Now we know why the Tories were so keen to hide their regional Brexit impact studies

The regional Brexit impact assessment figures that the Tory government were trying to hide have been leaked, and they spell disaster, especially for the North East, North West, West Midlands, and Northern Ireland.

The Brexit assessment looked at the regional impact of three different Brexit scenarios, a Single Market Brexit, a free trade deal, and a "no deal" reversion to World Trade Organisation rules.

In every single region it turns out that "no deal" is by far the most damaging option, ranging from a 3.5% fall in the London economy to an astounding 16% collapse in the North East.

The analysis suggests that aside from London and the South West, a "no deal" Brexit would trigger a financial collapse that is worse than the recession that followed the bankers' insolvency crisis.

The terrifying thing is that as a result of ruinous Tory austerity dogma and their unprecedented campaign of wage repression the UK still hasn't recovered from the last recession, yet the Brextremist faction of the Tory party are pushing for a "no deal" Brexit which would hit us with another, even worse recession.

The second worst scenario is a free trade deal Brexit, which would still see significant economic contraction across every single region.

The least bad option is the Single Market option which would cause a slump of between 1% in London, to 3% in the North East.

It's important to recognise that the least bad Single Market scenario is off the table as long as Theresa May and the Tories are running the negotiations for their own purposes, because they have continually ruled it out.

Whether Jeremy Corbyn and Labour could be convinced to adopt a pro-Single Market/Customs Union stance remains to be seen.* 

One of the standout things about the analysis is the way London is projected to suffer the least under every Brexit scenario, yet London voted heavily in favour of Remain, whilst some of the strongest Leave-voting areas like the North East look set to suffer the most extreme economic downturns from the Brexit they voted for.

This contrast certainly adds some more statistical weight to the Turkeys voting for Christmas narrative.

However it's not all totally clear-cut, because Wales and Scotland look set to suffer very similar levels of economic damage as a result of Brexit, despite Wales voting in favour of Brexit and Scotland voting very heavily against it.

Anyhow, the reason the Tories wanted to keep this analysis secret is beyond obvious. There's no way they can pretend that there's any economic benefit to Brexit now that their own evidence says that it would cause an economic downturn/recession in every single part of the UK.

Another reason they must have been desperate to keep this research under wraps is that it completely destroys their endlessly repeated propaganda trope that "no deal is better than a bad deal".

Their own evidence demonstrates beyond doubt that "no deal" is the worst possible deal, so they'll surely have to bin that appalling nonsense for good after this.

It's important to recognise that anyone still pushing for Brexit under these circumstances is aiming to inflict damage on the UK economy, so the onus is on them to clearly explain what it is that is so damned important that they consider it worth triggering a recession for ...

And no, blue passports (that we could have had anyway without quitting the EU) just won't cut it.

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OR

* = If I were to give advice on how to achieve such a change of approach I'd suggest that politely pointing to the facts and evidence to request a change of Labour Party policy in order to "protect jobs and the economy" is more likely to succeed than a relentless barrage of #FBPE abuse, revisionism, misrepresentations, and lies from Lib-Dems, Tory concern trolls, and the very same people who were shrieking anti-Corbyn nonsense during the spectacularly failed chicken coup of 2016. 

Why economic suicide is a bad idea

It seems such a ridiculous thing to have to explain, but the outburst of Twitter outrage over the failure of Ian Murray's economic suicide amendment kind of makes it necessary to explain why economic suicide is actually a bad idea.

The likes of ex-Liberal Democrat Leader Tim Farron and the usual suspects from the Labour right bombarded Twitter with howls of protest after the amendment to the Taxation (Cross Border Trade) Bill by the right-wing Labour MP Ian Murray was defeated by 311 votes to 76.

Tim Farron put up a Twitter rant claiming that he'd voted to keep Britain in the Customs Union, but in reality he did no such thing. An amendment to keep Britain in the Customs Union would have specified that Britain should stay in the Customs Union, but what Ian Murray's ludicrous amendment sought to do was to force the UK to continue behaving as if it was in the Customs Union, even if we end up out of it!

Murray's amendment sought to prevent the UK from imposing tariffs or quotas on imported goods from the EU, regardless of whether the hard-right Tories contrive the "no deal" cliff edge Brexit they're craving or not.

However, the World Trade Organisation rules are clear that countries can't offer favourable trade terms to other countries unless they do it through a formal trade agreement, so that means the Murray economic suicide amendment would have forced the UK to drop import tariffs and quotas on all imports from anywhere in the world, whilst leaving the rest of the world free to impose tariffs and quotas on UK exports!

The UK trade deficit is already enormous, so just imagine the impact of eliminating all tariffs and quotas on imports while simultaneously allowing the rest of the world to impose WTO level tariffs on exports from the UK.

Just imagine how scrapping all import tariffs and quotas would render the UK absolutely defenceless when it comes to protecting British manufacturing from unfair trade practices like other nations dumping artificially cheap steel into the UK economy.

So if this amendment had passed and the Tories then forced a "no deal" flounce out of the EU, it would have hard-wired an even more fanatically right-wing and damaging Brexit than the hard-right Tories are pushing for!

Don't get me wrong here. I think the Tory red line that the UK must quit the Customs Union is a terrible idea that has already caused deadlock over the Irish border situation, and will cause a significant amount of economic damage to the UK economy when we leave, but the likes of Ian Murray and Tim Farron got it all wrong by attempting to ensure that the UK is forced to kill its own manufacturing sector stone dead if they don't get their own way.

Yet somehow these people turned the defeat of their economic suicide amendment into furious bile-laden attacks on the majority of the Labour Party for supposedly siding with the Tory hard Brexit fanatics because they lobbed their reckless and economically illiterate amendment in the bin where it belonged.

Ian Murray's amendment was so bad that he's even admitted that he expected it to lose, meaning that it was just another bit of pointless and destructive grandstanding from the Labour-right aimed at damaging their own party from within. And to see the likes of Tim Farron opportunistically piggy-backing anti-Labour diatribes onto it after its failure just proves the point.

I was particularly disappointed to see Caroline Lucas of the Green Party resort to this kind of hyper-partisan rubbish after the amendment was defeated because she's one of my favourite politicians and normally loads better than that. 

I was also disappointed to see so many SNP politicians voting in favour of Ian Murray's economic suicide amendment and then engaging in hyper-partisan attacks when it was defeated. The SNP should have considered the implications of what they were voting for before they voted for it, and they should also be perfectly well aware that Ian Murray is a right-wing Labour MP more intent on making trouble for his own party leadership than doing anything to actually help the people of Scotland.

It takes quite a level of idiocy to propose an amendment that would make a Tory "no deal" Brexit even worse by turning the UK into a lame debt-shackled sitting-duck economy that is literally begging to have its core industries ruined by allowing unlimited imports, while the rest of the world can apply tariffs on UK exports. But it takes a whole other level of idiocy to then turn around and spit bile at those who prevented you from making such an economically illiterate blunder, accusing them of collaborating with the Tories.

Even most of the rabid hard-right Brexiteers have enough sense to understand that abolishing all import tariffs and quotas on imports while other economies remain free to impose them on UK exports would be nothing short of unilateral economic surrender, but Tim Farron and his ilk are just too dim-witted to realise that they were attempting to hard-wire a super-hard Brexit that was too extreme even for the hard-right Tory Brexiteers to stomach!

It really does not engender much faith in the parliamentary process that so many MPs voted in favour of an economic suicide amendment, and then cried victim so piteously when it was defeated.

It also severely erodes the standing of the (already hopelessly diminished) mainstream media that they utterly failed to convey the reckless economic illiteracy of Ian Murray's amendment, or it's shocking implications should the Tories achieve the "no deal" Brexit they're so obviously craving.

It's utterly infuriating that so many people (including our elected representatives and the mainstream media figures who are supposedly tasked with holding them to account) are so insistent on framing everything in a over-simplistic binary opposition between pro- and anti- Brexit, when stuff like the Murray economic suicide amendment just doesn't fit.

The politicians who voted in favour of it were too lazy/irresponsible to think about the devastating economic consequences that such an amendment would have in the case of a Tory "no deal" Brexit, meaning that their haphazard knee-jerk opposition to Brexit could have actually hard-wired a more extreme version of Brexit than the foaming-at-the-mouth hard-right Tories are aiming for!

But apparently the reality of the situation is just too boring/complex for most political commentators to bother with, so they just stick with their tactic of hyper-partisan shrieking instead.

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The Labour leadership were absolutely right to oppose Ian Murray's economic suicide amendment

When the right-wing Labour MP Ian Murray's proposed amendment to the Taxation (Cross Border Trade) Bill was defeated there was an eruption of outrage amongst the right-wing of the Labour Party and the appalling self-declared centrist types who propagandise for them on Twitter and in the mainstream media.

How they howled and shrieked that some Labour MPs had voted against the amendment designed to stop the UK from imposing tariffs and quotas on produce from the EU.

In reality the vast majority of Labour MPs abstained on the vote, with just 18 voting against the amendment and 28 voting in favour, meaning that the amendment was always going to fail, and was beaten by 311 votes to 76.

The furious centrist narrative was quickly set that the 18 Labour MPs who voted against the Murray amendment were traitors who were determined to force a Tory hard Brexit by ruling out membership of the EU Customs Union. However this  propaganda narrative couldn't be further from the truth.

In reality the Murray amendment would have worked to create an even harder Brexit than even the most foaming-at-the-mouth hard-right Tories are aiming for.

The Murray amendment would have caused a British economic catastrophe by making it impossible for the UK to apply import tariffs or quotas on any products from anywhere in the world, while all other countries could continue to apply import tariffs on the UK!

The reason for this is that if the UK reverts to World Trade Organisation rules (which seems increasingly probable given the shambolic Tory handling of the Brexit process) the WTO "Most Favoured Nation" rule states that unless you have a specific trade agreement, then you must offer the same deal to everyone. So if you've legislated to make it illegal to apply tariffs or quotas on imports from EU countries, then you can't apply tariffs or quotas from imports from literally anywhere else in the world either.

Just think back to the chaos caused by the Chinese dumping cheap steel on the world market. If the Murray amendment had have passed, the UK would have been rendered powerless to stop other larger economies from deliberately wrecking UK industries through strategic dumping.

The UK already has an alarmingly vast trade deficit with the rest of the world, and just imagine how much worse that trade deficit would have got had the rest of the world been allowed to flood the UK with unlimited tariff free imports, while UK exports are subjected to quotas and tariffs at the normal WTO rates.

The idea of totally eliminating tariffs and quotas is actually utopia for hard-right Lassaiz-Faire fanatics, but even most of the hard-right Brexiteers understand that eliminating all tariffs and quotas on imports, while other countries can continue applying them on our exports would be economic suicide.

What Murray's amendment would have achieved is a state of unilateral economic surrender. But somehow the Labour right-wing and the centrist dad types have whipped themselves up into furious outrage over the fact that the Labour front bench had the economic sense to see the dangerous economic illiteracy of the Murray amendment, and ensure that it could not pass.

It should obviously be no surprise to anyone that Ian Murray is a Labour right-winger from the Progress faction of the party, because no left-winger (or anyone with a grain of sense) would want the UK to use Brexit as an excuse to declare unilateral economic surrender.

This whole furore just goes to prove that it's not just the Tories who engage in reality-reversing propaganda, but the Labour Party right-wingers and the so-called centrists do it too.

How else is it possible to explain their furious accusations that the Labour front bench have sided with hard-Brexit Tories, when what they actually did was ensure that Ian Murray's ill-considered amendment didn't end up creating a unilateral economic surrender version of Brexit that's so extreme that even most of the fruit-loop Tory hard-Brexiteers have sufficient sense to steer clear of it!

So if you come across anyone expressing outrage that the Labour leadership opposed the Murray amendment, you can safely conclude that they're just simple-minded ideological partisans who are so desperate to attack Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left that they have literally no interest in the reality of what actually happened at all. In fact accusing the Labour front bench of colluding with hard-Brexit Tories shows so little regard for the facts that it's obvious that they're (either wilfully or ignorantly) reversing reality.

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John Redwood is spewing delusional Brexiteer gibberish again

The Tory MP and Brexit fanatic John Redwood has written a ludicrous article for The S*n in which he outlines his argument that Theresa May should address her spectacularly failing Brexit negotiations by escalating her threats to do an extreme "no deal" strop away from the negotiating table.

In this article I'm going to critique Redwood's article line by line to demonstrate how billionaire propaganda barons like Rupert Murdoch are providing fanatical Brexiteers like Redwood public platforms to peddle an absolute crock of misrepresentations, contradictions, shallow nationalist rhetoric, and outright lies in order to make incredibly reckless brinkmanship look like a good idea.

Critique

"Next week there is a big European Council meeting which is likely to tell the UK they are not willing to talk about trade without us paying a shedload of money that we don’t owe."

The idea that we don't owe anything to the EU is pure fantasy. Just take the example of all the pensions of the British MEPs and civil servants who have worked for the EU over the last four decades. Of course the UK should cover the cost of these pensions, and all of the other financial obligations the country signed up to, otherwise who on earth would ever sign a trade deal or treaty with the UK again in the knowledge that the British government has a track record of reneging on their financial commitments whenever it suits them?

"Theresa May can and should turn the tables on the unhelpful EU at next week’s meeting. She can tell them the UK is preparing to leave the EU on March 29, 2019, with no deal."

Theresa May has been spewing her reckless "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric for months, but it doesn't work. The EU27 are unified and they're not going to budge because her "no deal" threats are completely delusional. It's like threatening your neighbours that you'll burn down your own house in the hope that they suffer some disruption and smoke damage.

"She can say this will mean we will trade with them all on World Trade Organisation terms. That will be just fine for the UK. It’s how we do our trade with the rest of the world today."

This is an outright lie. The UK does the vast majority of its trade with the rest of the world through treaties negotiated though our membership of the EU. A "no deal" cliff edge Brexit would mean Britain doesn't just end up outside the Single Market and Customs Union, but also outside every single trade deal we've entered with the rest of the world over the last four decades too.

"Just leaving brings us lots of advantages. It means we don’t have to pay them another penny once we are out."

You'd have to be as mad as a bucket of frogs to imagine that the few £billion in net savings from no longer paying our (significantly rebated) EU membership fee is not going to be absolutely dwarfed by the costs of economic meltdown that would be triggered by a ruinous "no deal" strop away from the negotiations.

"We don’t owe them anything beyond our contributions up to the date we go."

As I pointed out before, we do owe them for the cost of stuff like the pensions of British EU employees, the costs of ongoing infrastructure projects the UK has signed up to, and a range of other things. Just saying we don't owe it, isn't the same as not owing it.

"We can spend that money on our ­priorities. It means we can get rid of VAT on things which the EU makes us charge, where we disagree. That includes insulation, better boiler controls and other energy-saving ­measures, and female hygiene products."

Another hazy promise from a Brexiter that isn't worth the (toilet) paper it's written on. Even if we believe the absurd fantasy that leaping off the "no deal" Brexit cliff edge would result in a net economic gain for the UK, who on earth would be naive enough to imagine that a Tory government would spend it on stuff like environmental measures and alleviating period poverty, rather than distributing it to their £billionaire backers in tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich?

"It means we can decide how many people to welcome into our country."

In 2010 Theresa May (who was Home Secretary at the time) promised to reduce net migration to below 100,000. What she actually did was oversee the biggest migration inflow in UK history peaking at 336,000 in 2015. Even if the UK commits a massive act of economic self-harm by banning all migration from the EU, the rate of non-EU migration is still well over 100,000, and quitting the EU won't have any effect whatever on that.

"We can police our borders as we wish, to make the country safer." 

This claim is a sick joke from a member of the ruling party who let the Manchester bomber come back through the UK border from hanging out with his terrorist mates in Libya and Syria, then didn't even bother to keep him under surveillance despite numerous warnings from the Manchester Muslim community and a tip-off from the US intelligence services that he was actively planning a terrorist attack against the EU. 

Additionally, a "no deal" Brexit would mean the UK bailing out of all of the policing, security and intelligence sharing agreements with the EU, which would obviously make the UK an awful lot less safe.

"It means we can pass the laws we want."

The Tories are currently using Brexit as an excuse to launch an audacious anti-democratic power grab that would allow them to rewrite thousands of existing laws with no parliamentary scrutiny. There's a huge difference between the kind of stuff that Tory politicians might want to write into UK law without any democratic scrutiny, and what "we" the British public, would actually want.

"We can amend and improve the EU laws we are inheriting. It means we do not have to accept any more EU ­regulations unless we like them."

You'd have to have a significant level of contempt for the concept of parliamentary democracy to believe that the process of "amending" and "improving" the EU laws we've signed up to over the years should be done in secret by Tory ministers with no democratic scrutiny whatever.

"The problem for the EU states is they export a lot of food to us." 

That the UK has a vast trade deficit with the EU is not a problem for the EU, it's a problem for us.

"Food is the only area under World Trade Organisation rules where tariffs are high, designed to keep out imports. Danish bacon, French dairy products, Dutch flowers and vegetables, Irish beef will all be subject to tax penalties if they go for a no trade deal. It is ­massively in the EU’s interest to keep their tariff-free access to the UK. They sell us much more than we sell them across the board."

This summer I have been making sure I can buy non-EU food and drink at my local supermarket. The English tomatoes and vegetables have been good so I didn’t need the Dutch ones. English, Australian and New Zealand wines are great, so no need to buy French or Spanish. Scottish beef and English lamb are tasty, UK dairy products fine and English fruit touches the right parts. When Europe is in winter we can buy from the southern hemisphere or from our farmers’ heated greenhouses."

An estimated 70% of the UK's food imports come from EU countries, and the vast majority of the rest comes from countries with which the UK has trade deals that have been negotiated through the EU. A ruinous "no deal" Brexit would mean new or increased tariffs on 97% of the food we import.  

The idea that trade with the rest of the world wouldn't be disrupted by tearing up all of our EU negotiated trade agreements is utterly delusional, and you'd have to be a total idiot to be placated by a fluffy personal anecdote about how John bloody Redwood has been "buying British at the supermarket"!

"Some say we could not do this. After all, it will be our customers who have to pay the higher prices of EU food with tariffs on while we wait for UK farmers to increase their output to serve more of our needs."

Just like his fellow Brexit fantasist Chris Grayling, Redwood completely fails to explain how UK farmers are going to dramatically increase their output when Brexit drives away the EU seasonal migrant workers that the British agricultural sector relies on so heavily. Who is going to do the backbreaking agricultural work? Pensioners? Disabled people? unpaid Workfare slaves?

"They don’t understand the cards in our hands as the EU’s main customer."

Back to the shit Brexiteer poker analogies. 

Everyone in the world can see that Theresa May has got a handful of duff cards and she's resorted to bluffing. There's no other way to explain her lunatic "give us what we want or we'll blow up a massive economic bomb under ourselves in the hope that you get injured by the shockwaves" approach to the negotiations. 

"The Government will be able to give us all a tax cut out of the tariff ­revenue it collects, so we need not be worse off."

Ah ha ha ha. We'll all have to pay the cost of tariffs on our supermarket shopping, and we're to trust the Tories to redistribute that wealth back to us, rather than distribute it to their billionaire backers in tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich. 

If you believe that, you'll believe anything! 

"We can also cut the tariffs we have to impose on food from outside the EU to balance things up a bit. Why should we put a tariff on South African oranges to help the Spanish industry when we grow none for ­ourselves?"

This is just delusional. We'll have to put WTO tariffs on produce from all over the world because we'll be bailing out of all of our trade agreements if we do a "no deal" tantrum. Maybe we could sign up to new low-tariff trade agreements with minor trade partners like South Africa eventually, but there are several things to consider.  

1. Trade deals take years to negotiate, and we don't have anything like the civil service capacity to negotiate scores of replacement trade deals all at once, so the WTO tariffs on non-EU produce will be in effect for years, if not decades. 

2. Countries like South Africa will understand that we need trade deals with them an awful lot more than they need trade deals with us. They will be in the driving seat with the power to demand all kinds of favours and concessions from our massively over-stretched, inexperienced, and time-pressurised negotiators.

3. If we do a "no deal" strop, why would anyone want to sign trade deals with us anyway? If you witnessed someone rip off their business partner by unilaterally abandoning the deal they had together, would you rush to sign a business deal with them, or would you keep well away?

"Your shopping basket may change a bit but there is no need to worry. Our farmers will boost their output."

Again. How? How do they boost their output when Brexit has chased away a huge chunk of their labour force?

"The EU negotiators do not seem concerned about the damage they could do to EU exporters. Their overwhelming concern is losing all that cash we pay them each year."

Outright lies. The EU have outlined their three main concerns over and again: Protection of the rights of EU citizens in the UK, a resolution to the Irish border problem, and a financial settlement to cover the UK's ongoing commitments. 

Until these three issues are resolved they're not going to get into trade talks over how much the UK might pay for preferential access to the Single Market. Everyone knows this. David Davis agreed to this sequencing of events in June.

"They have jeopardised an agreement about a good trading relationship in the future to try to wring more money out of the UK after we have left."

No. The agreement over future trading relationships comes after the rights of EU citizens and the Irish border situation are resolved. The ones who are guilty of jeopardising the future trading relationship are the Tories for trying to use the rights of EU citizens as bargaining chips, and failing to make any meaningful progress on the Irish border problem.

"The PM needs to remind them we owe them nothing under the law and their treaty. Why would we pay extra when there is no benefit for us?"

In one paragraph he's accusing the EU of jeopardising the future trading relationship, and in the very next he's demanding that the PM lies to the EU negotiators about the UK not having an obligation to honour the costs of the laws and treaties we signed up to. as if they'll just say "yes, abandon your financial obligations, here have a trade deal that's better than the deal that we give to actual members of our club".

"When we entered the EU — then the EEC — for the first time we inherited a lot of payments the others had agreed to without us. No one said we did not have to pay for things agreed before we got there. So why does anyone think we need to go on paying for things after we leave?"

This is a nonsense argument. It doesn't even make sense. If you sign up to a club, you abide by the membership rules, whether you're a founder member of the club or not. If during your membership you sign up to agreements to cover the cost of certain things, then you can't just quit and refuse to pay what you'd agreed to. Otherwise you end up massively pissing everyone off, and making yourself look like a fundamentally dishonest and unreliable chancer who doesn't stick to their word. 

"The EU is not planning on paying us anything after March 2019, so they save what they used to give us back from the money we send them."

Such backwards logic! Why would the EU pay the UK anything? The UK is causing disruption by quitting the EU, not the other way around. 

"Out of the EU we will end the ­uncertainty." 

A "no deal" strop out of the EU would cause massive uncertainty for millions of workers, businesses, investors, and government agencies. Dressing such a drastic move up as "ending the uncertainty" is a stunning example of "black is white" Orwellian propaganda.

"We will be able to sign trade treaties with countries elsewhere in the world, which we cannot do as a member of the EU."

Yes. But this process will obviously take a lot of time, and the UK's reputation as reliable trading partners would be absolutely devastated by a "no deal" flounce away from our trade agreements with Europe over a refusal to cover the cost of ongoing commitments.

"We will get our fishing grounds back and put in a fishing policy that works for us."

The fishing industry accounts for a tiny fraction of the UK economy, but the subject is a reliable touch-stone for Brexit fanatics, so it's no surprise to see Redwood randomly lobbing it into his article. 

It would take a spectacular amount of optimism to think that a Tory government that is massively over-stretched by their own Brexit mess would somehow make a better job of regulating the UK fishing industry than the status quo. 

What's actually highly likely to happen is that the Tories will use access to UK fishing territories as a bargaining chip in order to win favours for the UK financial services industry (over half of Tory party donations come from the financial sector, virtually none come from fishermen or fleet owners).

"If Theresa May sounds positive about no deal, she greatly increases the ­chances that they will want to offer a trade deal for their own sakes."

Even if we're delusional enough to accept the idea that Theresa May suddenly sounding more positive about the insane "no deal is better than a bad deal" threat she's been making since January will cause the EU27 negotiation team to suddenly fold and give the UK a wonderful deal, this completely contradicts Redwood's previous attempts to argue that "no deal" is a great idea in its own right.

Which is it? Is "no deal" a ludicrous and futile we're holding the gun to our own heads so do as we say threat, or is it actually Redwood's preferred endgame? He is trying to have it both ways in the same damned article!

"If she accepts the advice of the Treasury and looks worried about leaving without a deal, she should expect a larger bill and more delay in settling anything."

You'd have to be a unbelievably reckless and sociopathic ideologue to have no worries about the social and economic destruction a "no deal" strop would wreak on the UK, or about the extreme damage to the UK's reputation as a reliable trading partner. 

Additionally we've already established that the delays are stemming from the Tory refusal/inability to guarantee the rights of EU citizens in the UK, and resolve the Irish border problem, not from the EU.

"The best few hundred millions the Treasury will spend this year and next is the money to ensure we are fine without a deal."

The idea that the estimated £250 million the Tories are spending on planning for a "no deal" strop away from the Brexit negotiations would be enough to mitigate even the tiniest fraction of the social and economic fallout of such a reckless act of national self-harm is utterly delusional. 

"That will save us billions that some want us to give to the EU to end up with something like the single market bureaucracy we voted to leave."

A "no deal" tantrum wouldn't "save us billions", it would plunge the economy into chaos and trash what remains of our national reputation.  

Additionally, it's an outright lie to say that "we voted to leave" the Single Market because the Single Market wasn't even mentioned in the referendum question, in fact a load of high profile Brexiters like Nigel Farage, Daniel Hannan, Owen Paterson and Arron Banks argued that we should stay in the Single Market after we quit the EU during the referendum debate.

"It is also money well spent if we do get a deal, because we still need ­borders and customs that work."

This is an utterly bizarre conclusion. We should waste hundreds of millions planning for a "no deal" tantrum in the vain hope that openly planning to try and screw the EU over by exploding an economic bomb under ourselves will cause them to suddenly offer us a wonderful deal!

If we spend our money buying a big gun so we can point it at our own heads, Redwood is arguing, they'll back down because they won't want to get blood splatters on their clothes!

Conclusion

Essentially what John Redwood seems to be arguing (in a shockingly dishonest manner) is that Theresa May should "turn the tables" on the EU by ... errm ... doubling down on her delusional policy of making the reckless threat to do a "no deal" strop the centrepiece of her spectacularly failing negotiating strategy. 

The incredible thing isn't that the propaganda baron Rupert Murdoch provides a platform to fanatical ideologues like John Redwood to promote this kind of delusional and downright dishonest Brexiteer rhetoric, it's that anyone ever took this kind of fanatical hard-right Brexiteer idiocy seriously in the first place.

As a result we're now in the extraordinary situation where the 27 remaining members of the EU are far more united than the UK governing party, which is catastrophically split. 

Theresa May is being pulled in opposite directions by one bunch of Tories who actually want to negotiate sensibly in order to avoid an economically ruinous "no deal" national meltdown, and other Tories like John Redwood who insist that the best approach to the most complex and risky set of negotiations the UK has faced in decades is to play an increasingly hysterical game of brinkmanship.

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OR

The Tories are now openly planning for "nuclear Brexit"

Theresa May's team have been briefing the right-wing press* that they're now working on a plan to launch a "nuclear Brexit" if the negotiations don't go their way.

This should be deeply concerning to anyone who thinks that a chaotic Tory administered "fuck you" departure from Europe is the worst case scenario in this whole Brexit shambles.

Theresa May's slow march towards the abyss

The probability of a "no deal" strop away from the Brexit negotiating table looks almost inevitable if Theresa May is not defeated in her opportunistic and self-serving snap election.

She's already made the path towards a sensible negotiated settlement almost impossible with her "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric because any deal is obviously going to be a "bad deal" in comparison to the deal we had before (Single Market access, countless beneficial treaties and a huge amount of influence, but all with a rebate that meant we paid less in membership fees than Italy!).

Then a couple of weeks after calling her bizarrely-timed snap election Theresa May spouted the most paranoid and unstable nonsense that has been uttered by a British Prime Minister in my entire lifetime about a supposed deliberate EU plot against her.

This extraordinarily deranged attack on the people we're going to have to negotiate with was yet another move to poison UK-EU relations and further damage the prospect of a sensible negotiated settlement.

In the wake of her paranoid "EU plot" temper tantrum outside 10 Downing Street, it's now been revealed that Theresa May is actually drawing up a plan to quit the EU without meeting any of our financial obligations.

Now this may seem like a good idea if you're one of the 30% of the British public who are delusional enough to believe that a "no deal" strop away from the negotiating table would actually be great for Britain, but even a rudimentary consideration of the economic consequences and the dire diplomatic position that would put us in should be enough to make any right-thinking person very seriously concerned about the future this country would be facing under Theresa May's weak and unstable leadership.

Immediate economic damage

A "no deal" strop would obviously cause absolute chaos. I won't list all of the consequences, there are too many. I'll just run through a few of the really big ones.

Think about the estimated 6.3% - 9.5% collapse in GDP (even the best case scenario of a 6.3% collapse in GDP would be significantly worse than the recession caused by the Bankers' crisis).

Think about what such a "nuclear Brexit" crisis would do to the state of the budget deficit and the UK's ability to actually pay for things like pensions and the NHS.
Think about the way the introduction of customs checks would harm the UK shipping industry and how the loss of the EU Open Skies agreement would adversely affect the UK aviation industry.
Think about the massive supply chain disruption as manufactured goods are hit with tariffs every time the production process involves the import or export of parts or ingredients. 
Think about 97% of UK food and drink exports being hit by export tariffs.

Think about the huge number of job losses, and whether you and your family would be safe (the worst affected areas would be areas like manufacturing, agriculture, aviation and airports, shipping and ports, import/export dependent businesses, food and drink, financial services, hotels and the leisure industry ...).

Think about the very serious problems with the Irish border and the peace process.

Think about the loss of your travel rights and the terrible uncertainties that would be imposed on millions of EU migrants in the UK and UK migrants in the EU.

Think about the fact Scotland would vote for independence and refuge from this self-inflicted madness if they had any sense whatever.

Reputation damage

The immediate economic consequences of what a "no deal" strop would be bad enough, but there would be a very much more serious long-term consequence too.

If the UK government decide to just walk away from their financial obligations, what kind of message would that send to the rest of the world?

It would obviously say that the UK is the kind of country that doesn't respect the international agreements they sign up to, and walks away from their obligations whenever it suits them.

Now who would sign up to a trade deal with a country like that?

Just think about the difficulties suffered by Argentina after they went bankrupt. They were treated like international pariahs for years. But they tore up their obligations out of necessity during a terrible prolonged economic crisis. They really had no choice but to devalue their currency and default on their debts.

Britain on the other hand would be tearing up its obligations out of choice: Not because they needed to, but because they wanted to.

So I'll ask again. Who would sign a trade deal with a country with a proven track record of wilfully breaking its trade deals?

Would you sign a contract with a person with a proven track record of refusing to honour the terms of the contracts they sign? No, I didn't think so.

WTO schedules

Lots of Brexit fanatics like to claim that the UK could just walk away from our obligations and start trading with Europe and the rest of the world on World Trade Organisation terms, but this looks like another of their hyper-optimistic fantasies given that the EU and their closest allies are all members of the WTO, and all members of the WTO club have a veto on countries implementing new schedules.

The idea that the UK could just walk into a club that contains the organisation that they just defrauded and all of their closest allies, and then get exactly what they want without any other nation raising objections by using their powers of veto is yet another display of the kind of magical thinking that seems to plague Brexiters.

Trade deal fantasies

Now think about the promised trade deals the Brexiteers assure us that the UK will strike with other economies.

The first thing to note is that if the UK has turned itself into an obligation-breaking international pariah, do you really think that any other country they approach for a trade deal wouldn't take the "you need us more than we need you, so what are you going to give us" approach?

How about considering the fact that a lot of countries would probably prefer not to jeopardise their economic relations with the EU (the largest trading block on the planet) in order to sign up to a trade deal with an obligation-abandoning international pariah state.

Even if the UK does find some countries to concoct trade deals with, you know that trade deals take years to negotiate, finalise and implement don't you? So the UK would be in the international wilderness for years even if they did find potential trade partners who are willing to overlook their contract-breaking behaviour.

You know that each trade deal takes hundreds of civil servants on either side to negotiate it don't you? This means that the UK could only negotiate a few trade deals at a time without hiring literally thousands of new trade negotiators. Even if they did hire thousands of new negotiators, they'd obviously be inexperienced and unlikely to secure the best possible terms.

More backwards Tory rhetoric

Surely you know by now that the Tory party use completely backwards Orwellian rhetoric all the time?

• When they said they were "paying down the debt" the reality is that they we're busy increasing it by more than every single Labour government in history combined!

• When they said they were "making work pay" they've actually been overseeing the worst collapse in UK workers' wages since records began, and ruthlessly slashing in-work benefits for the working poor to boot!

• As they told us that "we're all in this together" they actually oversaw massive rises in child poverty whilst the tiny super-rich minority literally doubled their wealth.

• When they say they have a "long-term economic plan" what they actually did was slash investment in infrastructure and innovation to about half the level of our international rivals, and betray future generations by ensuring that Britain gets left behind on the world stage.

So even as the Tory party are drawing up plans to march the UK economy into the abyss by turning ourselves into contract-breaking international pariahs who deliberately exploded an economic bomb over eight of their top ten their closest trading partners**... they'll obviously be spouting a load of wonderfully optimistic "global Britain" rhetoric as they wilfully commit economic suicide, and thehacks who work for the hard-right tabloid press will be parroting their "global Britain" propaganda and cheering them along every step of the way.

Conclusion

The only way to ensure that this catastrophic scenario doesn't happen is to get out and vote against Theresa May so she doesn't have a thumping great super-majority to enact it.

Make sure you're registered to vote, and make sure you encourage anyone you know who is not a delusional nuclear Brexit enthusiast to ensure they're registered to vote against Theresa May's lunatic plans too.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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* = I almost always link to my sources, but in this case the source is The S*n, which I don't link to out of a point of principle. Here's a screenshot from the "Nuclear Junker" article they published the day after Theresa May's bizarre paranoid rant outside Downing Street:

** = Yes I know Switzerland isn't technically in the EU, but a "nuclear Brexit" would severely damage their economy too, seeing as how they participate in the Single Market and conduct most of their trade with the EU nations the UK would be defrauding by abandoning the EU without fulfilling their financial obligations.

How Chuka Umunna actually helped deliver what he's warning against

The Labour Party MP Chuka Umunna has written an article for the Independent warning that Theresa May's snap election is just a power-grab designed to give her "the freedom to go back on all the promises made by her and by the Leave campaigners with little meaningful challenge in Parliament".

He also warned that a thumping majority would allow Theresa May to deliver the wet dream of the fanatical hard-right wing of the Tory Party; a "no deal" Brexit that "would mean us defaulting onto WTO trading terms, leading to high tariffs on all our imports and exports; a job-destroying, price-raising nightmare scenario that would leave working people worse off".

He's right of course. Theresa May has admitted it herself that this election is a power grab to ensure she gets to dictate the future of the UK without any kind of proper democratic scrutiny, and I've been warning of the dangers of a "no deal" strop away from the Brexit negotiating table ever since Theresa May made the threat of it the centrepiece of her so-called "negotiating strategy".

He's also right to warn of the danger of a "no deal" flounce away from the negotiating table that would leave millions of ordinary Brits worse off, while the wealthy elites insulate themselves from the economic consequences.

The glaring problem though is that Chuka and his ilk could have been holding the Tories to account over their Brexit shambles like this from the very beginning, but instead they used the Brexit vote to launch their own self-serving pre-planned (and hopelessly failed) coup plot against their own democratically elected party leader.

• Instead of lambasting David Cameron for gambling the entire future of the UK in return for a bit of short-term party political advantage over UKIP, then losing and resigning in disgrace...

• Instead of ridiculing the anti-democratic way the Tory MPs appointed Theresa May as their leader by bullying her rival out of the leadership contest ...

• Instead of pointing out time and again that the Tories delivered a Brexit without even having developed a contingency plan in case it happened ...

• Instead of every Labour MP repeatedly pointing out that Theresa May's "Brexit means Brexit" rhetoric was a meaningless platitude to mask the fact that the Tories had no coherent negotiating strategy whatever ...

Chuka and the other coup-plotter Labour MPs threw away the best opportunity to rubbish the Tories in decades in order to launch a pre-planned attack their own party leader, dividing the opposition at the very moment the nation needed a unified opposition more than ever.

If Theresa May gets the whopping great majority that she needs in order to launch the socially and economically ruinous "no deal" cliff edge Brexit that Umunna is rightly warning about, the Labour coup-plotters must admit that the distraction of the ridiculously ill-timed and ultimately failed Anyone But Corbyn coup was one of the main reasons such a disastrous scenario ever became such a strong possibility.

If Chuka and his coup-plotter mates had concentrated on holding Theresa May to account from the moment she was appointed to power, instead of focusing most of their efforts on an internal Labour Party squabble, there's no way she could have put herself in such a strong position to deliver the ruinous "no deal" nuclear Brexit that the fanatical hard-right wing of the Tory party have wanted all along.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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