United Kingdom and Gibraltar European Union membership referendum
all articles
The countdown is on: If no one pulls the emergency brake, the Brexit will be completed on March 29, 2019 - in whatever form. The worst-case scenario is currently the EU exit without contractual protection, the so-called hard or no-deal Brexit. For a long time considered barely conceivable, much seems to boil out at the moment. Theresa May's attempt to find a majority in Parliament for her EU-negotiated deal ended with the worst government defeat in English history.
Since then happens, what you hardly thought possible: A further increase of previously mistaken for total held helplessness, whether and how to start now what with this Brexit. The accusation that the May administration has insufficiently prepared the country and its civil service for the possible consequences of an unregulated exit from the EU is also gaining ground.
It is true that since the fall of 2018, when a lapse in public awareness of the existence of a contingency plan called "Operation Yellowhammer" ("Operation Yellowhammer"), it has been known that the May administration began training officials to deal with possible Brexit consequences.
However, there was not much reassuring: Apparently, the May government even assumes that even the train traffic could come to a standstill. Also speculations about possible food rationing or drug storage by the government were not well suited to arm the "Civil Servants" for a confident Brexit. Especially since the rumors probably did not correspond to the facts: It is the British consumers themselves, who have apparently begun to hamper cans and pills out of growing fear of a Brexit chaos.
Concrete plans of action, which could link the civil service from government level down to the municipalities and prepare for coping with possible Brexit consequences, were meanwhile not known. Probably because so far there is little. It would correspond to the extent of planning, which is necessary for "the planning of a war," quoted on Saturday morning, the "Guardian" allegedly high-ranking government officials: "The impact of a no-deal Brexit on the system would be similar."
After all, there is a lot going on in the meantime. Employees and civil servants have recently received training from the Cabinet Office, a secretariat of the Cabinet. And that does not rely on prognoses in the mediation of possible Brexit consequences, but at least on illustrative examples.
Brexit: like a volcanic eruption
The best thing the government officials could think of was the comparison of Brexit with the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. Which could at least prevent a broad discussion about it, because who can pronounce that?
As a reminder, the Eyjafjallajökull is a 1600 meter high volcano in Iceland, whose eruption threw so much ash in March / April 2010 in the air that the air traffic had to be stopped in many parts of Europe. From the British government's point of view, this completely surprising, unpredictable volcanic eruption is therefore comparable to Brexit's own, albeit largely haphazard, plan because it had cascading consequences.
In plain language: As with the game with dominoes led the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull to effects that triggered other things again. The disruption of air traffic largely brought life to Iceland to a halt, but it also reached far beyond its borders.
Standstill? We will make it
That, believes the British Cabinet Office, will probably succeed with the Brexit. However, the Guardian reports, the government agency estimates that the Brexit effects would be "significantly broader" than the effects of volcanic ash rain. One is intuitively inclined to agree.
In fact, there is currently no single serious scenario in which Brexit would have a direct positive impact on the UK. However, Brexit also has a lot in common with Eyjafjallajökull in this respect: No one has to offer even an approximate calculation of what the fun really caused or will cause damage. In the case of Eyjafjallajökull, damage estimates vary from a few million to several billion euros, depending on who you ask.
The same is true of Brexit, which is said to break British gross domestic product by between five and 17 percent (depending on who you ask for). This is to be caused by an interruption of the transport routes (Na? Alright? Eyjafjallajökull!), Which should allow the goods traffic in the first months in extreme cases to collapse up to 13 percent of the current volume (exactly: whoever you ask).
Considerably cheaper would have been Theresa Mays rejected EU Brexit deal, calculated the British National Institute of Economic and Social Research in November. The May deal would have cost the British only 700 to 1100 pounds per nose per year. Anyway, maybe as the volcano eruption at the end of the matter, the matter is more lenient than initially expected.
Britain's civil servants are now prepared, yes. You can only wish for a warm Eyjafjallajökull.
Graphic for Brexit poker