Genuinely Ignorant

It is surely ironic that today -- July 4th -- is the day Boris Johson has chosen to liberate Britons. The pub doors have swung open wide. And Britons have been told that all is now right with the world. But Jonathan Freedland writes that British Independence Day is hiding an ugly truth:

I’m speaking of 11pm on 30 June, the moment at which Britain lost the ability to seek an extension of the Brexit transition period. Unless we reach a new free trade agreement with the European Union in the next six months, we will be crashing out of the EU with no deal on 31 December.

It seems like bad form to mention it now, when we have a deadly disease to contend with. That suits Johnson and Dominic Cummings well: they hope to bury the bad news of Brexit deep inside the coronavirus, calculating that any damage inflicted by the former will be concealed by the general trauma of the latter. “Covid’s created an excuse,” says one former Conservative minister.

Like his orange cousin across the Atlantic, Mr. Johnson works very hard to hide uncomfortable truths. He's doing that now:

Now is absolutely not the time to submit Britain to the economic shock of a chaotic break from our nearest trading partners. Recall that the Bank of England has warned that the UK faces its deepest recession since the Great Frost of 1709; that the OECD forecasts that the UK will suffer the worst recession in the developed world; that three quarters of UK manufacturers expect to cut jobs this year.

The layoffs have already started, with thousands announced this week, from Upper Crust to Airbus. When the furlough scheme ends, there’ll be many more. Mass unemployment is coming; consumer confidence will shrink as those with money become ever warier of spending it. If, on top of all that, Britain leaves the EU without a deal, or a deal so thin it’s barely better than no deal, it will fall as a blow to the skull of a man already bleeding.

None of this is abstract. The government has already published the tariffs that would be imposed on basic food items necessarily imported from the EU. They would add 12p to a 500g bag of dried pasta, 4p to a tin of tomatoes: to some, that won’t sound like much, but for those counting every penny it could make all the difference. If you’re grappling with food poverty, an increase of 20% or more on staples will be ruinous. In normal times, charities might step in. But many of those are fighting for their own lives, their high street shops devastated by the collapse in footfall brought by lockdown.

This is how the coronavirus and a no-deal Brexit compound each other, their combined damage greater than the sum of its parts. Ministers like to play down the coming Brexit pain, suggesting that since all industries are going to have to adapt to Covid-19, they might as well adapt to an EU crash-out while they’re at it. But that’s wrongheaded, not least because the two different crises will affect different sectors. Travel, tourism and the arts have been gutted by coronavirus, while manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and financial services stand to be hit by Brexit. “It’s two parallel shocks, rather than one shock that might conceal the other,” says Naomi Smith of Best for Britain.

We face several challenges all at once. But the biggest challenge we face is genuinely ignorant leadership in very important places.

Image: The Atlantic