Project Fact

Food shortages, diabetics going without insulin, outbreaks of salmonella and swine flu: a no-deal Brexit has become a dystopia of the imagination that gives even the Old Testament a run for its money. To lend it extra credence, the doomsayers are not muttering men with long white beards but business leaders and figures from respectable-sounding thinktanks.

Yet in just 11 weeks’ time, a no-deal Brexit could become a reality. Will we really be impoverished, hungry and living in fear of infectious diseases? Or is it just Project Fear, ratcheted up to a new level by those who see the clock ticking down and have become ever more desperate to persuade the public of the foolishness of its decision to vote for Brexit?

Some dismiss the predictions of chaos as mere scaremongering. Yet they are harder to ignore when you look at their provenance. The salmonella and swine flu warning, for example, came not from David Icke but from the normally sober London Port Health Authority — not a body that usually features in the rough and tumble of political debate. So just what is the truth about some of the most-quoted concerns?

Supermarket shelves will empty. Hospitals will run short of drugs

The risk to the NHS was made clear last month when Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said he had become ‘the world’s largest buyer of fridges’, as hospitals prepare to stockpile six weeks’ worth of medicines. He didn’t explain why such a large stockpile is needed, but it didn’t sound very encouraging. Drugs that have regulatory approval on 28 March will still be approved in Britain on 30 March, so there should be no greater need for regulatory checks — although there could be traffic delays in delivering drugs. The NHS regularly has to deal with shortages of particular medicines: last autumn, for example, manufacturing difficulties caused a shortage of EpiPens.