Who’s afraid of no deal?

How bad would a no-deal Brexit really be? This is now perhaps the most important question in politics, and the one provoking greatest disagreement. The answer will help decide whether parliament allows Brexit to happen, and whether Tory MPs bring down their own government. If they think calamity would follow, patriotic rebels might risk a general election to stop the Tories. But what if it would not be so bad? And is there any way of finding out?

Almost everyone accepts it will cause problems, but views range from manageable to ‘national suicide’. It is difficult to predict complex events without historic precedent, but there are other reasons for the divergent views. The first is that there is not a single ‘no deal’, but a whole spectrum. Leaving the EU with no deal (and no preparation) would indeed be ‘crashing out’. But leaving with no deal in, say, 2022, with government and business having prepared meticulously for three years, would be less dramatic. It is a moving target: given the preparations, no-deal Brexit now would be less damaging than a year ago.

Then there is the ‘millennium bug effect’. Before 2000, computer companies had an incentive to talk up the problem of everyone’s systems crashing when dates moved from 12/12/99 to 1/1/00. No one could tell for sure how bad it would be, the media loved an apocalyptic story and we had warnings of aircraft falling out of the sky. But despite the frenzy about the end of days, nothing happened. With no-deal Brexit, there are groups, including those wanting to block Brexit, who have an incentive to talk up problems and a media hungry for bad news.

The government has given conflicting signals about no deal, with parts of it sounding the alarm. ‘It was definitely deliberate to keep all the no-deal planning invisible,’ one former Brexit minister told me.