So bluntness.....you agree there may be a 3 month stockpile. How do you know it wont take less than 3 months to get more in?
Because it is logistically impossible. If we leave with no deal we will have no trade deals. At all. Zip, nada, zilch. For anything from anywhere. All of our trade agreements, even with countries outside of the EU are done through the EU. We can, of course, agree to continue trading under the same rules as the deals the EU has but there is no guarantee that the other countries would agree (and let's face it, if your were China, who was able to sell to 27 other countries and you knew we really, really, really needed your steel because we don't produce enough of our own would give us a favourable deal?). That's thousands of complicated trade deals, covering hundreds of thousands, of goods that need to be renegotiated, agreed upon and signed off on. We have 222 countries we need to negotiate with.
Is that possible to achieve within 3 months, do you think?
Not only that but while we're doing that we would need to work under WTO rules which means instead of checking a small proportion of imports we need to check all of them. We need to physically check and fill in paperwork for every single lorry, plane and ship bringing goods to the UK. Not only do we need to find the staff to carry out all of these hundreds of extra checks per day but we also need to find the space, on a relatively small island, to store all of these planes, ships and lorries while they're being checked/waiting to be checked or we need to slow down the flow of trade.
Is that achievable within three months, do you think?
Obviously we will prioritise essential goods and organise those deals first but that's still hundreds of trade deals with dozens of countries.