The Columnist @ Sime0nStylites
1. Where has all the No Deal coverage gone?
2. DR et al publish their first trance of notices. There’s a slew of media commentary, expert and industry reactions for the next 12 hours...and then...(I exaggerate a little)...tumbleweeds.
3. And yet, No Deal us generally regarded as anywhere between a bad and very bad thing. Impact estimates range from really bad to disastrous.
4. Even the more phlegmatic commentators struggled to imagine the move from status quo to who knows what would not result in a great degree of disruption.
5. The notices themselves were helpful in this regard, pointing out in excruciating (but definitionally insufficient) detail a surreally wide range of impacts.
6. And it’s not just the areas affected. The notices did a pretty good job of scientifically demonstrating that the best case scenario of merely great disruption could only be achieved through extensive cooperation from the EU.
7. Friends, this assumption is what we might call a ‘major risk’. We shall be relying on the goodwill (and, yes, mutual interest) of an organisation whose budge for the next two years we’ve just bazookaed.
8. Perhaps, the coverage fizzle out is because no one thinks No Deal will happen? Hmmm. Liam Fox tells us its 60% likely. Various others are at 50/50. Jeremy Hunt says that any Deal must confirm to the ‘spirit and letter’ of the referendum.
9. Let’s put it differently. If there was an impending natural disaster, a typhoon or a meteor strike, that would potentially devastate large sections of the economy...
10. ...Even if the probability of doom was only, say, 20%, I don’t think that the reaction 24 hours after its announcement would be shrugs and the odd eye roll.
11. We can speculate a few reasons for this strange lacuna. It’s late August. Everyone’s bored, so bored, of Brexit (apart from me). Post World Cup blues, perhaps.
12. More seriously, I still don’t think that many people really think it’s going to happen - the happy outcome paradox. I also think people struggle to conceptualise the scale of the problem.
13. Finally, I wonder if some of the larger businesses are just getting on with it. Their contingency plans are being quietly activated. They’ve largely given up on trying to influence the process. Maybe.
14. TL;DR We’re months, maybe weeks, away from what may well be the biggest crisis in many people’s living memory. Time to wake up. /ends
Leave friend said some time ago "it'll all work itself out" and politicians would come up a solution cos they always do.
Yesterday she was moaning about how she didn't know where her job in regulation was going because all the rules were changing but no one including her regulatory body knew what they were going to be.
She then stated her new position that "Brexit is going to be painful at first but we'll come out stronger". Thats a shift. The first admission that Brexit is a shit storm and the politicians didn't have a fucking clue what they were doing.
I despair. She's intelligent.
She also owns three houses and the company she works for is about to be bought out. By a Chinese firm. Oh and her husband is just about to have to fork out £2000 for his indefinite leave to remain (which she thinks will be dead easy and she'll have no problem).
I love her to bits but there were so many things she came out with yesterday that made me cringe or bite my tongue rather heavily.