As they damned well should. Let us take just one assertion from this little piece of fiction.
Petrol stations would close within weeks... So I had a dig around for our petroleum product stats.
And what does it say??
Refinery production does not meet demand for every product. Around 55 per cent of
the UK’s demand for diesel is produced in the UK and around 40 per cent of jet fuel,
whereas refineries continue to produce more than sufficient petrol to meet UK demand
For those who do not know, the North Sea Oil is what they call Light Sweet Crude. Essentially it is full of light petroleum elements, the best for producing petroleum products.
So we would need to bring in jet fuel and diesel until we could ramp up our own refineries. If the EU companies holding those refineries refused to ramp up production, we could forcibly nationalise them under national security measures.
And here is another interesting little snippet from the financial markets in February this year. Make Room OPEC? Why? Well because the UK is going to be producing more light sweet crude than it can consume.
This is hardly a matter of us running out of fuel because we can't afford oil or someone won't "give" it to us. This is a matter of the companies who own the refineries in the UK not wanting to produce enough because the can't compete.
Hardly Armageddon where we are unable to get fuel because we're broke and the EU has blockaded us. Also if you want to talk about natural gas, the imports we do come mainly from Russia even if they come across the channel in a pipeline. Why? Because the EU's largest producer of gas and oil is, by far, the UK. (not counting Norway who is EEA).
You think Putin won't allow shipments to us? Think again, he has a spending splurge to pay for.
As for food. I know we do just in time supply today, but two days? Not really. A week to two weeks in reality and the UK does not produce "nothing", it produces around 40% of its own goods. Two weeks is enough time to bring in goods from America, North Africa, the Middle East and other countries. We could also force all retailers to shut down all exports of food products until the supply chain is re-established outside of the EU.
What about all that produce coming to the UK, sitting at Calais, Dunkerque, Newhaven, Le Havre, Caen, Santander, Oostende, Zeebrugge, Hoek Van Holland, Ijmuiden, Hambug and a whole host of other ports along the EU eastern seabord? Well if they don't want to send it to us, it can rot. Especially as the UK is such a massive market for food products that the remainder of the EU can't take it up at short notice.
I really hate rubbish scare tactics like this, especially when it assumes the government will do absolutely Not One Single Thing to mitigate the impact of a hard Brexit until the last possible day before we exit. The only person in the Government who wants to do that, of course, is Hammond.... Big surprise there, was it his buddies who produced this report?
Add on to this the fact that if we bang out with hard Brexit, we don't have to apply the 35% EU import tariffs on food products nor the other tariffs and so we could simply open ourselves up to free import trade, for the rest of the world, until we have stabilised the situation.
Could we face Armageddon in Hard Brexit? Yes, absolutely, all we would need to happen is that the Government does not do their job!
If, on the other hand, the Government does do its job, then we would see some positives and some negatives. Pretty much what we are talking about with a Soft Brexit.
I really hate these kinds of reports. They upset everyone and put everyone at everyone else's throats. However it does have one upside. All those people who voted Leave, for all the right reasons, who were wavering; will be reminded, all over again, just how much the government of the day lied to them in order to influence their vote.
This report has, almost certainly, come from the same unaccountable Civil Servants who produced Osborne's Punishment Budget amongst other fallacies of the cost of even daring to vote Leave.
