Deal or no deal?

Boris Johnson, who looks set to become UK Prime Minister next week, is promising to "deliver Brexit" by October 31 come hell or high water.  The spin on this from Johnson's camp is that he is trying to threaten a no-deal Brexit in an effort to get the EU to revisit the deal negotiated by Theresa May.  The unanimous response of "no way!" from everyone within the EU, from Donald Tusk to the Taoiseach, suggests that all Johnson will achieve is a particularly nasty no-deal Brexit.

Today the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility spelled out the potential costs of such an outcome, and they're not pretty.  As its name suggests, the OBR's primary focus is on fiscal policy, and its analysis examines the impact of a no-deal Brexit on the public finances.  Based on its assumption that a no-deal Brexit would plunge the economy into recession, the OBR projects that public borrowing for 2019-2020 under a no-deal scenario would twice as large as it would be if there were an agreed deal.  Moreover, massively higher borrowing would continue under a no-deal scenario throughout the OBR's customary five-year forecasting horizon. 

In an effort to avoid accusations of bias, the OBR has used the latest IMF assessment of the impact of Brexit on UK economic activity.  This shows the economy falling into recession in 2020 before gradually recovering beyond that.  Needless to say, the use of outside expertise has not mollified the hard-line Brexiteers, who are again accusing pro-Remain forces of scaremongering -- "Project Fear".

The entirely ludicrous Jacob Ress-Mogg has gone so far as to suggest that a no-deal Brexit would in fact boost GDP by 80 billion pounds, a number that appears to have been pulled straight out of the air.  It's perhaps worth remembering that much earlier in the Brexit debate, Rees-Mogg blurted out that it might take fifty years for the benefits of Brexit to be realized! It's.... unlikely that both of these  statements are correct.

If Johnson is indeed the next PM, he faces an all-but-impossible task in getting anything other than a no-deal exit by October 31, not least because the House of Commons, seized of the urgency of this national disaster, will be taking most of the summer off.  Both Johnson and Rees-Mogg have mused aloud about proroguing Parliament in order to prevent it from stopping a no-deal Brexit.  As it has been from the outset, Brexit is an anti-democratic shambles.

I can't end this without a hat-tip to the excellent blogger Diamond Geezer, who on Wednesday summed up the whole ghastly farrago with this inspired Tweet:

Next week Britain's worst Prime Minister, who replaced Britain's worst Prime Minister, will be replaced by Britain's worst Prime Minister

to which one can only add, at the worst possible time.