There will be no free meal in the UK with the Brex …

From London

Nobody knows if the United Kingdom will leave the European Union without an agreement and even less what will happen if it happens. The departure date is March 29, but this could be renegotiated with the EU this week. Disaster forecasts abound, worthy of a future Hollywood movie or Netflix series. The most alarmist, curiously, are those of the same government.

The government released its "No Deal Guidance Notes" last August, a thematic guide, on what to expect and how to prevent the worst effects of an untimely exit. To date, there are more than 100 "Guidance Notes" covering all areas, from travel on the continent to drugs, through industry, the financial sector, and the world over. 39 environment and immigration.

Even the most enthusiastic Europhobes who promote a hard Brexit (breaking any particular bond with the EU) do not fail to admit that there will be an economic impact. According to the government's badessment, the drop in GDP could reach 10.7% in the next 15 years. The Central Bank of England says the pound will fall by 25% and unemployment will double. The pharmaceutical and automotive industries would be the most affected: a loss of 20%.

Consumers will soon see this impact in two ways: a possible shortage of some essential products and an increase in prices. The United Kingdom imports half of its food: 90% of lettuce, 80% of tomatoes and 43% of carrots. About 30% of these imports come from the EU.

In the current rules of world trade, in the absence of an agreement (for example, a free trade agreement), the tariff and para-tariff rules of the World Trade Organization prevail. The calculation is that products imported from the EU by the UK could benefit from an automatic tariff increase of up to 38%.

British traders admit that they will not be able to fully transfer these tariffs to prices, but they exclude an inevitable dose of inflationary increases in a context of stagnant wages since the beginning of the 1990s. Conservative austerity program of 2010. The worst scenario calculated by the director of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, is a 10% increase in the price of buying supermarkets.

In the most dramatic case of drugs, the government has called for an emergency measure: store up to 60 days of essential remedies. Even so, Prime Minister Theresa May and Health Portfolio Holder Matt Hanbad have refused to give any guarantees for the supply of essential remedies.

The United Kingdom and the European Union knew no borders in recent decades. In the absence of agreement, border controls will automatically be erected. At the moment, controls are limited to identity verification and security, a situation that will change dramatically as trucks to the mainland and vice versa will have to complete a customs declaration. In the case of many products, custom controls will be required.

In the port of Calais, which accounts for 17% of trade between the bloc and the United Kingdom, it is estimated that an additional delay of two minutes in customs procedures can create lanes of trucks of more than 20 kilometers. According to the UK Road Transport Association (RHA), trucks will have to fill out a form with 40 different sections: the calculation is that each form takes about 10 minutes.

The impact will reach the production costs. "In the case of a trader who has eight thousand shipments to process, it will take 170 people to work eight hours on a vehicle," said RHA General Manager Richard Burnett.

The fear of a similar situation in airports seems to be eased with the announcement on March 7 that both sides had adopted measures to avoid one of the most feared scenarios : the paralysis of the flights. Some 164 million pbadengers travel between the United Kingdom and the EU each year. The issue of visas for the millions of Britons going on holiday on the mainland has been postponed to 2021, by which date a seven-euro visa would come into force unless a specific agreement is reached in this regard. What can not be changed is the fall of the pound, which has depreciated by 19% since the 2016 referendum and which, according to forecasts, will continue to fall, which will affect finances of British tourists going to the mainland.

The list of avatars is longer than that published by the British government. Among the pro-Brexit, they point out that everything is a "fear of the project", an attempt to generate fear to avoid a UK exit from the EU. They note that in the case of food products, the United Kingdom could unilaterally eliminate import tariffs. This week, the government announced that it is considering taking a similar measure for a wide range of products.

It is a policy that can be applied without major problems for some products – aluminum, steel, machinery, shoes, wood – but would be much more complicated for others that require a greater dose of protectionism: the automotive industry, the countryside, especially for meat and food. dairy products. These sectoral policies would make it more difficult to conclude free trade agreements with other countries, one of the main objectives of the pro-Brexit, which believes that the exit of the EU without agreement will be, beyond certain initial complications, a liberation of the productive forces.