How dangerous would a no-deal Brexit be?
Eight months before the deadline for the UK leaving the EU, fears about the impact of a hard Brexit without a deal with Europe are growing. The media must refrain from creating panic among the people with horror scenarios, some commentators criticise. Other warn that not just the British should be worried about underestimating the consequences.
Media sparking Brexit hysteria
Press reports are fuelling exaggerated fears of the consequences of Brexit among the British, The Telegraph criticises:
“They read of how one industry after another is belatedly waking up to the disaster it could be facing; of how the Government itself is apparently making plans to stockpile food and medicines; even of the possibility that, if we crash out without a deal, our airliners could be grounded and our airports closed, because we would automatically lose the mass of legal authorisations which permit them to operate. So unreal has it all become that when Heathrow's chief executive revealed that he has borrowed £1 billion to cover the 'worst-case scenario' whereby Europe's busiest airport could be forced to shut down 'for two months', not even the newspaper which reported this seemed to grasp the staggering implications of what he was saying.”
Europe doesn't want another Weimar Republic
The UK leaving the EU without a deal would be dangerous not just for Britain but for Europe as a whole, historian Timothy Garton Ash warns in La Repubblica, comparing the resulting situation with that in Weimar Germany:
“A society riven by domestic divisions and economic difficulties, let down by its ruling classes, fetid with humiliation and resentment. Any such country is a danger both to itself and to its neighbours. Am I exaggerating the danger by hinting at a comparison with Weimar Germany? Indeed I am. I don't seriously envisage millions of newly unemployed, or a new Hitler coming to power, or a world war started by Boris Johnson. But it's surely better to overdramatise the risk, to get everyone to wake up to it, rather than ... consistently to underestimate the dangers for the whole of Europe that flow from Brexit - especially a mishandled Brexit.”