Robert Stevens
Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrives in Germany today for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel. Tomorrow he will meet French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris.
Johnson has pledged to take the UK out of the European Union on October 31, with or without a trade and customs deal with the EU. The flare-up of tensions ahead of his trip shows that no deal is increasingly likely. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, and Irish Premier Leo Varadkar rejected out of hand Johnson’s demand that the “backstop” aimed at preventing a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic must be abandoned or there would be no deal. Johnson has described the backstop as “anti-democratic and inconsistent with the sovereignty of the UK.”
The crisis wracking the ruling elite over Brexit is the most severe since the Second World War. In response, Johnson’s anti-EU government is preparing a ferocious assault on the working class to enforce its “Rule Britannia” agenda.
This week’s Sunday Times published more details of Operation Yellowhammer, documents it described as revealing the “covert planning being carried out by the government to avert a catastrophic collapse in the nation's infrastructure” post-Brexit.
The Sunday Times has confirmed that they were compiled this month by the Cabinet Office. The documents marked “official sensitive” are understood to have been leaked by a senior Tory figure supportive of remaining in the EU, one of a group of ex-ministers led by former Chancellor Philip Hammond and David Gauke.
The newspaper emphasises, “The [Yellowhammer] documents… set out the most likely aftershocks of a no-deal Brexit rather than worst case scenarios…”
In a front-page article, “Operation Chaos”, the Sunday Times warns, “Britain faces shortages of fuel, food and medicine, a three-month meltdown at its ports, a hard border with Ireland and rising costs in social care in the event of a no-deal Brexit…”
The existence of the Tory Brexit planning strategy was first revealed last September, when a press photographer was able to take a snapshot of a document revealing some “no-deal” plans and the codename. Details of its general contents then emerged over the last year.
Yellowhammer’s “command and control” contingency plans for a no-deal outcome were first set to be enacted last March—the previous deadline set for the UK’s exit before it was extended to October by then-Prime Minister Theresa May and Brussels. Under its provisions, the government’s Cobra committee, which is usually only convened under conditions of national emergency, is empowered to deal with all no-deal preparations, including having a minimum of 3,500 troops on standby.
Yellowhammer’s provisions have dire social implications, as they are premised on the clamping down of strikes and protests by workers and the evisceration of democratic rights. They include the rolling out of sweeping police-state powers embodied in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, introduced by the Labour government of Tony Blair.
In January, the Times revealed that scenarios for martial law were being considered and that “curfews, bans on travel, confiscation of property [and] deployment of the armed forces to quell rioting are among the measures available to ministers.”
The picture that emerges from the latest documents is one in which every section of the economy faces turmoil in a small island nation that relies on imports for virtually all the necessities of everyday life, including basic foodstuffs and medicine.
There will be significant disruption at ports lasting up to three months before the flow of traffic supposedly “improves”—to 50 to 70 percent of the current rate. Yellowhammer warns that “Certain types of fresh food supply will …. decrease, which adds to the “risk that panic buying will disrupt food supplies.”
“Low-income groups” and “vulnerable groups” will be “disproportionately affected by any price rises in food and fuel.” Under these conditions, plans for rationing food are underway.
Yellowhammer notes that there will be “probably be marked price rises for electricity customers with associated wider economic and political effects.”
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