The steady diet of Brexit scare stories is continuing, with officials claiming the country could be overtaken by super-gonorrhoea and other infectious diseases.
The claims follow revelations from a Tory MP close to Theresa May that the Government plans to “scare people witless” over the summer about the supposed consequences of a ‘No Deal’ Brexit, which would see Britain leaving the European Union without a formal exit agreement and deal with it on normal third country terms, as it already does with countries like Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
This is in order to win support for Mrs May’s ultra-soft Chequers plan for Brexit, which would see Britain making a raft of concessions to Brussels on membership of the Single Market for industrial goods and agricultural products, adoption of a so-called ‘common rulebook’ based on EU law, effective submission to the EU court, and more.
The aforementioned Tory MP told BBC Newsnight that Project Fear 2.0 will involve the release of some 70 official documents describing dire-sounding contingency plans for ‘No Deal’, and it seems unlikely that the sudden spike in disaster stories from other sources is unrelated.
“At the moment our strongest concern is the huge level of uncertainty. We are just not clear where this is all going to land,” claimed NHS Confederation chief executive Niall Dickson, in comments to the London Evening Standard newspaper edited by former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Remain campaign Scaremonger-General George Osborne.
“The only positive is that we can say this is not only about UK patients, it is about European patients who would be affected as well,” Dickson suggested.
“It is in everyone’s interest to maximise cooperation. Diseases do not recognise borders.”
The theory is that, if the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) decided to stop co-operating with Britain, it would be difficult (for both sides) to track the progress of certain infectious diseases.
In fact, it is not clear that the European Union is a boon to public health, with the influx of illegal migrants to the bloc from the Global South, coupled with the lack of internal border controls in the Schengen area, likely to increase the potential for infectious diseases to spread.
Easy immigration from both within and without the EU is known to have undermined Britain’s public health — although it is little discussed — with infection rates for tuberculosis, which had been effectively eradicated, now worse in some of multicultural London than in Rwanda, Eritrea, or Iraq.
Other scare stories in recent weeks have included claims Britain will have to stockpile food and medicine, the Army may have to be deployed to supply remote areas, aeroplanes will be grounded, and — perhaps most outlandishly — that Brexit poses a “threat to sandwiches”.
Similar claims were made before the EU referendum, with the Osborne Treasury falsely suggesting that a vote to Leave the European Union would deliver an “immediate and profound shock” to the British economy, with the country sliding back into recession and around half a million people losing their jobs.
Osborne received tacit or explicit support for much of his claims from the Bank of England and global bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
All of these short-term forecasts turned out to be wrong, however, and the economy has in fact grown while unemployment has fallen to record lows.
Establishment economists have claimed they were not acting maliciously but simply got it wrong, but many analysts have suggested their “very partisan” work might have been intended to deliberately mislead people.
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