WTO won’t happen.
Johnson is planning another last minute capitulation…as the tides across the pond shift against him and his brinkmanship.
Liberal pundits get a lot of column inches and airtime out of the catastrophic ramifications of a WTO Brexit, with a degree of truth to the claims. Yes, a No Deal would cause economic hardship and a hit to material conditions for working people in Britain, and on those grounds needs to be avoided. But the problem is more so No Deal when you’re being driven by free market fanatics intent on turning us into a glorified version of the Cayman Islands, oh and with no plan in the middle of a pandemic.
Thing is, a No Deal (a very undesirable way to go about exiting the EU) won’t happen. It would never happen and it certainly won’t happen after the significant development in the United States (my thoughts soon).
People get whipped into a frenzy about it, and their most antidemocratic instincts around Brexit come to the fore. That’s what we saw with the liberal establishment in October 2019, and it allowed Johnson to position himself as (bizarrely) a “man of the people” on Brexit, standing with democracy, all while democracy and indeed working people are things he and his elitist club hold in contempt. Brexit based culture wars were inarguably the biggest single component and driver across the board in the 2019 general election result, period.
Boris Johnson is about to do the same again. He’ll capitulate meekly to the demands of the EU (whatever the cost) at the very last minute, securing a weak, distant, and pathetically slim trading agreement. He’ll then look to the US, with a President-Elect who looks upon him with distain for his racist comments about the President he used to serve under, and realise he couldn’t possibly secure a meaningful trade deal with the States, save holding the entire economy up for American corporations to siphon abroad the national wealth.
There are a lot of problems for the UK. A WTO “No Deal” Brexit won’t be one of them. Johnson will do his brinkmanship, infuriate a culture war if questioned, do a victory lap, and get a boost in the polls for his troubles.