The price tag for all this new red tape is €600m for the Dutch side alone. This excludes the costs of new export and import tariffs, VAT and other new “sector-specific” barriers for trading with the UK. The 35,000 small and medium-sized businesses unused to trading with non-EU countries also face an estimated cost of €20,000-€50,000 to adapt their IT systems.
Added to this, warns the report, must be the likely effects of the inevitable economic slowdown, or worse, in Britain. When the country leaves without a deal it must “fall back” on the minimal World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules for trade. But financial services and aviation fall outside the WTO regime, meaning that after a British no-deal departure both sectors must stop trading with the EU overnight. Between Amsterdam Schiphol airport and London alone there are currently 60 flights a day – one every 15 minutes. [...]
This simply will not happen. Even the ardently pro-British Dutch government has made clear again that the choice for Britain is simple. It can buckle and accept the EU’s conditions for continued “frictionless trade”, or it becomes a “third country” on the periphery of Europe – like Morocco or Turkey, except that Turkey will have more privileges because of its customs union with the EU. [...]
So next time you hear a Brexiteer proudly declare that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, remember that for once this Brexiteer is correct. Not as far as Britain is concerned of course because “no deal” for the UK means the severe disruption of not just one trade flow – as it is for the Netherlands – but of 27. However, for EU member states the negative economic fallout of a British crash departure is far more preferable than the utter catastrophe of the single market imploding. Painful as it will be, no deal with Britain is indeed better for the EU than a bad deal.
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