credit;PA
The Government is “still not telling the truth” about medicine and food shortages that would result in the event of a no-deal Brexit, Gordon Brown has said.
The former prime minister argued that the Operation Yellowhammer report looking at no-deal scenarios concealed the full truth about shortages to vital medicines and drugs.
Mr Brown said: “The truth is that we are not taking back control but losing control – of medical supplies and food and energy prices.
“The worst-case scenario document downplays the risks to medical supplies, the threat to household budgets and the damage inflicted on the most vulnerable.
“We now know from Yellowhammer that no-deal Brexit is an unnecessary act of self-harm but ministers are still not telling the truth about the sheer scale of the self-inflicted wounds.”
As concern levels are raised in the UK the BBC News channel spoke to a Director of a crisis management consultancy, who compared the reaction to a no-deal Brexit to the Fukushima tsunami.
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude-9 earthquake shook northeastern Japan, unleashing a savage tsunami.
The tsunami caused a cooling system failure at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which resulted in a level-7 nuclear meltdown and release of radioactive materials. The death toll was over 15,000 people.
Charlie Maclean-Bristol Director at Plan B consulting told BBC News “the very obvious things might be planned for, well I hope they are going to be planned for.
“The supermarkets getting food, there’s not going to not be food.
“It will be a little like the response to the Fukushima tsunami, where it was very strange subtle things that the impacts were.
“After the earthquake you couldn’t get any black cars, or Honda couldn’t get car parts, so they had to go on half-time working.
“It won’t be Armageddon, but what there will be is, you will suddenly notice certain things are not in the shops, you can’t buy them or are in short of supply, there will be a slightly eclectic mix of things, that people couldn’t predict.
When he was asked how British the people will react in a no-deal scenario, he said: “I think there is a little bit of panic buying.
“I’ve looked at research into what happens after a hurricane, and actually there isn’t the panic and looting, not the kind of Armageddon like in disaster films, it’s not real.
“On the whole after a disaster people are very good at sharing stuff and looking after each other, you get a greater sense of community after a disaster, as everyone is in the same boat, they have to help each other.
“The British people are a pretty stoic lot.”
