The bookmakers’ odds are that Britain will crash out of the EU without a deal next March. While Prime Minister May is not giving up on hopes of securing a soft Brexit, she is being held hostage by the right.

Like migrating birds seeking calmer climes, Britain’s MPs and other members of the polity have evacuated Westminster and flown off for a summer break that is extravagant even by Australian parliamentary standards. Not until after the October party conference season will there be a buzz in the lobbies of the House of Commons and the House of Lords again.

By then, with less than six months before Britain is scheduled to leave the European Union, it is a fair bet that an air of panic will envelop the country. The bookmakers’ odds are that Britain – as the Tory hard-Brexiteers desire – will crash out of the EU without a deal next March.

One MP – Prime Minister Theresa May – is taking a much-shortened holiday. She has taken direct charge of the European Union negotiations and is swinging round European capitals trying to convince national leaders of the viability of the ‘boutique’ customs plan put forward in a White Paper and agreed on by the Cabinet in June. But this past weekend, the customs plan was rejected by the Austrian Chancellor just before he took May to the opera. The plan also had the thumbs-down from the Brussels point man, Michel Barnier, the European Chief Negotiator, as well as former ministers Boris Johnson and David Davis.

Mrs May has ordered government department heads and public institutions including police, customs/excise and border control to prepare for a hard Brexit. In this event, all existing arrangements would cease on March 31 next year.

What are the implications of such a happening? Consider just one of a multitude of knock-on impacts: even with boosted numbers of immigration officers, there would be long queues at ports and airports. At Dover and Felixstowe, the leading ports for EU-UK trade, full-scale customs checks may lead to 20-mile tailbacks on approach roads, according to trucking industry estimates. New tariffs will be introduced by both the EU and the UK, increasing the cost of food and drugs, as well as manufactured goods.

Ironically, had the UK remained in the EU, it would be a major beneficiary of the recently agreed EU-Japan free trade agreement (FTA), making Japanese automobiles and electronics cheaper, as well as engines for Japanese cars assembled in Britain. As it stands, Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox will have to begin again with Tokyo; no easy task. He has little to show for his preliminary skirmishes with other major trading targets: China, India and the US. In any case, the value of an FTA with any of these countries pales alongside that of membership of the single market of the world’s largest and most economically powerful trading bloc: one lauded as the EU’s greatest achievement by the revered former high-Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher. That Thatcher’s heirs should want to throw it away for Boris Johnson’s delusion of a “glorious global future” seems almost beyond belief.

In recent months, while Britons have basked in the sunniest summer for many decades, the Brexit debates have diminished in both quantity and quality. The business sector, at last, is sounding the alarm bells. Adam Marshall, Director General of the British Chamber of Commerce commented that “there is a level of frustration among businesses that deepens with every passing week”. In the financial sector, Deutsche Bank, which until now has undertaken almost all its euro clearing activities in London, announced it was moving half the business to Frankfurt, a move sure to be followed by others. Financial services will take a big hit in the event of a hard Brexit.

In a letter to the Financial Times, John Nelson, a former Lloyd’s of London chairman and a City grandee, wrote: “Never in over 50 years of working life have I seen the UK facing such an abject future, caused by the complete failure of our political establishment to govern.”

There are real threats to jobs and the UK economy too. Germany’s BMW and Jaguar Land Rover, now owned by India’s Tata Group, warned a hard Brexit could prompt them to close factories in the UK. Airbus Industrie, the European aerospace group and rival to Boeing, has officially warned the government that unless a deal can be struck, it will close its plane-making operations in Britain. It would be a devastating blow: the company employs 14,000 directly, and almost 100,000 indirectly. The UK’s highly promising space industry, excluded from the Galileo global navigation space system project, may suffer irreparable damage too. There are many more such examples.

If Britain will suffer greatly from crashing out of the EU without a deal, the remaining 27 EU countries will not be unscathed. As Barnier has repeatedly reminded us, there cannot be a partial deal; all that has been negotiated so far falls away if there is no final agreement. And much has been agreed: a two-year transition period, the UK’s exit payment to the EU (estimated at about £50 billion, or AUD$ 88 billion) and the arrangements that allow EU citizens working in Britain to remain in the UK, are in jeopardy. Ireland will be one of the worst affected countries, with the re-introduction of border controls between it and Northern Ireland, affecting the free movements of traffic, goods and people. There is widespread concern on both sides and in Brussels that the Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland will collapse. Already paramilitary groups are making preparations for a resumption of the ‘troubles’ according to British intelligence.

It is clear the tenacious Mrs May is not giving up on hopes of securing a soft Brexit. But she is being held hostage by the dogmatic hard-Tory right led by Johnson, Fox and vocal back-bencher Jacob Rees-Mogg. Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn is a spectator, enjoying watching the Tory party tear itself apart, contributing little and ready to seize the opportunity of another election should it present itself in October.

This could provide a final opportunity for May. She could address the nation on television and tell the British people that, after sustained and genuine efforts to achieve a Brexit deal, she has concluded the best and only solution is to remain in the EU and ask the other member countries to rescind Article 50, the notice of withdrawal. France and Germany will readily agree; there will be tears of relief. A challenge to her decision in Parliament will be lost, the pound will recover and something resembling normal life will go on.

But I can’t see it happening and fear the worst.

Colin Chapman FAIIA is a writer, broadcaster and public speaker specialising in geopolitics, international economics and global media issues. He is a former president of AIIA NSW and was appointed a fellow of the AIIA in 2017.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may republished with attribution.