Boris really boxing himself in with no wiggle room to avoid a red-faced climbdown or no deal, ‘Albanian’ style. The background : a long term productivity crisis that goes back decades, with consumption levels being maintained by borrowings esp among the poor 1/n

Add in the outsized impact of the financial crisis in 2008-9 largely because of the v large financial sector and the particular nature of its exposures and you had a compounding economic hit 2/n

Then we had the tough austerity years in which the capacity of the state in key areas - local government, health, police was severely reduced and the withering of the support networks for the most vulnerable 3/n

Then the Uncertainty of the Brexit vote and the resulting stalling of capital investment (and foreign investment) evidenced among other things by a massive underperformance of UK equities v global equities- a sign that productivity faces further challenges 4/n

Then the COVID hits - which exposed the fraying of state capacity in healthcare and the supersized economic hit given the large service sector 5/n

And you add in a difficult vote in May’s Holyrood elections and it’s easy to see how a No deal Brexit might test the institutions of the country very severely. 6/n

It’s all a bit Juan Peron’s Argentina in the late 1940s when the country basically went mad. It didn’t end well. 7/7