Getting prepared for Brexit by telling us so

A few last attempts anticipating the 'Don't blame us, we told you so' line that will continue, doubtless for years. First:

NHS faces drug shortages as Brexit stockpile used in Covid crisis

“What we were relying upon in Brexit was a supplies stockpile. I would suggest we have eaten into that stockpile because of Covid. We need to think about what the stockpiles are looking like.”...“The main supply routes for drugs have been through Europe, both in terms of red tape and logistics, as they’ve come from mainland Europe to the UK through ports. This could all change suddenly with a no-deal Brexit.”

What a strange argument. OK we would have been able to cope with Brexit after all because we stockpiled. But now we have Covid which has used up the same stockpile, without any new stockpiling. European supply routes will somehow all be closed if there is no deal.Therefore Brexit will be reponsible for drug shortages:

problems associated with Brexit could conjure a “perfect storm” of problems this winter that could undermine care, including flu, bad weather, workforce shortages, a resurgence of Covid and an epidemic of burnout among staff.

But of those, Brexit just must be the major one. Note the weaselly 'could conjure'. By way of 'balance':

The Department of Health and Social Care declined to say if any of the drugs in the Brexit stockpile have already been used....A DHSC spokesperson said : “We hold a range of stockpiles for a variety of medicines, including crucial treatments used to treat Covid-19 patients to help ensure there is uninterrupted supply.

Then

No-deal Brexit risks violence in Northern Ireland, MPs warn MI5

Why? Because a long stream of conditional statements, if all interpreted in the negative direction, might provide accurate predictions of doom:

MI5 cannot afford to cut resources devoted to countering terrorism in Northern Ireland because of the risk of a rise in violence in the event of a hard or no-deal Brexit, parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) has warned.

Hilariously 'the agency’s full response was redacted. “I think we can be reasonably confident,” it began, before being cut off for security reasons.'

Not for the first time, I am very grateful to Briefings for Britain's refutations of many of these silly stories:  This for example:

On Friday the BBC headline news included an item entitled: Shoppers could pay more after no-deal Brexit.

The story was planted by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) who said that tariffs would add £3.1bn a year to the cost of importing food and drink unless the UK and the EU can strike a free trade agreement. This was a lesson in propaganda: using value rather than volume statistics; assuming the imported goods basket would remain unchanged; and the implication that some extreme percentage increases were a typical example. Towards the end of the article, the BBC admitted that this would only amount to an annual increase of £112 per household or just over £2 per week. However, the more I investigate this story, the more I believe that even this amount is questionable and that could is definitely the operative word in the BBC’s title.

This review of scary reports by economists, or this 'rebuttal' of a BBC story about threats to the car industry