With 101 days to go to Brexit, I suppose it’s best to be rational and logical about the no-deal planning that has been announced by the government. I mean, if you’re going to jump off a cliff without a parachute, it’s quite right that you should make sure that you’ve got clean underpants on, a packed lunch ready and enough fuel in the car to get you to your destination.

The prime minister, it is pretty clear, is playing a dangerous game. She will do whatever it takes to force MPs to choose between her deal and no deal, and remove any other options, such as a second referendum. She is gambling that Labour, Lib Dem and SNP moderates will look over the cliff edge and, for fear of worse, hold their nose and vote for her deal. The danger is that they won’t, that Jeremy Corbyn will be bloody-minded enough to defy you and minimise the rebellion in his own party, and we will crash out. And no contingency planning can mitigate the effects of accidental Brexit.

You see, there is only so much that £2bn worth of emergency measures can do. You could make it £20bn, or £200bn and it wouldn’t be sufficient. As the various official guidance documents have already made painfully clear, across many areas of life, the British government will be powerless if we crash out of the European Union with no transition to, as yet unknown, future trade arrangements.

For example, if you’re a Japanese or German carmaker in Britain, you can certainly organise the annual shutdown for 29 March and after, because you know things will be getting fairly hairy then. But sooner or later you’re going to have to go back to work and figure out how to make and sell cars with bits missing, because the components are hanging around in Calais or somewhere on the M20, when they should be being fitted into a nice new Mini Cooper. Then they’ll need to work out how to sell their cars in Europe when they have a 10 per cent tariff slapped on them. Some Eurosceptics say that any business that can’t slice 10 per cent off its cost base isn’t doing its job properly. We’ll see how Nissan, Toyota, Honda and BMW respond to that, and how big the subsidies these motor giants demand of the British government will turn out to be. Too high, probably.

If you’re a lamb farmer the British government will advise that there will be a 40 per cent tax on your exports when you attempt to export them to the European Union, and that the inevitable disruption at the ports will mean your livestock may be hanging around in the back of a lorry for an unconscionable time. So maybe don’t bother? Maybe diversify? Open a hotel? Farm shop? Try to divert the exports that usually go to France to China or Saudi Arabia? The Department for International Trade can advise on that, but won’t be equipped to sell a single kilo of meat. Up to you, anyhow.

If you’re a city investment bank and you find yourself losing clients because you are shut out of the EU single market, you’ll probably have already set up an office in the EU and exported a few jobs. You’ll be open to moving many more if needs be, and writing off the money you’ve sunk in those nice new offices in Canary Wharf and the training you’ve provided for your British workforce. You are footloose, even if the staff are not. Sadiq Khan and Liam Fox tell you London is “open for business”. You can prove otherwise, though you don’t want to.

The truth is that Whitehall can no more rescue Britain from a no-deal Brexit than anyone else. There is not the money to make good all the losses that will be suffered by all the industries that will be affected. In some sectors the effects will be immediate; in others they will take many years, if not decades to materialise.

It may be that such dislocation to the economy will eventually be righted. Probably through a major devaluation in sterling – which will cut the purchasing power of already depressed British wages – new markets will be found, and Britain will find new ways to make its living in the world. Economies can and do adjust to shocks, just as Britain adjusted to joining the then European Communities after 1973 – but that, too, was quite painful, with higher unemployment and inflation partly as a result.

Britain before Brexit: Wales Show all 16 1 /16 Britain before Brexit: Wales Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea A giant anonymous message calls after a shopper leaving the town centre, his bags full with advent calendars and Christmas wrapping paper, reminding him of the non-material he’s lacking. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Wrexham Two notices occupy the same wall, both white, both prohibitive. Yet the distance between them goes further than the grey bricks: they are separated by political and everyday concerns, by enmity and what’s simply not allowed. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Cardiff Another tent pitched in a British town centre, adding to those I saw in Coventry and Margate and Great Yarmouth and elsewhere. It looks so out of place, so unadapted, and I can almost hear the bitter scrape of a tent peg on concrete, unable to penetrate, unable to settle in and secure. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea It’s jarring to see the sanitised whiteness of the hospital on the high street. Its clinical, no frills description is at odds with the puns and the slogans of big-name brands. Yet it’s more mysterious too: the crucial details are absent, only its origin is laid bare as a clue. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Merthyr Tydfil The site of the former police station, now demolished, the ground bare behind bars. The sign hangs like an historical artefact, revealing not only what once was, but how the public and the law were divided. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Aberystwyth Thank you notes to God are displayed in St. Michael’s Church. I’m interested in how people interpret His role in their lives and how they express gratitude. I try to ignore innuendo when I see this note, and consider the vague completeness of God’s contribution. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Port Talbot A view of the Tata Steelworks from an underpass by the M4. It flanks the southern side of the motorway, facing the hills to the north and the town between and below. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea A disused road sign, first in Welsh, then in English, propped up against a tanning shop. The surface of the body designed to sell the product has been satirised with graffiti in Arabic: “Oh, fire of my heart!” I read the message as a subversive play on heat and attraction in our society, counterposing the superficial, sexualised burning of the body’s exterior (tanning) with the purer, warmer image of the interior fire of love. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Aberystwyth The university Geography Society beats the History Society in a drinking competition. Participants turn glasses over above their heads to prove that they’re empty. Student supporters cheer from the balconies in drunken delirium. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Port Talbot A distinctly twenty-first-century British hieroglyphic. A symbol conveying an obsession with virility, with its tendency to tarnish and spoil, to reduce everything it touches to an insignificant canvas for its power. I would say it has something to do with Port Talbot’s phallic steelworks and their daily emission, if I hadn’t seen it so much elsewhere in Britain. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Merthyr Tydfil Children imagine the future of the town, and in so doing transform the present, from something static and fixed to a place of becoming, where “now” is simply a transitional phase, pregnant with the utopian possibilities of “Las Tydfil”, a place combining two of Britain’s strongest currents: environmentalism and gambling. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Cardiff The Welsh Dragon is printed on plastic bags probably because the company thinks it can sell more products by tapping into the country’s niche patriotism. Yet, it also means that the Welsh Dragon is being treated as rubbish, thrown to the gutter, trashed in landfill, left as litter in a mess of detritus. Richard Morgan Britain before Brexit: Wales Cardiff Black Friday on Queen Street. The street is lined with commercial exclamations - of sales and deals and time running out - that sometimes appear better as ironic parodies of the fate of the capital’s rough sleepers than notices of the products and bargains they promote. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea An anarchist imperative opposite the prison wall, suggesting to the residential area that fundamental, wholesale social change cannot come about through participating in the democratic political process, but only by rejecting it, confronting it, and rising against it. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Merthyr Tydfil Investment cut in half. The promise of a sale broken. Once an announcement, now discarded to the street, visible only to those looking down, more meaningful now than ever before, in the company of rotting autumn. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Wrexham The town has a similar accent to the Liverpudlian one. There are hints that it shares an undercurrent of resentment towards The Sun newspaper too. Richard Morgan/The Independent

So why not back Theresa May deal in that circumstance? Is that not a no-brainer?

Maybe, if you take the understandable view that leaving the EU is all about damage limitation. The UK-EU withdrawal agreement, and the unknown future trade deal, really is the worst of all worlds. Leaving aside the Northern Irish backstop, it does mean Britain will be a rule-taker, committed to accepting aspects of the single market and/or the customs union indefinitely. These may suit Britain or not, but there will be no opportunity for the UK to make its own arrangements to compete in world markets, including the EU. The problem with the prime minister’s deal isn’t so much the Irish border, but the much wider issue about what the future UK-EU trade deal will actually be. That is why it is a “blind Brexit” – we have no idea what our new economic rule book will look like. All we know is that we’ll have little say over it and the Europeans will not allow us to undercut them.

The main problem with the no-deal Brexit isn’t so much the immediate chaos – bad as that would be – or the long-term damage to the UK’s trade with Europe, which is inevitable too. The bigger problem is not having a long-term plan to build a competitive economy that will function and make the British prosperous in such challenging conditions. What should have been made explicit by the majority of Brexiteers is that the only way to make no-deal Brexit work is to begin a radical liberalisation of the economy. That would mean shredding troublesome workers’ rights, opening up somnolent consumer markets to intense competition, slashing taxes on business, unilaterally dropping tariffs and quotas on imports, cutting the welfare state and generally letting rip. No one ever told the British that that was the way to make Brexit work – to turn Britain into a low-cost, business-friendly, light-regulation, privatised Thatcherite centre of enterprise, the Singapore of Europe as it is occasionally known.