“This is the most extreme form of project fear yet, these people are an absolute disgrace.” That was how Nigel Farage, ever the patriot, dismissed the voice of the nation’s doctors last week. The British Medical Association had set out some of the harm a no-deal Brexit would cause. Its prediction that the UK’s ability to fight pandemics would be undermined grabbed the headlines. But in the small print were warnings of “delays in diagnosis and treatment for cancer patients” and adverse effects on “nearly a million patients receiving treatment for rare diseases”.

Brexiteers’ reaction to this morning’s leaked letter from NHS providers, which states that a rupture with the European Union would damage “the entire supply chain of pharmaceuticals”, will unfold along similar lines. “This is just a re-run of the referendum,” they will say. “Project Fear 2.0.”

Two years after Britain voted to leave, it is now a familiar refrain. “It has become clear that Project Fear – the scare-mongering campaign carried out by those who want to remain in the EU – is alive and well,” well-known medico-legal expert Iain Duncan Smith wrote recently. “Hardly a day goes by without another scare story about the UK failing to get medical isotopes.” And who among us, if they had cancer, wouldn’t turn to a failed party leader and benefits system botcher for advice, as opposed to, say, the BMA council chair, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, with his 28 years’ experience as a doctor and CBE for services to primary care?



Somehow, we are back to having “had enough of experts”, in the words of cabinet minister Michael Gove. Or, at least, that’s the kind of mood Brexiteers want to stir up. Being able to paint expert advice as an elitist project to frustrate the will of the people may be their last chance to salvage the “Brexit dream”. Let’s be entirely clear about what that dream is, because few of them have ever been honest about it: a legal separation from our closest neighbours that will retard growth, cost jobs, undermine consumer rights and disadvantage citizens. They are prepared to countenance those things because they think the prize is worth it.

As these drawbacks become more widely understood, however, the public doesn’t seem to be relishing the idea of a hard Brexit. What better way to win them round than arguing that, just like in June 2016, dire predictions of economic collapse will not materialise.

There are two gigantic flaws in this argument. First of all, while much was made of the immediate harm a no vote would cause, many of those dire predictions concerned the potential harms of Brexit itself. It can sometimes seem hard to believe, but Brexit still hasn’t actually happened – so the predictions haven’t been proved wrong yet. In any case, it has gradually emerged that the vote alone did stymie growth and continues to do so. We might have avoided the fireworks of sudden recession and capital flight, but it’s not as though “project sunlit uplands” won the day instead.

Second, many of those now warning about no-deal or hard Brexit are not even political actors, let alone spokespeople for an active referendum campaign. “As experts in delivering health services and providing care for our patients, we have a duty to set out the consequences of leaving the EU with no future deal in place,” says Nagpaul. His sentiment echoes those of many others whose genuine concerns are being snagged in a net marked “enemies of the people”. If we are to believe Farage and Duncan Smith, organisations as diverse as the Port of Dover and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society have been infiltrated by Brexit saboteurs.

The hardliners are now operating under an unfalsifiable premise: there is no negative information about Brexit that they wouldn’t slap the Project Fear label on to. A committee of Nobel prizewinners couldn’t convince them. How very post-truth.

Not only that, but the very notion of Project Fear allows Brexiteers to redefine “not disaster” as success. This increases the likelihood that the public will consent to some thoroughly unpleasant outcomes, since anything that isn’t catastrophic will feel like a relief. An example of this would be accepting the fact that new drugs will become available in Britain long after they are marketed in EU (a likely consequences of leaving the bloc’s medicines agency), because at one point we were worried we wouldn’t have any drugs at all. Brexiteers, yet again, are trying to sell us a pup. Don’t buy it.