Stop trying to link Brexit to coronavirus – politics has nothing to do with a global pandemic. Oh, wait...

Nobody ever said that a no-deal Brexit would badly affect our ability to deal with the global outbreak of a viral illness. Well, apart from the British Medical Association in 2018. And the Faculty of Public Health, in 2016 before the referendum was held

I’m sick to death of people trying to link everything to Brexit. I mean, for god’s sake, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. The fact that the deadline to extend the transition period and avoid a December no-deal Brexit will come next week, on 30 June, is completely unrelated to the coronavirus crisis. Isn’t it?

Aren’t there loads of areas of politics that EU membership had absolutely no link to at all? The fact that British politicians used to sit in European parliament committees, covering everything from chemical safety to foreign policy, is neither here nor there.

In 2016, after the Cygnus test, our chief medical officer declared that the UK was grossly unprepared for a pandemic. The test specifically cited a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health and care staff. But that’s fine. Because for the next four years our government spent every waking moment focused on improving the NHS and buying PPE to make sure the doctors and nurses who were saving our lives wouldn’t risk theirs. It wasn’t distracted by anything else at all.

See! Nothing to do with Brexit.

In 2016, EU citizens made up 5 per cent of the UK population but made up 10 per cent of our doctors and 6 per cent of our nurses. That number was growing, but it’s been coming down since 2016. But of course that has nothing to do with the fact that, in 2016, 52 per cent of British voters told them that they were going to have fewer rights in the UK than more than two dozen other European countries. And even if it did, I can’t see any reason why, right now, the UK would be particularly reliant on its health staff. (Of course, let’s forget the fact that the only reason we haven’t seen hospitals collapse under the pressure is because they had to stop doing everything else apart from tackling the outbreak of coronavirus.)

OK, maybe every single medical institution in the country told us Brexit would weaken our NHS’s ability to keep us alive in general. But none of them told us specifically that a no-deal Brexit would badly affect our ability to deal with a pandemic. Well, apart from the British Medical Association in 2018, that is. And the Faculty of Public Health – in 2016, before the Brexit referendum was held.

But people have real problems to deal with. They need to feed their families, and earlier this year the shelves were empty. That happened because people were worried about our supply of food through the coronavirus lockdown, even though factories were still supplying just as much. So the fact that a third of our food is imported from EU countries and no deal would add tariffs and red tape to that process, there’s no reason to think Brexit will have an effect on our food supply just as we’re trying to recover from effects of this pandemic.

The chief executive of Make UK, which represents UK manufacturers, said when it comes to people getting their jobs back after lockdown, “it’s all about those supply chains, getting things across the borders, with all the restrictions that may be in place there, in order to get these factories working”. But the fact that Boris Johnson recently retracted his plans to impose full customs checks on everything coming from the EU, by specifically citing the Covid-19 crisis, doesn’t mean there’s any link between the two.

We elected Johnson after he spent four years telling us he was going to ignore the experts and the “merchants of gloom”, and that we were naturally better than European countries, given that 27 of them together supposedly need us more than we need then. So relaxed was our prime minister about Britain’s superior leadership that he skipped five emergency meetings over coronavirus, continued to allow mass gatherings for 10 days after the World Health Organisation declared we were in a viral pandemic, and told people to shake hands while northern Italy was already in lockdown.

The EU-UK negotiations are falling apart. If we don’t request an extension to the transition period in the next five days, and if we cannot agree a deal with the EU by 31 October, we’ll face a no-deal Brexit at the end of December. But I’m sure glad that has nothing to do with our recovery from coronavirus – because otherwise we’d be piling one national catastrophe on top of another.

Femi Oluwole is a campaigner against Brexit and a co-founder of pro-European Union advocacy group Our Future Our Choice