Professor Tamara Hervey:

It is a political question. I am not an expert, but I can reflect on it in terms of the discussions we have been having with people in the health sector as part of our research. Everybody in the health sector we have talked to behaves rationally and thinks Governments will behave rationally. The evidence that some British Governments are behaving rationally is disputed. What is very interesting is the temporal element. As the crunch moment comes, it appears that the British Government is forced to behave more rationally. One of the extraordinary things about this situation is that in all of the powerful institutions in society, such as the financial services industry, new technology, farming and so on, nobody wants the chaos of an unplanned, no-deal Brexit. Yet, those powerful institutions do not appear to be enough to stop the politics which are feeding into the rhetoric of no deal. We have held interviews with people in the street in England who have said we should just walk away and they have no sense of what that means in reality. The narrative of just walking away has become part of the political discourse in the UK in a way that is quite unimaginable and difficult for people like me whose job it is to discuss things rationally and weigh the evidence.

It has become a question of facts and feelings. We are having to think about it in terms of feelings as well as facts. This is not an answer at all to the question. The facts tell us that there must be a further extension beyond December 2020 but some people feel this is abhorrent or wrong. The question is who will be in power and make decisions and whether they listen to the facts or the feelings.