o you have the bunting out and the fireworks primed for Independence Day, with 4 July designated as the moment England ends its long national hibernation and flocks to the pub? To the untrained eye, the choice of a Saturday for the great unlocking might seem a tad rash, when, I don’t know, Monday was available to ease people in gradually. That point was put to Boris Johnson on LBC this morning, but he couldn’t offer even an approximation of an answer. Which leaves us to conclude that his government of geniuses picked Saturday solely because of the pleasing headlines that the Fourth of July suggested – rather forgetting that this is the day when Americans celebrate their escape from the rule of a dysfunctional London elite headed by a man with more children than you could count and prone to gibbering in public. The date may yet acquire new notoriety if the grand English reopening comes to seem premature, given that coronavirus is still lethally active and the UK has one of the world’s highest death rates. And yet 4 July does not mark this week’s most reckless date. With much less fanfare, another milestone was passed, one that could wreak a havoc all its own – especially in combination with the pandemic. I’m speaking of 11pm on 30 June, the moment at which Britain lost the ability to seek an extension of the Brexit transition period. Unless we reach a new free trade agreement with the European Union in the next six months, we will be crashing out of the EU with no deal on 31 December. It seems like bad form to mention it now, when we have a deadly disease to contend with. That suits Johnson and Dominic Cummings well: they hope to bury the bad news of Brexit deep inside the coronavirus, calculating that any damage inflicted by the former will be concealed by the general trauma of the latter. “Covid’s created an excuse,” says one former Conservative minister. But the logic is perverse. Cummings may like the politics of crashing out under cover of corona, but anyone else can surely see that now is absolutely not the time to submit Britain to the economic shock of a chaotic break from our nearest trading partners. Recall that the Bank of England has warned that the UK faces its deepest recession since the Great Frost of 1709; that the OECD forecasts that the UK will suffer the worst recession in the developed world; that three quarters of UK manufacturers expect to cut jobs this year. The layoffs have already started, with thousands announced this week, from Upper Crust to Airbus. When the furlough scheme ends, there’ll be many more. Mass unemployment is coming; consumer confidence will shrink as those with money become ever warier of spending it. If, on top of all that, Britain leaves the EU without a deal, or a deal so thin it’s barely better than no deal, it will fall as a blow to the skull of a man already bleeding. None of this is abstract. The government has already published the tariffs that would be imposed on basic food items necessarily imported from the EU. They would add 12p to a 500g bag of dried pasta, 4p to a tin of tomatoes: to some, that won’t sound like much, but for those counting every penny it could make all the difference. If you’re grappling with food poverty, an increase of 20% or more on staples will be ruinous. In normal times, charities might step in. But many of those are fighting for their own lives, their high street shops devastated by the collapse in footfall brought by lockdown. This is how the coronavirus and a no-deal Brexit compound each other, their combined damage greater than the sum of its parts. Ministers like to play down the coming Brexit pain, suggesting that since all industries are going to have to adapt to Covid-19, they might as well adapt to an EU crash-out while they’re at it. But that’s wrongheaded, not least because the two different crises will affect different sectors. Travel, tourism and the arts have been gutted by coronavirus, while manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and financial services stand to be hit by Brexit. “It’s two parallel shocks, rather than one shock that might conceal the other,” says Naomi Smith of Best for Britain. And do we really believe this government can handle two such seismic shifts at once? Consider this. Johnson has promised to create an entirely new IT system to check goods heading from the UK to the EU in time for 1 January 2021. But guess what? Exporters are getting worried that the new Goods Vehicle Movement Service won’t be ready in time. The Road Haulage Association calls it “a cocktail for potential disaster”, predicting chaos and delay at the ports. Not to mention the new paperwork that will be required from British companies shipping goods to Northern Ireland. Now remember that the government also promises to have its delayed track-and-trace app for coronavirus up and running by the winter. It’s a brave citizen who reckons they’ll succeed in one of these two massive IT ventures, let alone both. Brexit once dominated our politics; now it is barely mentioned. The Conservative landslide last December seemed to settle it. Many of the Tory MPs who would have raised the coming no-deal threat have been purged. Keir Starmer is wary of raising it: he has his eye on leave seats, and is in no hurry to play the diehard remainer. He didn’t even press the government to seek an extension to the transition. The result is a double danger to this country. A hurricane is coming, and yet we are blithely choosing this of all moments to sail off into uncharted waters, all alone.