CONSERVATIVE
New Forest East

CABINET OFFICE – OPERATION YELLOWHAMMER - 25 September 2019

CABINET OFFICE – OPERATION YELLOWHAMMER - 25 September 2019

Dr Julian Lewis: Was there a plan equivalent to Operation Yellowhammer back in 2016 to deal with the widely predicted run on the pound and financial catastrophe if the country dared to vote for Brexit, and is there any reason to believe that our current worst-case scenario is any more likely to materialise than that which applied three years ago?

[The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Michael Gove): My right hon. Friend makes a characteristically elegant point, and it goes to the heart of this. None of us can predict with absolute accuracy what will happen in the future. During the run-up to the 2016 vote, a number of people made lurid predictions about what a vote to leave might lead to, and those lurid predictions were not found to be true. Government can take and have taken steps to mitigate the impacts of a reasonable worst-case scenario.]