Senior Tory Brexiteer faces backlash after comparing fears over no-deal Brexit to millennium bug

A senior Tory Brexiteer has said warnings about the dangers for Britain’s future if it leaves the European Union without a deal are like fears about the millennium bug.

Sir Bernard Jenkin said there would be “rioting in the streets” in EU countries if their producers faced extra barriers trading with Britain if a deal was not reached.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The civil service and the government are feeding the industry and the industry is feeding the government with this diet of gloom and alarm and despondency.

“Actually, it’s unnecessary and we will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about, a bit like the millennium bug.”

He said most countries that trade on World Trade Organisation terms have increased their trade with the European Union faster than the UK has over its period of membership.

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“WTO terms is not the great impediment,” he added.

But Mr Jenkin’s comments were criticised by Labour and several IT professionals who worked on getting the UK ready for the millennium.

Labour MP Alison McGovern tweeted: “British people have dealt with a decade of lost wages, a decade of crumbling public services, and a decade of prospects drifting away.

“No deal would be like all that on speed.”

Finance writer Frances Coppola posted: “I am sick and tired of hearing ignoramuses like Bernard Jenkin claim that the Millennium bug didn’t exist. IT DID.

“I worked on Y2K projects. We found bugs and we fixed them.

“It’s because we did such a good job that people who weren’t involved think there was never a problem.”

Journalist Paolo Attivissimo tweeted: “I was there. My colleagues were there, working overtime to fix deeply rooted date bugs that would have crashed banks and hospitals.

“So I’d say that Sir Bernard Jenkin is a waste of time.”

Meanwhile, former Brexit secretary David Davis says the European Union will be making a “massive miscalculation” if it thinks the UK is not ready to walk away from Brexit talks without a deal.

His comments followed Liam Fox’s recent assessment that the probability of a no-deal outcome was “60-40”.

Mr Davis – who spent months negotiating with Michel Barnier before quitting over Theresa May’s Chequers plan – insisted that EU member states had more to lose from a failure to reach an agreement than the UK.

He told the Daily Telegraph: “This has great scope for being a massive miscalculation on the part of the EU that could end up with no deal by accident.

“It’s certainly not the intention of the EU to have a no-deal Brexit but they are misjudging us at the moment. The UK Parliament does not want no deal but it’s certainly not going to be pushed around by the European Parliament.

“I’ve always thought that no deal is better than a bad deal and while there will be border issues and so on… it would give us more freedom.

“I’m still of the view that we have got two things on our side – we have got our own currency and we are masters of our own destiny in a way that EU member countries are not.

“This is a negotiation and it will go to the edge, but we must not panic about this.

“They have got lots to lose too, and specific countries and specific sectors have got large amounts to lose. As we get closer to the brink, there will be internal pressure within the EU.”