Britain Stages Mass Truck Jam to Prepare for No-Deal Brexit

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Like a military operation, the project to test how traffic might flow around South East England in the event of a no-deal Brexit started before dawn. And like many a military operation, it ran into trouble soon after making contact with reality.

The Department for Transport had asked for between 100 and 150 trucks to assemble on Monday morning at a disused airfield in Kent. In the event, 89 turned up.

Those that were there queued on the runway, waiting to be moved. In 2015, the pro-Brexit U.K. Independence Party proposed reopening Manston Airport, to help the local economy. This was probably not what they meant.

For the rest of the morning, the vehicles moved in convoys back and forth to the port of Dover, down a single carriageway.

The exercise is designed to test the U.K.’s readiness in case Prime Minister Theresa May fails to get her Brexit deal through Parliament and the country crashes out of the bloc without an agreement to smooth the split.

The impact on the transport system -- especially goods movements across the U.K. border --would be potentially huge.

The exercise, known as Operation Brock, is turning the Manston Airport site into a mass holding bay for heavy goods trucks, to ease congestion on major highways to British ports such as Dover, southern England.

“We do not want or expect a no-deal scenario and continue to work hard to deliver a deal with the EU,” the U.K.’s Department for Transport said in a statement. “However, it is the duty of a responsible Government to continue to prepare for all eventualities and contingencies, including a possible no deal.”

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