The EU will be digging their own grave, if they failed to reach a deal with the UK – Professor Minford

An economist analyst has warned the EU that failure to reach a deal with the UK could result to an overwhelming recession within the continent, reason being that the UK has an upper hand in the Brexit talks billed to commence June.

Professor Patrick Minford speaking further, also predicted that due to the huge debt owed by Greece, the recession would collapse due to colossal fall in tourism and tariffs imposed on the country’s exports.

Because of the fear of losing other member nations, the EU is pressing towards a ferociously hard hard Brexit negotiations in order to protect the union.

Speaking to express.co.uk he said: “The people who have got the most to lose from not having a deal with the UK are the Europeans.

“They are going to do themselves a lot of damage. They’ve just come out of recession, they don’t need a recessionary shock like this any more than one needs a hole in the head.

“The banking system there is as rickety as hell and they are stuffed to the gills with government debt.

“The whole situation is very fragile and it just needs a shock pushing it back into recession to make it quite a mess, and the euro would fall in those circumstances.”

Also in his conclusion, he stated that: “So all this talk of punishing Britain is very silly and very immature. This really looks like an own goal from their point of view.”

Speaking further, he said: “The Greece problem isn’t going away, but it’s not getting any worse for now.

“But a blow which knocks their exports is potentially quite a recessionary impact and the particular impact in Greece could be very significant because it’s always teetering on the edge of chaos because of the way they’ve treated it.”

Prof Minford, who does not believe any other countries will leave the EU said: “If we don’t get a deal with the EU we’ll be in a perfectly good position as we’ll simply free trade with the rest of the world.

“For them the big problem is actually that we go to no deal and we have free trade with the rest of the world.

“They will find this is a very competitive market indeed and they will sell far less in it because stuff will be coming in from the rest of the world without those protectionist barriers.”

Saying the election of Emmanuel Macron was a good thing for the Brexit talks, he added: “We do want a strong Europe, we’d like them to sort themselves out. It’s not in our interests to have them falling apart at all.”