LONDON: A senior British Cabinet minister said Wednesday that businesses need to prepare for the possibility the UK will leave the European Union in March without an exit deal, as a growing number of firms braced for disruption by stockpiling goods or shifting operations overseas.

Last week British lawmakers threw out Prime Minister Theresa May’s EU divorce deal, and attempts to find a replacement are gridlocked. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox said “no deal is a ­possibility.”

“We know that the law in the United Kingdom says that on the 29th of March the European treaties will cease to apply to a UK, so the only way we can stop that happening is to come to an agreement,” Fox told the BBC from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Published in Dawn, January 24th, 2019