Hm, what's the definition of gangsterism then? It seems to me that the EU put up no fight about the UK leaving, the UK simply wanted in on the single market and customs union and also be outside of the regulations that are the single market and customs union, which is the exact definition of a contradiction.

The EU will carry on with a melancholic resignation if the UK does a no deal exit. It'll be just as painful for the EU to do all those border checks, Belfast will tense up again, the queue at Gibraltar will get longer, crossing at Dover and Calais will be simply silly long and all the unmentioned things are even more complicated by default. The EU has rules how to handle them and does it rutinely, the UK can probably dig up a few old rulebooks and then they'll throw them away and will probably start with the EU rules anyway, as those are relevant, contemporary, up to date, known, tested, tried and used already.

And the problem with slowly drifting away from the EU is that the EU ingress points won't know which rules the UK changed, or which new rules the UK forgot to adopt, so checks will have to be performed. Every port, airport, other ingress point will have to treat anybody and anything from the UK as outside EU. Full stop.

If the UK wants to avoid that it has to offer something to the EU to get that special treatment. (It always had special treatment, it had right to selectively implement directives and regulations, but it hadn't utilized that right except in a few important cases, like they opted out of the Eurozone, Schengen area, etc.)

So, all in all, the burden of treating the UK as an important close-to-EU-but-not-EU entity has to worth something to the UK, right? May and co. basically offered nothing except that we'll figure it out later.

All of the problems that the last 2 years of brexit negotiations wanted to "solve" are solved by an 'even closer cooperation'.