There’s a Westminster whisper doing the rounds. It’s been around for some time but it’s getting louder. It goes something like this: “Why not accept the EU referendum result but keep the UK in the single market?”
After all, this would adhere to the democratic mandate provided by 17 million people. We’d still leave the European Union, and our economic security and stability would be more assured.
It sounds eminently sensible, doesn’t it? Indeed, it’s an exit strategy I advocated as recently as March this year. We’d leave the EU under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and smoothly transition into a Norwegian-style agreement as a member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) trading in the European Economic Area (EEA). We’d extricate ourselves from some of the supranational bugbears and retain the trading benefits. Surely it’s a win-win.
But something doesn’t sit right. Millions of people voted to leave the EU for a variety of reasons and with different orders of priorities. High on the list for many was the issue of immigration and free movement of people. Indeed, it’s perhaps the main reason Vote Leave eventually conceded that a future trading relationship would have to be forged from outside the single market: in other words, access to the single market but not in the single market. It was an implicit recognition that EFTA membership requires concessions on the free movement of people.
It would be wrong to ignore this. While polls indicate that sovereignty and democracy remain the key issue for voters, immigration has been swiftly moving up the list. Many of the working class areas most affected by uncontrolled EU immigration showed huge swathes of support for leaving the EU.
Vote Leave is not the government, but as the designated campaign to leave the EU it made explicit a future position outside the single market: a relationship with controls on EU immigration achieved through an Australian-style points system.
It’s the government’s job to implement the instructions of the people. What is questionable, however, is the narrowness within which this instruction might be interpreted under the guise of economic security, despite the overarching context within which the instruction was delivered.
The next Prime Minister will need to unify the country. This will require clear recognition of the economic concerns of 16 million people that voted to remain in the EU, but will also require a clear recognition of the concerns around free movement of people, among other matters. What we are left with, then, has to be a new deal.
Should the UK government and/or the negotiating team judge single market membership to be a prerequisite for any deal, they will need to negotiate a fresh deal of a kind not achieved before by any country. This would be a deal that retains membership of the single market but also allows the UK to control EU immigration in its own interests. Jeremy Hunt has referred to this as the ‘Norway-plus’ option. Liechtenstein operate under a similar sort of arrangement, but a UK agreement would clearly be a different ballgame.
The problem the UK faces in negotiating such an agreement is a stark economic and political trade-off in Brussels. On the one hand, this deal might be considered to be in the economic interests of EU member states: after all, the UK has a substantial trading deficit with the member states. But there is a wider political context to consider. EU leaders will not want to create a ripple effect. They do not want other nations to look across the channel at the UK’s deal and take their chances on replication. We’ve already heard Angela Merkel state that the UK will not be able to “cherry pick” the good bits of any trading relationship and toss aside the bad bits.
Make no mistake, this may just be the defining issue in negotiations when – if – Article 50 is invoked. The negotiations will be finely balanced.
And don’t write off the possibility of a second referendum just yet. The EU has form in this department. Some concessions may encourage Parliament to ask us again, perhaps until we get the ‘right’ result.
Info Angle. 