They squawk about Brexit ...and miss the easy escape
HAVE you ever had a bird trapped in your house, and tried to urge it towards the open window? And then watched in growing exasperation as the panicked creature dashed itself against walls and furniture, seemingly determined to go every way but the right one?
It is much the same watching our Government trying to work out how to get out of the European Union while not bankrupting the country, and while gaining more control over our borders.
For months it has been flapping and squawking, and also making a nasty mess, as it doggedly refuses to find the obvious way out. Last week’s gibberish documents, more or less laughed at by the EU, were only the latest proof of this.
So to David Davis and Liam Fox and Philip Hammond, may I suggest what is known as the Norway Option? You are all blundering around as if you’ve never even heard of it. Yet it answers all major questions.
It does not require long years of detailed negotiation. We can lift it off the shelf, take it out of the box, and switch it on. It will work straight away.
It doesn’t get us completely out of the clutches of the EU. We’d still have to pay some money every year (nothing like as much as now) and accept their regulations when we traded with them, which is reasonable. But we can, if we wish, govern ourselves in all other matters.
Remember, the vote to leave the EU was a narrow one. It was a clear vote to leave, but it was not a huge, overwhelming demand for some kind of wild triumphalist leap in the dark. ‘In victory, magnanimity’ is a good rule, set out by the Leave campaign’s hero, Winston Churchill. It means that you treat your defeated opponents with courtesy and generosity, seeking to win them over to your position, not trampling on them.
There’s another side to this. What if our exit from the EU goes wrong because arrogant Leavers won’t compromise? What if the scare stories turn out to have some truth in them? What if, the day after we leave, the lorries back up in Ireland and at Dover for hundreds of miles, waiting for the endless bureaucratic procedures the EU must by international law impose on ‘third countries’ as we will then have become? The arrogant Remainers will then take their revenge, all the more bitter because the arrogant Leavers have been so scornful.
I don’t think it’s impossible if, in such a crisis, with jobs vanishing by the day, the pound shrivelling away and the economy going down the plumbing, the Government would fall. A new government could then be elected, pledged to seek immediate re-entry to the EU, on any terms we could get. A fine victory that would be, not least because we would almost certainly be compelled to abolish sterling and join the euro as the price of our humiliating surrender.
So, noisy militants, consider that your noisy militancy may get you the exact opposite of what you claim to want.
By choosing instead to stay in the European Economic Area (EEA), we can leave the EU, make our own trade deals with non-EU countries, but stay in the single market. This (not the quite different Customs Union) is what allows us to have friction-free trade through the Channel Tunnel and across the Irish border. And no, it doesn’t force us to accept ‘free movement’.
EEA members are allowed to activate Article 112 of the EEA agreement, the so-called ‘emergency brake’. Under this rule, tiny Liechtenstein has effectively managed to suspend ‘freedom of movement’ indefinitely, and operate its own quota system.
This is a precedent which Britain, with far more clout, can and should follow. The window is open.