Tim Stanley:

Joining the European Economic Area certainly trumps the current choice: the Chequers plan or war

This is an article about Brexit options and the importance of keeping them open, remembering that the primary goal of Brexit is – what? To get us out of the EU and its Looney Tunes plan to build a United States of Europe.

The beautiful simplicity of that proposition has been lost since Theresa May took over the process. We are living through Mrs May’s Brexit. She defined what a “real” Brexit would look like, she set the red lines and then she messed up the 2017 election, leaving her without the majority she needs to do the obvious.

For instance, why are we debating the future of the Northern Ireland border? Under normal circumstances, Westminster would have accepted the EU’S proposal to set a customs border down the Irish Sea, with checks in Liverpool rather than County Armagh – but you can’t do that if your government is propped up by the DUP, who, by the way, have turned out to be far better negotiators than the soppy old Tories. We shouldn’t have sent David Davis to negotiate with the EU, we should have sent Arlene Foster. If we had, the EU would have ended up paying us to leave.

Now there are just weeks to go before we’re supposed to agree the final terms of our exit with Brussels and Mrs May has laid out two options: her deal or war. It’s a testament to her political abilities that so many MPS think “war” is the better option.

Her deal isn’t all that bad, as it stands. The problem is that it opens bidding with such a generous offer on goods – the EU sets the rules, we take ’em – that the EU will cheerfully ask for more, having already intimated that it would be required for services, too. And we will probably go along with it. After two years of footdragging, surrenders and sheer incompetence, few trust Mrs May, the one really doing the negotiating, to hold firm against Brussels.

When she insists that the alternative to her plan is no deal – what Jimmy Carter used to call the “Moral Equivalent of War”, or Meow – I suspect her message is designed not to spook the Europeans but to remind Brexiteer MPS that there is no majority for Meow in Parliament (no one wants food shortages or queues at Dover). The problem with her gamble is that if no deal really is as apocalyptic as the Government says it is and if domestic support for her flawed plan collapses, which looks likely, then thoughts are going to turn towards a third option, which Mrs May has herself hinted at: staying inside the EU. To prevent that, Brexiteers have got to start promoting alternative plans of their own.

Here’s one: whatever happened to the Norway option? Leavers talked a lot about joining the European Economic Area during the referendum (along with Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein), partly because it reassured voters who’d prefer a soft exit. The surprise referendum victory, however, turned Brexiteers dizzy with success and they pushed for even greater divergence. But if they think again about Norway, they’ll find it achieves the fundamentals that Euroscepticism promised by taking us out of some of the EU’S greatest traps, such as the European Court of Justice and the Common Agricultural Policy. Most importantly, Britain would be out of the political EU project. As a sovereign power, we would be free to “pay to play” within the Single Market. Yes, we’d have to swallow many EU rules, but it would avoid a cliff-edge for businesses and leave us free to sign trade deals outside the continent.

The major political headache would be immigration, because the EEA offers just an emergency brake. But I’m afraid to say that the great sell-out on Britain’s borders has started anyway. Aside from the Government’s generous offer of settled status to around 4 million EU citizens, Mrs May’s customs plan includes a “mobility framework” that will fast become open borders in all but name.

That’s a key point. Mrs May’s plan – which, remember, is currently the only plan on the table – crosses so many red lines that all the old objections to the EEA seem moot. And any compromises that come with EEA membership need only be temporary. We could join it and stay: maybe encourage other EU countries to defect, too. Or, if we don’t like the EEA, we can explore building an alternative, Canadian-style trade deal with the EU in our own sweet time. Exit via the EEA gets us back to how many of us always saw Brexit: not as an outcome but a mechanism. Brexit puts us outside the EU. It’s up to future PMS to decide what kind of country we want to be once our ability to make real policy choices has been restored.

For something like EEA membership to happen, Mrs May would have to go. A serious Brexiteer would have to replace her, someone who could sell the proposal to MPS and the public. MPS will be easier to convince because EEA membership offers pretty much everything so many of them say they want – except for the most hardline of Remainers. And once we are out of the EU, the notion that we should return to it will be as politically unpalatable as bringing back cock fighting. The question will be settled. Britain will be in charge of its own destiny.