Norway plan leads to more problems than it solves

Prediction is a dangerous game these days, and I’m no thrill-seeker, but it appears that the Prime Minister has little chance of getting her Brexit deal through Parliament. So what then?

Cabinet ministers are said to be in discussions about a Norway-style deal, which would see Britain stay in the EU single market via the European Economic Area (EEA). There is now, apparently, a majority in the Commons for the UK to remain a member of the EEA. This will come as news to members of the House of Lords, whose proposed amendment to the Withdrawal Act enacted this summer, calling for it to be “a negotiating objective for the UK to remain in the EEA”, was rejected by MPs by 201 votes.

As recently as June, the parliamentary consensus was that in order for both the Conservatives and Labour to be seen to be respecting the referendum result, Brexit would have to mean taking the UK out of both the single market and the customs union. That is the sovereignty argument – that, post-Brexit, it should be in Westminster and not Brussels that control over our laws, money and borders would lie.

The Norway option may seem marginally preferable to Theresa May’s deal if it means being outside the customs union (although in the so-called Norway-plus solution, Britain would stay in that, too). Interestingly, according to the Political Declaration, the EU no longer dismisses exploring technical solutions to the Irish border problem as “magical thinking”.

But Brexiteers should think carefully before signing up to the single market.

EEA membership would mean surrendering control of our services sector, which makes up about 80 per cent of the UK economy, to the EU. We might have control over our trade policy, being outside the customs union, but would still be rule-takers on the mainstay of our economy.

It would therefore not be taking back control of either our borders or our laws, as even the arch-Remainer MP Vicky Ford has pointed out: Norway has no say on EU laws (but must comply and pay for the privilege). A Lords report from December 2016 echoed this, finding: “Despite being subject to three quarters of EU legislation, non-EU EEA states have little or no influence over the preparation and adoption of EU law.”

It may be tempting to accept any old deal just to end the perennial footdragging of the powers that be, but let’s be very clear: Mrs May’s deal, or any alternative where

What they mustn’t do is pretend this is what we voted for

leaving the EU also means leaving control of our laws, money and borders with Brussels, is not Brexit.

If the deal is defeated, Brexiteers would be wise to hold their nerve instead of falling in behind a Norway option.

If our leaders are of the opinion that we simply cannot leave the EU because Michel Barnier’s team has outwitted us in every step of the negotiation process, starting from the sequencing agreement, then they need to be honest about it, and let history judge them.

What they mustn’t do is insult our intelligence and pretend that this is what we voted for. FOLLOW Dia Chakravarty on Twitter @DiaChakravarty;

at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

It’s all going according to plan. The great establishment stitch-up is no longer even bothering to stay undercover, having recruited its most formidable forces – the Bank of England and the supposedly neutral agents of the Treasury – in its last desperate moves. Theresa May has now explicitly ruled out all the plausible options for a Plan B, including a Norway model that was gathering steam at an alarming pace, allegedly leaving only “no deal” as an alternative to her wildly unpopular proposal. And, in this last-ditch battle, no deal (invariably described by the BBC as “crashing out”) is getting the full horror-show treatment.

So that’s it: the only hands still in play are supposed to be Brexit in Name Only (BRINO) or falling off the cliff into no deal. In fact, Donald Tusk gave the game away at the G20 on Friday by admitting that there was, in fact, a third option: No Brexit – the conspirators’ real destination of choice – was still in the game. Like an exasperated parent losing patience with a hesitating child, he put it bluntly: mess us around for too long and we’ll see to it that you don’t get out – ever.

Meanwhile, back in Westminster, it is unclear whether the Prime Minister can unilaterally prevent Parliament from proposing or endorsing (with legal force) any other course, but even if constitutional arrangements do permit it, there would be profound moral and political repugnance at such an autocratic exercise of power by the executive.

This is very dangerous ground indeed. The chief actors in the drama must know this, and yet they are clearly prepared to take quite extraordinary risks with the integrity of British institutions and the conscientious determination of the electorate. We can only assume that there is even more at stake for them personally – or that they hold British parliamentary democracy in even greater contempt – than we had thought.

Maybe we should not be too surprised. There is something truly bizarre about this entire chapter in British history. I cannot remember any prime minister or any elected government – however unpopular or discredited – being so brazenly immune to argument, so defiantly resistant to the reality of its own weakness, as this one, which is particularly strange since it is a minority government that owes its viability to an arrangement with another party. (You can disregard the reasonably respectable Tory opinion poll ratings: they are simply a consequence of the collapse of Ukip, which leaves Brexit supporters with no alternative, and are probably as much as anything a reflection of voters’ support for Brexiteer MPs, who seem to be making all the running.)

This whole debacle is now becoming bound up with the personality of the Prime Minister herself. Embattled leaders generally go down fighting and almost never admit – even long after the fact – that their policies were mistaken. But they usually feel obliged (this being a democracy) to defend their position with arguments that are based on a process of reason and conscious thought. What is entirely new is the surreal performance we are now getting from Mrs May. She does not discuss possibilities or critique her opponents’ views. She does not even defend, in the proper sense of the word, her position. Representing what is far and away the most important national decision of our lifetimes, she presents a blank reiteration of mindless formulas in a way that seems positively sinister.

I saw a televised encounter some time during this last interminable week in which a reporter asked her a question to which she gave the predictable unsatisfactory reply. He then followed up with a further, more detailed question – to which she replied with the very same words as she had to his first question. And when I say the same words, I mean exactly the same words, which were accompanied by exactly the same facial expressions.

I once heard a police detective say that if a witness’s description of an event was absolutely identical every time he told it, it gave grounds for suspicion. When people are genuinely recollecting, or sincerely arguing, their accounts are spontaneous, not memorised or rehearsed. I wonder if Mrs May and her minders realise how much the peculiarly pre-scripted lack of variation in her speech itself gives rise to distrust. Combined with an utter refusal to address even reasonable dissent, it has surely increased the public animosity to her take-it-or-leave-it “deal”.

When she does improvise, of

Mrs May does not even properly defend her position. She presents a blank reiteration of mindless formulas in a way that seems positively sinister

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion course, the results can be disastrous. Last Friday she claimed, in an interview with Sky News, both that she “can’t see an alternative” (to her deal) and that “nobody has put up an alternative”, which are quite different things. Once this kind of popular suspicion takes root, it is difficult to supplant.

There is now a widespread sense, even among non-Brexiteers, that there is something seriously not right about this: that the country’s elected leader is being directed (and given lines to speak) by people who are unaccountable and largely unknown to the public, for unfathomable reasons. In the end, that pernicious mistrust will be as corrosive to faith in democracy as any possible outcome of the Brexit process.

The sad fact is that the concessions from the EU leaders for which Mrs May so repeatedly claims credit are not unlike the reforms that Brussels might have given to David Cameron when he pleaded for something plausible that he could offer to what he saw as a baying mob at home. Had it been done back then, the referendum might have gone another way. But it’s too late now. The British population has been patronised, insulted and openly despised by both the EU and its own governing class, and there is no coming back from that.

If the government ignores the national anger, and if a pusillanimous Parliament goes along too, the damage will last for a generation. Not forever – because nothing in politics lasts forever – but for long enough to require a very different settlement between government and people. Whoever follows Mrs May into power will have to speak and argue a lot better than she does.