**Purist Brexiteers should ignore talk of closer ties with the EU and focus on making the project work before it’s too late**
Few international relationships are as complex, baffling and even contradictory as that between Switzerland and the European Union. The Swiss align themselves with some EU rules but not others; their leaders agreed to join the European Economic Area but the voters turned that down; they made an application to join the EU but later withdrew it; they have over a hundred bilateral deals in force but have been unsuccessfully attempting to negotiate a new framework for the past eight years.
Recent governments in Bern have been preoccupied with how to move matters forward, and it is fair to say that the EU will never want to end up with such a hotchpotch again.
It is highly unlikely that whichever senior member of the British government told The Sunday Times that the UK could seek a “Swiss-style” relationship with Brussels meant it literally, as it is not something anyone would design. But not surprisingly, it was taken as indicating interest in a deal bringing Britain much closer again to the EU.
The net effect of the Swiss arrangements is that payments are made into the EU budget, many single market regulations are adopted and there is freedom of movement. You have only to drive into Switzerland, without needing to stop, to know that you are entering a country more integrated with its neighbours than post-Brexit Britain is able to accept.
The fury with which purist Brexiteers reacted to these comments was predictable, with Nigel Farage fulminating against a betrayal that “will never be forgiven”, and Lord Frost finding it “quite unacceptable”. On the other side of the argument, there were probably business leaders hoping that the decline in trade, expanding balance of payments deficit and stagnating investment since Brexit were starting to move the political dial towards a different accommodation with the EU.
In reality, they were all wasting their public anger or their quiet thoughts. There is no chance whatsoever of Britain making its policy the seeking of a Swiss-style relationship with the EU in the next few years. Rishi Sunak has more than enough on his plate without reopening the devastating Tory divisions that recently consumed his party. The Conservative promise at the last election was to “Get Brexit done”, not to start negotiating it all over again.
On the Labour side, Keir Starmer is absolutely not going to fight the next election on a renegotiation that would alarm red-wall voters and stir their fears of renewed immigration from Europe. The two main parties can only keep their voting coalitions together by trying to make the Boris Johnson version of Brexit work — they are lashed together on this issue in a 2024 general election.
The categoric denial from No 10 that government policy was changing is, therefore, authoritative and credible. It can be expected that the senior member of the government who made the reference to Switzerland will be more circumspect in future. Yet in this little squall of a row we can discern something of the political climate of the future if a success cannot be made out of the momentous decision in 2016 to leave the EU.
Voters felt strongly, on both sides, about how they voted then and have been reluctant to change their opinion. Recent surveys, however, are pointing to more regrets: YouGov recently reported that 56 per cent of voters thought it was a bad idea to leave the EU and only 32 per cent still thought it was a good one.
This does not mean there is a public appetite to stir this divisive issue again. Most people want to see what has been decided finished off and made to work. But if, over the next few years, that 56 per cent rises and the evidence of time suggests that Britain is doing badly, the electoral landscape at a future election, in 2028 or 2029, will be very different. That would be a long enough period for the electorate to come to a judgment and, if that judgment were to be that Brexit had been a serious mistake, for materially closer links with the EU to become a very popular cause. The bad news for hardline Brexiteers is not that they are about to be betrayed. It is that there are about six or seven years left in which to show that the “clean” Brexit on which they insisted can be made to work in the interests of British people. They have used up half their time.
Demonstrating such success is by far the best course for Britain’s political cohesion and economic prospects in this decade, for another bout of agonising introspection about our place in Europe is not an attractive thought.
There are two parts to attempting that success. One is to improve both the atmosphere and the substance of current UK-EU relations. Ministers have sensibly been working on this, starting in September under the short-lived Liz Truss premiership and continuing under Rishi Sunak. Discussions on the vexed matter of the Northern Ireland protocol have become more constructive on both sides.
If the protocol talks were to succeed, the way would be opened to other incremental improvements in relations. This would be nothing like a “Swiss-style” approach, but could, for example, include British participation in the huge research programmes of Horizon Europe. Britain could also offer closer co-operation on foreign and security issues with EU institutions, without sacrificing in any way British independence of action.
The second part is for the government to speed up its efforts to show that Britain can use its freedom to make its own regulations in key parts of the economy. The aim of abolishing all EU rules by the end of next year is really an act of frustration and threatens to throw the good out with the bad. A surgical approach to better rules for business and innovation has been slow to develop.
Progress is now speeding up — the reform of financial services rules known as Solvency II was finally unveiled last week, and the gene-editing bill is before parliament. But changes to EU agricultural policies by introducing an environmental land management scheme need pushing forward decisively. Reform of rules on clinical trials, on which the UK could be a world leader with a better framework than EU directives, is dragging on without decisions from ministers. There are other opportunities, across many sectors, that need to be seized quickly.
For the moment, there is no plot to be like Switzerland that the Conservative or Labour leaderships would entertain. Guardians of Brexit should calm themselves about that. What they should worry about is that the time available to show the Brexit project can work as it stands is not infinite. By the late 2020s, ministerial musings about Switzerland could be much more serious.
You CANNOT polish a turd.
Brexit is a turd.
It needs flushing down the toilet.
[deleted]
>Purist Brexiteers should ignore talk of closer ties with the EU and focus on making the project work before it’s too late.
Cult 1.0.1
The dogma of the cult is beyond question, if the promises of the cult are not delivered it is not the dogma at fault but rather the acolytes because they do not believe hard enough.
‘fears of renewed immigration from europe’.
Legal immigration hasn’t fallen since Brexit. Whilst it’s true there are less people coming from the EU, more people are coming from other countries. And we haven’t yet finalised a deal with India. Rishi can piddle about with 3,000 extra student visas a year but India wants substantial increases in immigration for workers.
If Brexit was about reducing legal immigration it’s already failed.
> The second part is for the government to speed up its efforts to show that Britain can use its freedom to make its own regulations in key parts of the economy. The aim of abolishing all EU rules by the end of next year is really an act of frustration and threatens to throw the good out with the bad. A surgical approach to better rules for business and innovation has been slow to develop.
Almost every regulation the UK changes will make it more difficult for the affected sector to trade with the EU though. It simply makes no sense to create a second, more permissive set of standards and regulations if your economy is already deeply integrated with the EU single market unless your ambition is to cater only to the domestic market. As for making a more strict regulatory framework, that was always possible from within the single market and does not match the ideological makeup of this UK government anyway.
The alternative is to slowly remove that integration but then that will have severe economic costs. There is also no guarantee that massive deregulation will actually help UK manufacturers at all. It will make trade with the EU more difficult, but will it enable the UK to compete on cost with the likes of China, India or even the USA? There is every reason to suspect that bringing down social, fiscal and environmental standards down to a point where you could theoretically compete with any of these will create such a popular backlash that it is politically unsustainable. And that’s even before you calculate in the effects of distance: every analysis I’ve seen seems to indicate that none of the proposed trade deals will offset the loss of single market access. Countries trade more with their neighbours than with other countries at the other side of the world, and in the UK’s neighbourhood there is no other large market than the EU one.
So what you end up with as the most reasonable opion is a set of standards & regulations that will closely match the EU ones, but without the convenience of automatic mutual recognition and frictionless trade. Most of the pain for no apparent gain.
A “surgical approach” is therefore largely pointless, while the blanket deregulatory approach is reckless and destructive. Both are costly.
There are none. We need to REJOIN NOW. We NEED workers
Not having to deal with that French biscuit twat, Macaroon?
Dad said that the butcher sold him some pork chops with kidney in it or some shit, apparently that wasn’t allowed before.
It would appear that the Brexit benefit has finally arrived.
Brexit doesn’t have any benefits ( at least for normal people ). Unfortunately we already took the plunge so now it’s really about damage limitation / making the best of it.
The only real positive that could come out of this is if people stopped believing the lies that the right wing media and politicians constantly pump out.
Right now the UK is a cautionary tale for others to learn from…..
10 comments
**Purist Brexiteers should ignore talk of closer ties with the EU and focus on making the project work before it’s too late**
Few international relationships are as complex, baffling and even contradictory as that between Switzerland and the European Union. The Swiss align themselves with some EU rules but not others; their leaders agreed to join the European Economic Area but the voters turned that down; they made an application to join the EU but later withdrew it; they have over a hundred bilateral deals in force but have been unsuccessfully attempting to negotiate a new framework for the past eight years.
Recent governments in Bern have been preoccupied with how to move matters forward, and it is fair to say that the EU will never want to end up with such a hotchpotch again.
It is highly unlikely that whichever senior member of the British government told The Sunday Times that the UK could seek a “Swiss-style” relationship with Brussels meant it literally, as it is not something anyone would design. But not surprisingly, it was taken as indicating interest in a deal bringing Britain much closer again to the EU.
The net effect of the Swiss arrangements is that payments are made into the EU budget, many single market regulations are adopted and there is freedom of movement. You have only to drive into Switzerland, without needing to stop, to know that you are entering a country more integrated with its neighbours than post-Brexit Britain is able to accept.
The fury with which purist Brexiteers reacted to these comments was predictable, with Nigel Farage fulminating against a betrayal that “will never be forgiven”, and Lord Frost finding it “quite unacceptable”. On the other side of the argument, there were probably business leaders hoping that the decline in trade, expanding balance of payments deficit and stagnating investment since Brexit were starting to move the political dial towards a different accommodation with the EU.
In reality, they were all wasting their public anger or their quiet thoughts. There is no chance whatsoever of Britain making its policy the seeking of a Swiss-style relationship with the EU in the next few years. Rishi Sunak has more than enough on his plate without reopening the devastating Tory divisions that recently consumed his party. The Conservative promise at the last election was to “Get Brexit done”, not to start negotiating it all over again.
On the Labour side, Keir Starmer is absolutely not going to fight the next election on a renegotiation that would alarm red-wall voters and stir their fears of renewed immigration from Europe. The two main parties can only keep their voting coalitions together by trying to make the Boris Johnson version of Brexit work — they are lashed together on this issue in a 2024 general election.
The categoric denial from No 10 that government policy was changing is, therefore, authoritative and credible. It can be expected that the senior member of the government who made the reference to Switzerland will be more circumspect in future. Yet in this little squall of a row we can discern something of the political climate of the future if a success cannot be made out of the momentous decision in 2016 to leave the EU.
Voters felt strongly, on both sides, about how they voted then and have been reluctant to change their opinion. Recent surveys, however, are pointing to more regrets: YouGov recently reported that 56 per cent of voters thought it was a bad idea to leave the EU and only 32 per cent still thought it was a good one.
This does not mean there is a public appetite to stir this divisive issue again. Most people want to see what has been decided finished off and made to work. But if, over the next few years, that 56 per cent rises and the evidence of time suggests that Britain is doing badly, the electoral landscape at a future election, in 2028 or 2029, will be very different. That would be a long enough period for the electorate to come to a judgment and, if that judgment were to be that Brexit had been a serious mistake, for materially closer links with the EU to become a very popular cause. The bad news for hardline Brexiteers is not that they are about to be betrayed. It is that there are about six or seven years left in which to show that the “clean” Brexit on which they insisted can be made to work in the interests of British people. They have used up half their time.
Demonstrating such success is by far the best course for Britain’s political cohesion and economic prospects in this decade, for another bout of agonising introspection about our place in Europe is not an attractive thought.
There are two parts to attempting that success. One is to improve both the atmosphere and the substance of current UK-EU relations. Ministers have sensibly been working on this, starting in September under the short-lived Liz Truss premiership and continuing under Rishi Sunak. Discussions on the vexed matter of the Northern Ireland protocol have become more constructive on both sides.
If the protocol talks were to succeed, the way would be opened to other incremental improvements in relations. This would be nothing like a “Swiss-style” approach, but could, for example, include British participation in the huge research programmes of Horizon Europe. Britain could also offer closer co-operation on foreign and security issues with EU institutions, without sacrificing in any way British independence of action.
The second part is for the government to speed up its efforts to show that Britain can use its freedom to make its own regulations in key parts of the economy. The aim of abolishing all EU rules by the end of next year is really an act of frustration and threatens to throw the good out with the bad. A surgical approach to better rules for business and innovation has been slow to develop.
Progress is now speeding up — the reform of financial services rules known as Solvency II was finally unveiled last week, and the gene-editing bill is before parliament. But changes to EU agricultural policies by introducing an environmental land management scheme need pushing forward decisively. Reform of rules on clinical trials, on which the UK could be a world leader with a better framework than EU directives, is dragging on without decisions from ministers. There are other opportunities, across many sectors, that need to be seized quickly.
For the moment, there is no plot to be like Switzerland that the Conservative or Labour leaderships would entertain. Guardians of Brexit should calm themselves about that. What they should worry about is that the time available to show the Brexit project can work as it stands is not infinite. By the late 2020s, ministerial musings about Switzerland could be much more serious.
You CANNOT polish a turd.
Brexit is a turd.
It needs flushing down the toilet.
[deleted]
>Purist Brexiteers should ignore talk of closer ties with the EU and focus on making the project work before it’s too late.
Cult 1.0.1
The dogma of the cult is beyond question, if the promises of the cult are not delivered it is not the dogma at fault but rather the acolytes because they do not believe hard enough.
‘fears of renewed immigration from europe’.
Legal immigration hasn’t fallen since Brexit. Whilst it’s true there are less people coming from the EU, more people are coming from other countries. And we haven’t yet finalised a deal with India. Rishi can piddle about with 3,000 extra student visas a year but India wants substantial increases in immigration for workers.
If Brexit was about reducing legal immigration it’s already failed.
> The second part is for the government to speed up its efforts to show that Britain can use its freedom to make its own regulations in key parts of the economy. The aim of abolishing all EU rules by the end of next year is really an act of frustration and threatens to throw the good out with the bad. A surgical approach to better rules for business and innovation has been slow to develop.
Almost every regulation the UK changes will make it more difficult for the affected sector to trade with the EU though. It simply makes no sense to create a second, more permissive set of standards and regulations if your economy is already deeply integrated with the EU single market unless your ambition is to cater only to the domestic market. As for making a more strict regulatory framework, that was always possible from within the single market and does not match the ideological makeup of this UK government anyway.
The alternative is to slowly remove that integration but then that will have severe economic costs. There is also no guarantee that massive deregulation will actually help UK manufacturers at all. It will make trade with the EU more difficult, but will it enable the UK to compete on cost with the likes of China, India or even the USA? There is every reason to suspect that bringing down social, fiscal and environmental standards down to a point where you could theoretically compete with any of these will create such a popular backlash that it is politically unsustainable. And that’s even before you calculate in the effects of distance: every analysis I’ve seen seems to indicate that none of the proposed trade deals will offset the loss of single market access. Countries trade more with their neighbours than with other countries at the other side of the world, and in the UK’s neighbourhood there is no other large market than the EU one.
So what you end up with as the most reasonable opion is a set of standards & regulations that will closely match the EU ones, but without the convenience of automatic mutual recognition and frictionless trade. Most of the pain for no apparent gain.
A “surgical approach” is therefore largely pointless, while the blanket deregulatory approach is reckless and destructive. Both are costly.
There are none. We need to REJOIN NOW. We NEED workers
Not having to deal with that French biscuit twat, Macaroon?
Dad said that the butcher sold him some pork chops with kidney in it or some shit, apparently that wasn’t allowed before.
It would appear that the Brexit benefit has finally arrived.
Brexit doesn’t have any benefits ( at least for normal people ). Unfortunately we already took the plunge so now it’s really about damage limitation / making the best of it.
The only real positive that could come out of this is if people stopped believing the lies that the right wing media and politicians constantly pump out.
Right now the UK is a cautionary tale for others to learn from…..