Squaring the immigration and market access circle - the fundamental question

BoJo, Steven Hammond the foreign secretary, Sajid Javad the business secretary as well as other leading conservatives and major companies seem to be emphasising how important it is for the UK to retain access to the single market.  Let's speculate that this is the basis for the future negotiations. The EU is unlikely to give us that unless we accept freedom of movement of people, goods, services and capital as well as making contributions to the budget.  This is the Norway option so we know it or something close to it is available.




Firstly, I don't believe money would be a problem, in spite of what the leave campaign's bus said. The £350m per week is untrue anyway and the net figure is really about £7 Bn per year. Our economy is worth about £2300 Bn, so our contribution at around 0.3% of GDP is nothing compared to the benefits. Norway already does this anyway.

This leaves the main sticking point, freedom of movement of people. If we can persuade the EU to give a little bit on freedom of movement of people there is probably the makings of a deal.  Also, Norway incorporates about 75% of EU law into domestic law so there would be a small reduction in regulation.  However, we would have little or no say into the 75% of new laws - we would have to accept them without question.

The problem for the new government is this.  How are the British public going to react to such a deal?  Is the benefit worth all the years of uncertainty and negotiating effort if the end result is that we are back to more or less where we are now with perhaps 90-95% of the existing level of free movement and paying more money into the budget because we would lose our rebate, plus accepting 75% of the EU regulations and having no say in what goes on. We would have deal that looks remarkably like full membership (i.e. the status quo) but reduces our influence to zero? Would the Daily Mail, Sun and Telegraph support it? Personally, I doubt it.  But as the two year deadline approaches we might be sweating a bit since the EU is far more able to withstand the shock of operating under WTO rules (i.e with tariffs) and we may be forced to accept a bad deal. The stakes are very high.