sunlight wrote:How do countries such as Norway go on, whom arent in the EU go on? What is the script there, in simple terms? And can the UK become the same as Norway?
Re the second question:
It’s complex.
We were a founder member of EFTA but later joined the EU and signed up to Schengen (free movement)
As an EFTA member Norway has free trade agreement with the EU (no tariffs either way) And is free to make independent agreements with other countries around the world - but it also voluntarily signed up to Schengen.
Switzerland- another EFTA country - didn’t sign up to Schengen and has a raft of individual agreements with EU countries and others.
Even some EU states are not signed up to Schengen eg Bulgaria but they will have to eventually.
Ireland has signed up to free movement but has retained an opt out clause.
So there are many options and different ways of securing a deal with the EU but if you remember back in 2016 we were in the grip of the fear of terrorist attack. We could have done several things eg chuck a billion or so at our security and intelligence services and enforce the detention powers we already had in the EU rigorously.
But at the height of the xenophobic frenzy we went for a referendum as the Tory owned media especially Murdoch who hates the EU for not bending to his will, blamed the EU - rather than our own government who were clearly negligent - and were actually cutting departmental expenditure instead of increasing in response to what in the scheme of things was a minor threat and could have been quashed with investment and increased resources.
So when it came round to discussing the “Norway model” (which the leave campaign used to sell the idea that Brexit would be something like that) the concept of free movement was off the table.
So it is a misconception that free trade cannot be achieved without free movement - but it would be a lot easier to achieve if we accept free movement AND massively boost our intelligence and security services which tbh we’ll probably end up doing anyway.
That would make us like Norway.
Obviously the most effective way of getting the best trade deals, negotiating new ones and ensuring national security would have been to stay in the EU, boost security spending and work with our partners for continuous improvement but we’ve flushed that away now.
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