London Banter - View Single Post - Will Brexit lead to the abandonment of Crossrail2 and Turning SouthLondon Orange?

[email protected] · July 14th 16, 09:22 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article e.net,
(Mark Goodge) wrote:

On Thu, 14 Jul 2016 10:01:53 +0100, "tim..." put
finger to keyboard and typed:

"Recliner" wrote in message

al-september.org...

So, with Brexit, the first vote should have been to choose between
several (legally possible, viable, rather than fantasy Boris-style)
alternative scenarios. There are at least three, and the population
could have chosen whether they preferred immigration control over the
single market, etc.

In the second round, the most popular of these would then have been
compared with remaining an EU member. That way, everyone voting to
leave would know exactly which option they were mandating the
government to seek.

The problem with this approach is, what happens if the EU won't offer us
the preferred alternative, after we have committed to leave?

There are, broadly speaking, three post-EU options:

1. Membership of the EEA and EFTA (the "Norway" model).
2. Membership of EFTA, but not the EEA (the "Switzerland" model).
3. No European trade bloc membership at all.

Obviously, all of those have different sub-options, and there are more
variants to option 2 than option 1 and many more variants to option 3 than
options 2 and 1. But they do represent three distinct scenarios which
could usefully be voted on.

What also makes them viable as voting choices is that the EU cannot deny
us any of them. EEA membership is available to any member of either the EU
or EFTA. So if we join EFTA, the EU cannot exclude us from the EEA if
that's what we want. The other EFTA members could, theoretically, veto an
application to join them. But that is vanishingly unlikely to happen. The
UK was actually a founder member of EFTA, but subsequently left when we
joined the then EEC. Returning is unlikely to be a problem (in real life,
we have already been told we are welcome to rejoin; that assurance could
easily have been obtained prior to the vote if necessary). And, obviously,
if we choose to remain entirely unaffiliated, then there's nothing the EU
could do about that either.

In real life, I think it's likely we will end up as members of EFTA. The
benefits are useful, and the downsides of belonging are minimal
(membership carries far fewer obligations than EU membership). Whether we
then go for EEA membership will depend, I think, on whether or not we can
negotiate a suitable set of Swiss-style bilateral treaties with the EU or
whether the only way to get what we want is to join the EEA.

Given the tussle currently ongoing between the EU and the Swiss on free
movement we sure ain't going to get that option without free movement to go
with free trade.

--
Colin Rosenstiel