People pushing for the so-called “Norway Plus” Brexit model if, as expected, the government’s Brexit deal is defeated come in two types.
The honest ones accept that the package would involve not just full access to the single market but the customs union, free movement, budget payments and rule-taking. Forever. Even if one was prepared to put up with the blow to national pride from Britain being turned into a total political eunuch, there’s no chance that MPs will back it.
The Labour front bench will rightly whip against such a package. So will the Tories front bench. The number of backbenchers in either party who will be prepared to support it is small. So it is a dead duck.
Then there is the other group of “Norway Plus” advocates – the sneaky ones. They pretend we can have full access to the single market but pull out of the customs union after a couple of years. They also say we won’t need full free movement of people and our payments to the EU can be much smaller than our current fee.
If such a package was available, it might be appealing to some MPs – even though it would still be against the national interest to be turned into a passive rule-taker. But the sneaky version of Norway Plus is another cake-and-eat-it mirage. It doesn’t exist, for the following reasons.
The Irish border
The single market on its own will not keep the Irish border open. You need the customs union as well for that. There’s no way the EU would agree a single market-only deal.
Free movement of people
The idea that the EU would give us anything more on free movement if we quit the EU but stay in the single market than we could get as a full member is also for the birds.
There are, of course, already things we can do to control free movement while staying in the EU, such as registering EU citizens when they settle here. And the EU could well agree further reforms to the way free movement operates – just as it tightened up the rules on so-called posted workers earlier this year.
Payments to the EU
It’s also hard to see our membership fee falling much, if at all, under Norway Plus. Norway already pays roughly the same per capita as we do on a net basis, and it doesn’t have access to the full range of the EU non-economic programmes that the government wants to stay in. What’s more, if we quit the EU, we’d probably lose the rebate on our membership fee that Margaret Thatcher famously negotiated. If so, we could even end up paying more than we do now.
Farming
The sneaky advocates of Norway Plus also pretend that we can pull out of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). It’s much more likely that we will end up trapped in something like both but without the ability to influence them any longer.
The Norway Plus advocates point out that Norway isn’t in either the CFP or CAP. That’s true. But Norway is only in the single market, not the customs union. It’s not in the “plus” part of Norway Plus.
Once you put the single market and customs union together, you have totally open borders between the UK and the EU. But then our farming produce is free to go to the rest of the EU without any controls at all (which Norway’s produce can’t). There’s no way that the EU will allow this unless we agree not to subsidise our farmers any more than it subsidises theirs.
We could, of course, cut subsidies to agriculture. But with totally open borders, our farming industry would then face unfair competition from EU farmers. The only sensible approach would be to mimic the CAP’s subsidy regime without a vote on it. Given that we’ve played a noble role in reforming the CAP over the past four decades – getting rid of those wine lakes and butter mountains – how is that in the national interest?
Fish
Similarly, the EU has made clear that it wants us to agree the existing quota regime for fishing before we get any long-term trade deal. That would apply to Norway Plus as much as the prime minister’s plan. So we’d be in a form of the CFP but without a vote.
How would that be in the national interest? People seem to forget that we’ve helped reform the CFP so fish stocks are more sustainable and dead fish aren’t thrown back in the sea if quotas are exceeded.
No patriot should have any truck with the honest form of Norway Plus. And no honest politician should have any truck with the sneaky version. The Brexit debate has been polluted by too much dishonesty already.
