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What you can pick up in Iceland

David Rennie

Wednesday, 13th September 2006

British Eurosceptics would love us to leave the EU and join Iceland in Efta. But, David Rennie reports, it is not clear that we would be welcome

It is no mystery why British Eurosceptics love Iceland. A bracing visit to Reykjavik is all it takes to see what the European Union could have been, if Brussels had stuck to the path of free trade and shunned ever closer union. Like pilgrims to a shrine, British Tories come to observe how Iceland enjoys the best of all worlds, thanks to its membership of the European Free Trade Association and — equally vitally — its stubborn non-membership of the EU.

Iceland enjoys the great prize Brussels has to offer: access to the EU single market. Yet Iceland is not a member of the Common Agricultural Policy. Iceland can strike its own free trade agreements with the rest of the world — unlike Britain.

Reykjavik can veto the screeds of EU laws and directives that come with single-market membership. (The veto has never been used. Instead Iceland secures occasional exemptions on the grounds that it is so small, and so far from the rest of the single marketplace.)

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