Nick Boles’ Common Market 2.0 plan for Brexit has an awful lot going for it: it would honour the instruction of the British people to leave the European Union, while minimising the economic cost of that decision by keeping the UK largely within the Single Market.
And the fact that the previous paragraph will drive some people into a frenzy of rage says quite a lot about those people, and even more about the Brexit debate as a whole.
In fact, the story of Common Market 2.0 is the story of Brexit. It captures many of the key disasters of this national debacle and highlights the way in which people on all sides have colluded to destroy a sensible centre where a workable Brexit compromise might have been built.
There is guilt on all sides here, but we will start with the Brexiteers who are latterly realising that their purism may yet capsize their entire project. Today, Mr Boles is a hate-figure to some Leavers and his plan regarded as anathema, the most treacherous of betrayals of the great and pure Brexit that we are repeatedly told the British electorate demanded at the referendum.
This is, of course, cobblers. Common Market 2.0, previously known as Norway Plus, is perfectly consistent with the version of Brexit on offer at the referendum, and indeed more consistent with the version of our exit set out by some at the time than the fantasies currently being peddled. It’s hard to remember now but back in the slightly surreal summer of 2016, a Norwegian Brexit was perfectly possible. It was certainly where a lot of people thought Boris Johnson was heading. In his first Telegraph column after the referendum, he described Brexit thus:
“British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down. As the German equivalent of the CBI – the BDI – has very sensibly reminded us, there will continue to be free trade, and access to the single market….. “The only change – and it will not come in any great rush – is that the UK will extricate itself from the EU’s extraordinary and opaque system of legislation.”
Nadine Dorries, meanwhile, was explicit about her preference for the “Norway model”.
Such Tories were arguably following the argument made over many years by Dan Hannan, who has consistently set out what he sees as the virtues of an exit based on (but not precisely duplicating) the Norwegian relationship with the EU.
The way Brexiteers have shifted the definition of an acceptable Brexit further and further away from Norway and out into the deep blue sea of No Deal is arguably the defining movement of the years since 2016. Time and again, Brexiteers could have sealed British exit in law, but time and again they refused to do so because the exit in question failed to meet the new and ever-higher standard they set for it.
The purist Leavers are not wholly to blame here, however. The biggest single blow, the one that really shattered the nascent Norwegian compromise of the summer of 2016, was delivered by someone who voted Remain: Theresa May. Her “red lines” for Brexit, first sketched out at the Conservative conference in October 2016, set the first condition of Brexit as an outright end to EU free movement, something that would require departure from the Single Market.
In January 2017 at Lancaster House, she made it explicit:
“We do not seek membership of the Single Market. Instead we seek the greatest possible access to it through a new, comprehensive, bold and ambitious free trade agreement.”
Later that year, of course, she put her version of Brexit to the British electorate in a general election. That general election result should have put Norway and the single market back on the table. That was certainly what I hoped and expected would happen, when I wrote here on 19 June 2017:
“Time to start preparing the electorate for some tough but necessary compromises. “EFTA membership would not be simple or easy or cheap. It would, as so often in politics, very likely be the least bad choice on offer. But for all its flaws, it would still be a lot better than falling out of the EU onto the stony ground of the WTO rules. “… averting disaster in 2019 should be the priority, and that surely means EFTA, or something that looks a lot like it.”
Why didn’t that happen? There are several reasons, many of them to do with courage. A Norwegian Brexit is and always has been harder to sell to voters than fantasies of sovereignty and freedom. It involves compromises and costs. Advocating it entails addressing the misperceptions and misunderstandings held by many voters, at potential political cost: Mr Boles has bravely done so, and may well lose his seat in the Commons as a result of the hostility he faces from some Tory members.
Part of that courage is needed to tackle the single, central fact of the Brexit story: immigration. No one talks about immigration any more, but we must never forget its essential role in both the decision to hold the referendum and the outcome. Simply, anyone who now tells you Brexit was nothing to do with immigration is trying to sell you something that you should not buy.
Too many politicians believed that British opposition to immigration was unchangeable, the immovable rock on which all Brexit policy must be based. Too many politicians were wrong. Today, poll after poll confirms that voters were open to argument on immigration: some have indeed changed their minds on the issue.
How many? Maybe enough to make a form of Brexit that involved some form of free movement of labour viable as a political offer. But too many politicians who understood perfectly well the economic case for a liberal immigration policy and the economic need to remain in the Single Market failed to make the risky, complicated argument for Norway after the 2017 election. If they had, we might never have reached the current national humiliation.
That wasn’t the only factor that counted against Norway though. Just as the purist Leavers have sought to destroy the centre on Brexit, so too have some of my fellow Remainers.
The People’s Vote campaign is possibly the best-funded but least effective campaign British politics has seen in recent years, churning out poll after poll showing that, no, actually, most people haven’t changed their minds and don’t really want a second referendum, all while adamantly refusing to say what the question would be in such a referendum. So poorly has the campaign gone that last month PV was left pleading with MPs not to put a second referendum to a vote, because the proposition would be defeated.
Yet PV has succeeded in one of its lesser aims: undermining a Norwegian compromise. After all, a viable Brexit plan like Mr Boles’ also fails the Remainer purity test. In December, PV launched an all-out attack on the plan that played into the narrative of the arch-Leavers by claiming “the [Boles] proposal cannot fulfil the promises made for Brexit”. Quite why PV colluded with the unicorn-hunters is a matter for speculation, but the effect was to narrow the Brexit debate. Yes, that has helped make revocation more of a possibility, but it has also left Britain less than two weeks from a no-deal exit that can only be averted by unanimous decision of the EU27. If we do crash out next week — and I think the chance of that is higher than many people at Westminster realise — then Remainers who sought to destroy a Norwegian compromise will have to take a share of the blame. Leavers are not the only ones in this mess who have made their idea of perfection into the enemy of the good.
Common Market 2.0 still looks unlikely to prevail in the end: it’s hard to see how a government that would honour the required form of the Political Declaration could be formed; there are purist Tory Brexiteers who would rather see a Tory government fall rather than pursue the policy. And it would face the continued hostility of the purist Remainers, also hellbent on absolute victory and determined not to compromise. And that, of course, is its greatest virtue.
Yes, a Norwegian deal would be difficult and imperfect, but look at the list of people most intent on stopping it: any plan with enemies like that must be worth a second look.
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