Brexit – reddit

I just had a bit of a head scratching moment.

I knew that Norway wasn't EU, but EFTA/EEA. So, I was wondering what the difference was.

Lo and behold, Norway is free to make trade deals with other countries while being in the single market.

The current mess with the NI protocol (and everything else) could have been averted assuming the UK were admitted to EFTA (not a given, but not far-fetched).

It seems like the two biggest issues were 1) the freedom to strike trade deals with whomever and 2) ending freedom of movement.

I cannot recall a single Brexit supporter being able to give a single example of which EU laws they wanted to see abolished, so I count "Sovereignty" as simply anti-freedom of movement and some nonsense about bananas. Besides, any trade >DEAL< involves voluntarily giving up the sovereign ability to impose tariffs on something, so there's no difference between the single market and a deal with Australia beyond the degree of cooperation.

So, really, the UK could have had its international trade deals AND maintained full access to the single market if it was willing to accept FoM.

At the core, then, it was simply about keeping "THEM" out. How repugnant.

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Brexit - reddit