I just had a bit of a head scratching moment.<\/p>\n
I knew that Norway wasn't EU, but EFTA\/EEA. So, I was wondering what the difference was.<\/p>\n
Lo and behold, Norway is free to make trade deals with other countries while being in the single market.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
It seems like the two biggest issues were 1) the freedom to strike trade deals with whomever and 2) ending freedom of movement.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
At the core, then, it was simply about keeping \"THEM\" out. How repugnant.<\/p>\n
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More here: <\/p>\n
Brexit - reddit<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 Continue reading