Quote:
Originally Posted by martyh
What's wrong with EFTA ,we can apply to join with effect the day after we exit and there is absolutely no reason why the current members would object, we can take advantage of the free trade between the members and all the other free trade agreements already in place for non members around the world and lets not forget that the EU has a large number of treaties in place with developing countries that currently apply to us as an EU member ,there is no reason at all that we cannot simply continue those arrangements after exit .All we need is access to the single market we do not under any circumstances want to be a member of the single market,it is too restrictive and harms our trade with other countries outside the EU which is growing at a faster rate .
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The EFTA countries bar Switzerland, which has a ton of bilateral agreements that are equivalent and was a founding member of the organisation, are within the EEA. You objected to the EEA
here and emphasised said objection
here and
here.
Your first phrase is to ask what's wrong with EFTA, your last sentence lists basically what you think is wrong with EFTA, given the entire point of it was free trade with the EU's predecessors, which is actually not the case. There is zero evidence I'm aware of that being within the EFTA has harmed the trading relationships its members have.
You didn't mention it but may not like that EFTA membership carries with it membership of the Schengen agreement though, unless the other members are feeling very accommodating of course.
The EFTA nations have
27 free trade agreements as a block and the individual members have bilateral ones too. Iceland, an EEA-EFTA member, was the first state in Europe to sign a free trade agreement with China, and another EFTA member, Switzerland has one. Norway are in the process of negotiating theirs. They are among
relatively few states to have them so evidently EEA/EFTA membership and membership of the Single Market hasn't harmed them too much.
It is incredibly unlikely that we would be admitted to EFTA without offering equivalence of Switzerland's bilateral agreements, or requesting full EEA membership. It's incredibly unlikely we'd receive EEA membership without serious concessions. There's really no point in our being there with that in mind; it's EU membership without the political structures and with a couple of conditions on migration and regulations. The EU would be idiotic to let us in there as the first thing we'd do is start misusing those conditions for political reasons. EFTA nations would regard an application from us without a request to join the EEA pointless. A country wanting to join an institution whose entire purpose is being a collection of nations with membership of the Single Market and common trading policy without wanting to be in the Single Market.
I will repeat something from earlier: the EEA is
not the Customs Union, and hopefully the below will make it all more clear so there's no further confusion.
