Douglas Carswell's Blog

After the EU

"But what would it be like outside the EU?" is a question I find I get asked increasingly often.

Daniel Hannan's new book – A Doomed Marriage: Britain and Europe – helps provide us with some answers.

Looking back, it is increasingly clear that Britain's EU membership has been a historic mistake.  When we joined, as Hannan puts it, "Western Europe ... accounted for 38 percent of world GDP. In 2010, that figure was 24 per cent. In 2020, it will be 15 per cent .... Far from joining a growing and prosperous free trade area, the United Kingdom confined herself in a cramped and declining customs union".

While we have been boxed in to a continent beset by man-made folly and failure, the Anglo sphere beyond has forged ahead.

So how best to realign ourselves with the rest of the world?

Those opposed to the UK's withdrawal from the EU, like the think tank Open Europe, are often keen to tell us that life outside the EU would mean being like Norway. We would, they say, have to comply with Euro rules, yet have no say in their drafting.

Given that Norway's per capita GDP is considerably higher than ours, and that Norway manages to do far more trade with the EU from outside than we do from within, I can think of worse things than being "like Norway".

Yet it is absurd to suggest that outside the EU, Britain would adopt the same terms as Norway has. Switzerland has managed to negotiate access to EU markets, without having to carry the costs of membership. "Switzerland is" Hannan explains "free to sign trade accords with third countries". Her relationship with the EU does not prevent her from forging closer ties with the world beyond - where the growth is.

Britain can and should, argues Hannan, seek a similar arrangement.  If those British diplomats who do all the negotiating on our behalf were made properly accountable to us for the deals they strike, such arrangements would be perfectly possible.  Jon Cunliffe and Britain's UKREP officials in Brussels ought to be made to read this book.

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