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“Of course, Britain could survive outside the EU...
We could probably get access to the single market as Norway and Switzerland
do.”
Prime Minister Tony Blair
The EU effectively presents us with a set menu. It tells us that in order to have the free trade we want, we have to put up with all the disadvantages of EU membership – the massive direct and indirect costs, the loss of democracy, the needless interference in matters that are nothing to do with trade, the tariff barriers preventing free trade with the rest of the world etc.
Fortunately, this is not true. The four members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) – Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein – can trade with EU members as freely as EU members can trade with each other. But they retain their independence, pay only a token contribution to the EU budget (as against Britain's £13.9 billion per year) and can avoid insane schemes like the CAP. They also don't have to watch their natural resources turned into a "common European resource" – the desire to protect their fish stocks from this fate is one of the main reasons Norway has stayed out of the EU. And they can trade as freely with the rest of the world as they like.
Not surprisingly this has led to their being more prosperous than EU members, even if one only compares them to the 15 Western European countries that belonged to the EU before the 2004 enlargement.
What's more, these four countries export twice as much per capita to the EU from outside it as Britain does from within. So much for membership being essential for our trade interests.
So why don't EU countries leave and join EFTA?
The Europhile answer to this question is the old canard that EFTA countries
have to absorb EU legislation without having any say in framing it, whereas
belonging to the EU gets them a seat at the table so they can stand up
for their own interests. There are two obvious problems with this argument.
Firstly, there are currently 27 EU member states – if the EFTA countries joined as well, there would be 31. This would give each state a 1/31 voice in any new legislation, hardly enough to guarantee that it will be designed to suit them when there are 30 competing interests.
In any case, the legislation concerned is entirely in the very narrow area of trading standards. If you want to sell your products to the EU, they must meet EU standards, just as they must meet American standards if you want to sell them there. Does anyone argue that Britain should become the 51st state of America just so that we can influence American trading standards to suit our exporters?
No, the real reason is that EFTA is not such a bonanza for politicians as the EU. The EFTA Surveillance Authority employs a fewer than 50 staff – no that's not a misprint, that's fifty – compared to the 18,000 who work at the European Commission, to say nothing of all the other branches of the EU. The disparity should give you some idea of how much more the EU is doing than simply enabling free trade as EFTA does.
MEPs receive generous salaries, expense payments which bear no relation to expenses actually incurred (and which in any case are never audited) and bonuses including a daily "attendance allowance" merely for showing up at the European Parliament – pretty much an essential part of the job, one might have thought. The European Commission provides a more than comfortable retirement for politicians who have reached the end of their useful life in national politics – Britain's Commissioners have included Neil Kinnock, Chris Patten and currently Peter Mandelson, a man twice found too dishonest to hold ministerial office in Britain.
For all these reasons – and perhaps an instinct for good old-fashioned empire building – the EU will always be more attractive to career-minded politicians than EFTA. Norway's politicians have several times tried to take their country into the EU. Each time the people of Norway have had the sense to vote no.
See Daniel Hannan's The Case for EFTA for more details, or view The Case to Leave, a film produced by the Bruges Group (large file – broadband connections only. Requires Windows Media Viewer.)