The simple answer is yes. Provided we had stayed in the single market and had a customs union with the European Union it would have. The so-called Norway plus option. Norway is in the single market but they do not have a customs union with the EU. The EU’s customs union is for members only, but we can negotiate our own customs union with the EU.
This would make us rule takers but not rule makers as Farage once put it. But that is unavoidable, every country bordering the EU comes under their sphere of influence, even one as big as Russia.
The leave voters would, of course, cry foul at such an option, we need however to remember that many people who should have been entitled to vote were excluded. If that had not been the case we can be sure that the vote would have been a 50/50 split for leaving or staying.
If we had stayed in the single market I for one would have accepted the result and not become a political campaigner. We were told that leaving the single market was not going to be on the cards by more than one of the leave campaigners. Things went wrong because of Theresa May's “red lines” which were then taken to their logical conclusion by our present Government.
Ending freedom of movement was one of the main aims of many leave voters. With only half the electorate voting for leave, they should have accepted a compromise. We all know what happened, the extremists kept putting pressure on the Government until they became the Government and since then chaos has ensued. They are so desperate to have total independence from the EU that many babies have been thrown out with the bathwater. Trade deals, cooperation in science, human rights, you name it we have or are in the process of losing it. The possibility of our being a successful nation outside of the EU has been trashed. All for the sake of an unrealistic unworkable xenophobic political doctrine.
The country is now experiencing an unprecedented decline that will have long term consequences for generations to come. And we have nowhere reached rock bottom yet. After only nine months of Brexit, everything is falling apart. They can not even implement the full customs checks at the UK/EU border because we will run out of food if they do and shortages are beginning to become a problem even without them. Because of this EU imports have gone up while our exports to the EU where the full customs requirements are being made have gone down.
This hardly helps our balance of payments, we are becoming a bankrupted isolationist country full of miserable destitute people living below the poverty line. When we could have had independence without losing everything the EU had to offer.
Can our decline be reversed?
If we rejoin the single market and negotiate a customs union it can. We will probably not make up the lost ground for a long time to come but our decline can be stopped by doing this. For the longer term, I would identify the problem as being that we do not have a constitution. Our system relies on our elected leaders having some integrity. That was always taken for granted by past generations but it has now been taken advantage of by unscrupulous power-grabbing charlatans.
Where this will all end is unknown and unknowable. For sure things will continue to go downhill for the time being. In the end, however, the people will rise up either on the streets or at the ballot box, or both. Things will change but we are still in for a bumpy ride for the foreseeable future.
Philip Notley
progressiveeuropeanparty@gmail.com
