Just join the EEA already, you’d get all the free trade advantages but could keep 100% of your own internal politics. How THAT is not palatable to UK politicians is beyond me.
Because freedom of trade with the EU always comes as a package deal with freedom of movement, which the xenophobes in London find unacceptable.
The xenophobes are mostly outside of London. In London, 60% of voters wanted to remain in the EU. But in the UK overall, 52% of voters wanted to leave the EU.
But yes I think the EEA would be too politically risky at the moment. The EU Customs Union might be more realistic (Turkey is part of this) but I think the current UK government don’t even want to do that. They don’t want to lose the votes of people who wanted Brexit.
I meant the politicians, who do typically sit at the capital. Of course there might be a xenophobic sentiment in the population, but the political elites can somewhat steer the popular sentiment. The current political meta (not only in the UK, but unfortunately pretty much worldwide) is to reinforce xenophobic tendencies in order to have an easy scapegoat in “them evil foreigners™” for things going wrong due to the political establishment and their benefactors in “the economy™” benefiting from things going wrong for ordinary people.
I don’t think xenophobia is motivating Labour to stay clear of the EU at the moment… I think it’s just political reality, unfortunately. There are quite a few working class people who traditionally vote for Labour, but they also backed Brexit, and Labour doesn’t want to lose those voters to the Conservatives or Reform.
Maybe I’m wrong but that’s my perception.
It’s a positive feedback loop. Some voters are xenophobes, party caters to the xenophobes by perpetuating xenophobe fairy tales, more voters become xenophobes from hearing those fairy tales.
Let Canada join in too.
With the threats from the US, Canada could use some closer ties to Europe too. There are already historic ties to the UK that have weakened over the last few decades.
IMO there’s some bad blood between the UK and the EU. The EU probably wouldn’t want to just take the UK back after Brexit. And, from the point of view of the UK, the Brexit voters are still out there, and if the EU makes re-entry too humiliating, they’d raise a stink.
But, if you include Canada it’s no longer just the UK rejoining the EU. It can be a new thing, the Canada-UK-EU pact: CUE. Conservatives who were pro-Brexit might be mollified because they tend to be more likely to be monarchists, and this can be seen as strengthening ties between two countries where Charles is the head of state. It also gives Canada and the UK a bit more bargaining power together than if they both tried to strengthen ties to the EU separately.
My guess is that if this allowed for freer movement of people and media, Quebec would be happy to have closer ties to France, Belgium, Switzerland and the other places in Europe where French is spoken.
We all should be working together to protect ourselves from Trump. And, even if the US survives Trump and elects someone sane as president in 4 years, recent history has shown that the US just isn’t a reliable partner anymore. It’s just too volatile and chaotic. Given the proximity, Canada will inevitably have strong ties to the US, but there needs to be some “plan B”.
I’m not convinced the EU is monolithic enough for bad blood to matter, there’s enough member states with enough history that someone will always have issues with someone.
What I do believe will be a point of contention though are all the special dispensations the UK have had. With the power balance as it is today, UK might have to face membership on equal terms with the other member states this time around.
Yeah, the UK would be bargaining from a weak position. As a founding member of the EU it was bargaining from a strong one and could get concessions.
But, maybe if they say “hey, let us in and give us some exceptions and we’ll let you talk to our good buddy Canada”…
UK was not a founding member.
https://enlargement.ec.europa.eu/enlargement-policy/6-27-members_en
They were a founding member in the way Musk “founds” companies: joining later and getting a lot of influence due to wealth
I don’t want to rejoin the EU unless what happened to Greece could never happen again and the power and influence of corporations is stripped. Remember TTIP? No thanks.
