[...]The right place to start is to declare boldly that Britain will rejoin the free trade club we founded in 1959 as an alternative to the European Economic Community, known as the European Free Trade Association.
Leaving the EU is the biggest decision the nation has taken for 50 years. This is not a moment to throw caution to the wind — rejoining EFTA would be a practical step in a new strategy for UK trade and a symbolic move signalling Britain still embraces international partnership.
EFTA is a free market not a political union, outside the European Court of Justice but with a trade court that is tried and tested.
Crucially, the free-trade deals EFTA has in place, together with trade to EFTA countries, cover exports worth £98bn a year. That is more than we sell to the US, and worth nearly a fifth of our exports in 2015. Indeed, with EFTA membership the UK would need just five more deals — with the EU, the US, Japan, China and Australia, to cover almost 90 per cent of current exports.
And of course, for those of us who believe that the single market still has much to offer, EFTA is a platform that is only a short hop back into the European Economic Area, the agreement between the EU and some countries outside the bloc, in a future where circumstances change. This course is the logical strategic alternative to the leap into the void offered by the hard Brexiters.
There is a real danger that leaving the EU will not only be the biggest demerger seen since the second world war, but that Britain’s exit sounds a retreat from the outward-facing, internationally engaged role that we have played for hundreds of years.
The UK’s soft power diplomacy needs this renewed commitment to global partnerships.
Too many hard Brexiters know they have peddled false hope and oversold their case. The price of trading in the EU on World Trade Organization rules — the alternative to a deal on a new EU free-trade agreement — is giant, perhaps as high as £58bn, or £884 per person, according to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (see paragraph 152). We cannot have a border constructed on dogma — that would strangle our trade to death.
The hard Brexiters might feel it brings them moral purity. But their purity will mean our poverty. Today, the Trade Select Committee concludes that WTO rules will not permit tariff-free, frictionless trade and therefore the ‘no deal’ option should be discounted. This must not become the era of ‘Little England’ when it is time for Britain to pioneer new relationships. The prime minister has the perfect chance to take this step and join EFTA. The select committee’s report, with cross-party backing for the government to publish a white paper on EFTA membership before the summer, is a positive start.
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