Time to comment a bit on today’s good news and put it into perspective (including a question to @SwissEmbassyUK ) (thread)
@SwissEmbassyUK Safeguarding the existing UK-Swiss relationship is important. That is the Swiss policy under the beautiful title of mind the gap.
However, the existing relationship is based on a web of treaties that is... complex. The German language list of treaties in force between Switzerland and the EU runs through 28 pages.
The main agreements are a 1972 FTA, 1991 Insurance agreement, 2009 customs facilitation, the 7 Bilateral agreements I, the 9 Bilateral Agreements II and agreements afterwards ranging from Europol to REACH.
The UK government position originally assumed some form of copy paste. In some cases that makes no sense (there’s a Schengen agreement in the bilateral II, no idea how you’d do that with reach, Switzerland’s Galileo relationship is not rolloverable...)
In others we would not want it (or would we?) - the Bilateral agreements I contain free movement and a guillautine clause linking the agreements. Neither Switzerland nor the UK are enamoured with FoM.
So the question arises: what precisely is in this agreement? What can we expect?
