Thread by @A_Glencross

This pro-EEA intervention by a leading Tory backbencher is notable for two reasons. Quick #Brexit thread.

https://twitter.com/Tony_Diver/status/1532018299176898562

The #EEA option used to be favoured by free market EU critics such as Dan Hannan, but on the basis of a tendentious reading that suggested it was a pick and mix alternative to EU membership.

Hannan has a fundamentally cakeist take on the EEA framework, as described in his 2004 pamphlet written to persuade UK voters to reject the EU Constitutional Treaty (a referendum that never took place). politeia.co.uk/wp-content/Pol…

Here’s a key passage with a veneer of truth in theory, but ignores the way the EEA (with a court and an independent monitoring authority) is designed to avoid competence clashes in the first place. So this legal arrangement is much stabler than the Swiss-EU bilateral treaty model

So the fact that Ellwood realises the EEA comes with serious obligations – not the benefits without costs idea peddles by Hannan – suggests the pure #cakeist phase of Brexit might be coming to an end.

That’s significant in another way becauses it offers a glimpse of how the Brexit process might be reversed. The 2016 vote came on the back of a cycle of policy anomalies and failed experiments when it comes to the UK’s EU strategy.

The list includes not using temporary restrictions on free movement in 2004, the attempt to shield financial services from EU regs after the global crash, the fiscal compact veto, the pre-referendum renegotiation.

UK political elites – not just the Tories – accepted the referendum for want of any better ideas for handling EU relations. If the EEA idea gets traction it will be because of the failure of Boris’ Brexit approach and potentially the start of the pre-2016 cycle but in reverse.

I tried to brainstorm how this could play out here @polinsight journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… END