In the legacy media, perhaps the most serious and comprehensive rebuttal of the "fax democracy" meme comes in the Booker column
this week. But then, if it was going to happen, this always was the place it was going to be.
Mr Cameron clearly has not been properly briefed: the Norwegians in fact have more influence on shaping the rules of the single market than Britain does.
Like many other people, he hasn't grasped that the vast majority of the single market's rules are decided by a whole range of international and global bodies even higher than the EU – from the International Labour Organisation, which decides working-time rules, to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, which agrees world-wide standards on food safety and plant and animal health.
On these bodies, Norway is represented in its own right, as an independent country, while Britain is only represented as one of the 28 members of the EU.
A recent
EFTA report shows that more than 90 percent of the laws of the single market include policy areas covered by UN or other global bodies. Norway has more influence in drafting laws originating from these sources than Britain, which
often has to accept the "common position" agreed within the EU.
There are
numerous examples of such international "
quasi-legislation", where Norway has more than once played a leading role in shaping rules which the EU members then have to obey.
The EU countries are in fact more subject to "fax democracy" than Norway is. There have even been occasions when Norway has refused to obey rules that touch on its national interest, but which the British have to obey even though they are significantly damaging to us.
Next week, Booker will go into all this in greater detail, because the extent to which the EU must act in subordination to these higher bodies is one of the least-understood aspects of the way it works. This is not to say that Britain should necessarily seek the same relationship with the EU as Norway, as a member of EFTA.
But what it does demonstrate is that if Mr Cameron continues to talk scornfully of Norway being subject to "fax democracy", he and his advisers simply haven't taken on board one of the most important ways in which our globalised world is increasingly being run.
If he persists in talking like this, concludes Booker, when he finally makes that long-awaited speech, it will be one of the main reasons why, as he wrote two weeks ago, he will fall flat on his face.
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