02/06/2015
The BBC
Today programme
yesterday ran a thoroughly dishonest piece about the impact of the "Norway Option" on the UK, using Norway's Foreign Minister Borge Brende to help deliver its propaganda.
"Britain can have more influence inside the EU than outside," said Brende, triggering an immediate organised twitter storm, while
Autonomous Mind posted a
stonking piece on his blog, calling out the man for what he is â a liar. But, for all that, the damage was done.
All things being equal, our next step would be to lodge a complaint, but there wouldn't be much point. We've been there before and the outcome will be the same. The adjudicators will say that even "no" campaigners don't agree that the option is beneficial: the Norwegian foreign minister was just repeating what a lot of eurosceptics are saying.
Other "eurosceptic" critics raise even more imaginative objections. At a recent
Global Britain seminar, Roger Bootle "warned" that the solution "could be sabotaged by existing EEA or other leaders saying at a late stage that it was not acceptable".
This harks back to the workshop we ourselves held on
Flexcit, when Lee Rotherham raised the prospect of a last-minute veto by Lichtenstein, stopping Britain from joining EFTA and thereby continuing to participate in the EEA. I told him that our plan had multi-layered fallback positions, and in the unlikely event that this happened, we would rely on what I call the "shadow EEA" option.
Had Bootle read
Flexcit, we would have known this, and therefore known that his warning was "invalid". But this was not to be.
Interestingly, we had previously met one of the
Global Britain speakers, Ewen Stewart, to discuss the adoption of
Flexcit as a provisional working plan, to use as the basis of a common strategy for a campaigning group were are setting up
Also there were representatives from
Democracy Movement and
People's Pledge, and although we were there to discuss the plan, none of the people from those three organisations had actually read it. Stewart, after informing the meeting that he had to leave early because he had a tennis match booked â despite some of us coming hundreds of miles to be there â professed complete ignorance of
Flexcit and asked if a copy could be "sent round to him".
But then, Global Britain had just published its own
Brexit option, which purported to have looked at all the other options (except
Flexcit), noting that of the Norway Option that, "some would argue that we would have no say on framing single market directives". For
Global Britain, the thing to go for was the WTO option, which it renamed the "Global Britain Free Trade Option".
Faced with this, we set up our free
Flexcit workshop for which, at great expense, we had printed and bound copies of the plan. Sadly, no-one from
Global Britain,
Democracy Movement or
People's Pledge could find the time to attend, where they would have seen presentations from Robert Oulds of the
Bruges Group and myself.
Whether
Global Britain is any better than Ukip is moot, but at a conference organised by the Bruges Group yesterday, Tim Aker
told his audience: "We don't need detail - 'articles and options' - we need to just explain to people that the EU controls our borders".
This evoked a response from Conservative MP John Redwood, who said: "You're trying to split the eurosceptic movement by not getting behind our prime minister who's trying to stand up for our country", but then we already read yesterday from
Dan Hannan that that voting "no" meant "voting for a Switzerland-style relationship with the EU", even if there is a
train wreck in progress.
Hannan, though, is somewhat at odds with fellow Conservative MEP
Campbell Bannerman, who wants renegotiation to produce a deal that allows us to control numbers arriving from the EU. He wants democracy to be returned to Britain by making the UK Parliament sovereign over EU law in a large number of key policy areas, and he wants an EEA-style agreement like Norway's, except within the EU - a sort of "associate membership" of the Brussels club.
On the other hand,
Matthew Elliott and his
Business for Britain wants a "
two-tier Europe" and now says that, diehard eurosceptics may well have to fight a "no" campaign without his outfit. "If the Government gets a two-tier Europe, we're very much in", Elliott says.
That raises the interesting prospect of a putative leader of the "no" campaign changing sides just before the referendum, which should encourage those who want to align with him to form the "no" campaign umbrella group.
Then, "rather sweetly", writes Isabel Oakeshott, Tory MPs who have long been regarded as arch eurosceptics say they are awaiting the outcome of negotiations before getting their campaign together, a "wait and see" strategy that she thinks is "naïve".
On our recently reactivated
sister blog, though, Peter warns of the other extreme, of over-selling the benefits of withdrawal, which is setting ourselves up for the fall.
But it doesn't need me to highlight the shambles in the eurosceptic camp. The
opposition is already fully aware that we're all over the place â with no chance of any immediate improvement.
The three things, for our "three-legged stool", that we need to underpin the intellectual base of this campaign are the "vision statement", the reasons for leaving and the "exit plan". We are nowhere near establishing these, much less agreeing a common position.
At this early stage in the campaign, this might not seem that important, but the Norwegian No2EU campaign took five years to prepare for their 1994 referendum victory. Even though
David Cameron has emphasised that he is in "no rush" to bring forward a referendum before the end of 2017, that still only gives us 30 months. We really do not time to mess about like this.
