The Times, 20th October 2016
What actually is the single market, and what’s the difference between membership and access?
The single market is the EU’s defining project. Its fundamental idea is that if you break down the barriers to trade you drive prosperity. And barriers to trade are not just tariffs – they’re also regulations.
In practice being part of the single market means that if you make chocolate in Birmingham you can produce it using workers from any EU country, sell it in any EU country without checks and if it goes well you can build a new plant in any other EU country and do exactly the same thing.
But it’s controversial because it is underpinned by four freedoms: free movement of goods, services, capital and – here’s the big one – people.
Theresa May can’t deliver on her vow to curb immigration if free movement of people is maintained, but EU leaders insist that the four freedoms come as an inseparable quartet. So we can’t have membership of the single market unless they budge on that.
So what’s this “access” thing politicians keep going on about? The truth is that lots of people ascribe different visions of Brexit to that term. After all, any country ostensibly has access to the single market merely by being able to trade with it.
But there are different levels of access, and probably the highest level without membership is that enjoyed by Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein via the European Economic Area (EEA). They essentially subscribe to the single market’s rules and regulations without having any say over them. That won’t do for Britain because (i) we want control over our laws and (ii) we want control over our borders.
When some figures say they want to preserve access to the single market, what they really mean is privileged access for certain sectors. The most obvious candidate for this would be our services sector, to ensure that banks don’t flee to Frankfurt or New York.
This has its own issues, though. To trade in services in the single market you’d need to accept some supranational authority to adjudicate disputes. And the PM gave a strong hint that she wouldn’t accept that in her conference speech this month.