Brexit: Swiss fever dream

By Richard North - November 21, 2022

Occasionally, I have to remind myself why, in 2004, with the late Helen Szamuely, we started up the EUReferendum blog, and kept it running for so long.

Essentially, at the time, we were dismayed by the abysmally poor standard of coverage of EU matters in what was called by some the “mainstream media”, and the lack of comprehension of the basics on the part of the political classes.

We thought we could do better. In fact, a blind man, marooned on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic could have done better, especially through the referendum campaign when blind stupidity vied with monumental ignorance in a vast competition to see who could produce the crassest headlines.

As Brexit faded from the headlines, and I’d put my own personal seal on events with the updated version of The Great Deception, I thought it was time to move on and widen the narrative with a new blog, which Pete and I called Turbulent Times.

Reading the front-page lead story of the Sunday Times yesterday, though, is like going down memory lane, and a brutal reminder that, in nearly two decades, nothing much has changed when it comes to the quality of EU-related reporting.

The story in question is headed: “Britain mulls Swiss-style ties with Brussels”, with the sub-heading, “The government believes EU relations are thawing and could lead to ‘frictionless’ trade”, the text telling us that, “Senior government figures are planning to put Britain on the path towards a Swiss-style relationship with the European Union”.

However, as a measure of the fragility of the story, within hours of the ST publishing its version, it has been comprehensively debunked in the Telegraph, first with minister Steven Barclay denying that a Swiss-style deal was being considered and then Sushi stepping up to insist that such a deal was “off the table”.

What was labelled in the run-up to the referendum as the “Swiss option” has always been a firm favourite with a particularly moronic strain of Euroscepticism, much championed by the ego on stilts, Daniel Hannan. But this option has never been on the cards – or on the table if you prefer – not least because the Swiss don’t even want it and the EU has been trying to phase it out for well over a decade.

Prior to the Brexit referendum, I wrote at length about the “Swiss option” in Flexcit, noting that, in 2013, MPs from the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in a visit to Berne were told that the EU did not wish the arrangements to continue.

They were told that they were regarded as too complex and time-consuming to administer. And, more importantly, the EU considered that, without any provision for Switzerland’s automatic adoption of new legislation in areas covered by its agreements, and without any dispute settlement mechanism, the current system created “legal uncertainty”.

This should not have come as a surprise. In 2010, the Council of the European Union, on the basis of a detailed study, reported that the arrangements did not ensure “the necessary homogeneity in the parts of the internal market and of the EU policies in which Switzerland participates”.

In respect of Swiss sovereignty and choices, the report continued, the Council had come to the conclusion that “while the present system of bilateral agreements has worked well in the past, the key challenge for the coming years will be to go beyond the system, which has become complex and unwieldy to manage and has clearly reached its limits”. The general and consistent view was that the Swiss option was unlikely to be repeated.

Two years later in another report, the Council noted that negotiations on Switzerland’s further participation in parts of the Internal Market had been “marked by a stalemate, partly due to unresolved institutional issues”. While the Council welcomed the continuation of intensive and close cooperation, successful conclusion of further negotiations on the Internal Market were “dependent on solving the institutional issues outlined in the Council conclusions of 2008 and 2010”.

There is much more written in Flexcit for those who are interested, but one crucial thing to take on board is that the Swiss option is not a single agreement but a a series of ad hoc, uncoordinated bilateral agreements, with over 120 in place, including the Schengen Association Agreement.

In something which has always been disliked by the Swiss, the agreements are subject to what is known as a “guillotine” clause, whereby if one part of the deal falls, the whole package is voided. To that extent, despite its separate components, this is an “all or nothing” arrangement. If one agreement falls, they all fall, giving the Swiss very little flexibility when it comes to rejecting parts they do not like.

So disagreeable to all parties are the arrangements that, since 2014 – two years before the Brexit referendum – the Swiss and EU have been undertaking sporadic negotiations to agree new arrangements, with the EU preference being for a single, overarching treaty. However, such has been the lack of progress that, on 26 May 2021 after seven years, the Swiss Federal Council broke off the negotiations with the EU (pictured).

At the time, it was remarked that Brexit had complicated the talks as the Commission’s hard negotiating position toward the UK government on issues such as protecting the EU’s single market meant that Brussels did not want to be perceived as being more flexible with the Swiss.

This hardly augurs well for the idea that the Swiss option is, or ever has been, a realistic model for the UK, especially as the sticking points that led to the breakdown of the negotiations were: the directive on the rights of EU citizens, wage protection and the rules on State aid.

It seems that the Swiss Federal Council viewed the guarantees obtained as insufficient, and considered that the changes being demanded to Switzerland’s selective immigration policy would be detrimental to its social welfare system, which would be compromised as a result of the increased number of beneficiaries.

Other unresolved issues were the Commission’s plan to maintain trade and migration relations with Switzerland, and the EU policy towards third countries with which it has bilateral agreements, in order to safeguard their legitimate sovereignty and the primacy of national law over EU law.

Despite all this, which has actually found its way into the British press under the headline: “EU admits relationship with Switzerland could ‘be obsolete’ in trade deal row”, we have the ST pursuing this dead duck story.

In pursuit of its fiction, it blithely quotes an unnamed “senior government source”, saying of such an agreement: “It’s obviously something the EU would never offer us upfront because they would say you are trying to have your cake and eat it but the reason I think we will get it is because it is overwhelmingly in the businesses interests on both sides”.

Elaborated on by the Guardian, though, is the view that EU Brexit negotiator, Maroš Šefčovič, offered a Swiss-style trading agreement to the UK last June but, it says, David Frost, rejected it because it required regulatory alignment.

Yet, this – heavily publicised at the time, only referred to lifting one specific agreement as a model, the Swiss-EU SPS agreement, to resolve issues with Northern Ireland trade over the movement of meat and meat products to the province. The whole deal was never on offer.

As of the end of last year, it was still evident that EU-Swiss negotiations were going nowhere, which might have sent a message to the Sunday Times about the validity of its story.

In a win-win for the paper though, its daily counterpart, The Times, gets to publish a rebuttal this morning, headed: “Rishi Sunak won’t seek Swiss-style relationship with Brussels”.

This apparently comes after “a procession of Eurosceptic Tories” warned against accepting EU rules as the price of freer trade. One backbencher is cited as saying the past few months of turmoil would be a “walk in the park” compared with rebellions provoked by any attempt to soften Boris Johnson’s Brexit agreement.

The idiot Farage is also cited as warning of a backlash. “This level of betrayal will never be forgiven. The Tories must be crushed”, he says.

But then, since the whole story is what is technically known as “bollocks”, this is nothing more than a fever dream. The British media has scored once again, with a crap story based on a foundation of thin air. One of these days, we might get a grown-up media, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.