In EFTA while part of the UK?
Today there have been rumours on Twitter that the Scottish Government is investigating whether Scotland can join EFTA (and thus the Internal Market) while being part of the UK:
Understand Scottish Government looking at EFTA membership for Scotland as one "flexible Brexit" proposal to be put forward in coming weeks
— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) October 24, 2016
It’s a bit like the Reverse Greenland solution, but joining EFTA instead of the EU. However, as far as I can tell, the obstacles are the same:
- EFTA and the EU cover a lot of policy areas that aren’t currently devolved to Scotland, so Westminster will either have to devolve a lot more to Holyrood very quickly, or they’ll have to represent Scotland and EFTA/EU meetings. (See also this blog post by Kirsty Hughes on some of the potential complications.)
- It’s not clear at all that EFTA and/or the EU are interested in having a non-sovereign member.
As I wrote in my old blog post above Reverse Greenland, I think it’s fine Nicola Sturgeon is looking into this, but I really don’t think anything will come of it.
Scottish independence is a better and much more straightforward solution for everybody involved. I don’t see what we’d gain by jumping through ludicrous hoops simply to postpone the next Indyref. Let’s just get on with it!
Don’t disagree, but if all options are not explored then when indyref2 is called the yoons will question why we didn’t explore option b,c,d….z as part of their riposte. So like it or not we have to explore all options even if some of them are weird. Besides we have nothing better to do as we still don’t know what Brexit means apart from brexit.
Yes, I agree. It’s an option that needs to be shown not to be feasible for whatever reason. Otherwise Better Together 2 will suddenly say that’s what’ll happen after a No vote.
I agree, I think we need to remember who Nicola’s audience is with this – it’s not us, it’s no voting remainers who might, reluctantly, vote Yes next time. But they need to be treated gently.
Indeed. It would be interesting to get some polling data on how close they are to moving to Yes.
“I don’t see what we’d gain by jumping through ludicrous hoops simply to postpone the next Indyref. Let’s just get on with it!”
One reason for delaying a referendum is that on the current opinion polls we would lose it. Seems like a decent reason.
When you are dealing with a Government as ludicrously incompetent as Westminster and a MSM as ludicrously virulent as the Express, Mail and Sun, along with the BBC which propagates their rabid rubbish, you do have to jump through hoops.