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Are Rejoiners ready to sell today’s EU?

The European Movement UK has the stated aim of fighting to rejoin the EU “as soon as it is politically possible”, an aim which I support. However, the EU that the UK would be rejoining is different to that which it left - both because the UK would almost certainly no longer enjoy its previous array of opt-outs, and because the EU has already moved on since Brexit happened. (The only opt-out one can envisage the UK potentially re-obtaining is that from the Schengen area, and then only because of Ireland’s opt-out and the need to keep the Irish border open - though Ireland could instead choose to insist on UK Schengen membership as a condition for the UK’s accession.) In the economic arena in particular, the European project (a term many UK pro-Europeans shy away from using) continues to move forward, with developments in the following three areas fundamentally changing the character of the EU membership which the UK left behind. The euro The euro is of course not
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Why the whole UK should emulate Switzerland's pragmatism and join the EU SPS area

As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated in stark terms, one of the fundamental responsibilities of the state is the protection of public health. While governments are of course exercised by the threat posed by anthroponotic pathogens (like SARS-CoV-2 or HIV now are), they are equally concerned about pathogens transmitted from or between animals and plants (not least of all because human pandemic viruses can originate in the animal kingdom), as well as more broadly about anything which might endanger human, animal or plant life or health. For this reason, governments impose so-called sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures . SPS measures are regulatory measures designed to protect humans from pathogens and contaminants carried by animals and plants, and to protect the animals and plants themselves from such pathogens and contaminants. (For clarity, SPS measures do not concern the protection of humans from transmissible diseases within the human population, which may be achieved with
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Restore free movement for Scottish citizens through early membership of the EEA

Though it cannot yet be considered a long-term trend, there now appears to be sustained majority support in Scotland for independence from the rest of the United Kingdom. Notwithstanding the practical challenges of securing and then winning a new referendum on independence, Scotland could quickly find itself having to confront a range of hard policy decisions - such as whether and when to apply for membership of the European Union. The policy of Scotland’s current governing party, the SNP, is for Scotland to “be an independent member of the EU”, but, perhaps understandably, the party spells out little detail for now about whether rejoining the EU would be a day 1 priority, or on what terms it would seek to join. Finland holds the record for fastest EU accession process - the country applied for membership in March 1992, agreed the final text of its accession treaty just over two years later in April 1994, and joined in January 1995 - but it had also spent the previous two years, f
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Sweden has found a comfortable home in the EU – for now

I went to Sweden for the first time in 2003. I happened to be there during the country’s euro referendum campaign, a tightly fought race perhaps most remembered for the tragic murder of the country’s foreign minister and leading euro membership advocate Anna Lindh less than a week before polling day. Sweden for a long time stood apart from the mainstream process of European integration embodied in the European Communities and subsequent European Union. But following the end of the Cold War, and with the centripetal force of an integrating single market on its doorstep, the country made the decision in 1992 to join first the European Economic Area and then in 1994, by referendum, to join the EU – which it did along with Austria and Finland on 1 January 1995. While Austria and Finland went on to become two of the eleven founding members of the euro in 1999, Sweden again stood aside – though it did not wait long to (re-)broach the question, holding the aforementioned referendum on eur
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The good governance argument for UK federalism or Scotland's leaving the UK

It is common for people from outside the United Kingdom to refer to the UK as “England”, either in English, or using the equivalent word in other languages. English people often do the same, and for many making a consistent, precise distinction between England and the UK can be a challenge - if indeed it is not viewed simply as unnecessary pedantry or “semantics”. However, if England ≡ the UK, and Englishness ≡ Britishness (≡ means “is equivalent to”), the implication is that a Scot who identifies as British can also just as well be identifying as English. That is manifestly absurd - not because there is anything wrong with being English, but because Scottishness and Englishness are clearly two different things. For Britishness to make sense for the parts of the UK that aren’t England then, Englishness must be distinct from - and not equivalent to - Britishness. (The alternative is that we accept Englishness and Britishness are effectively synonyms, and therefore that England has e
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The Fixed-term Parliaments Act shouldn’t be repealed - it should be made more Scottish. Here’s how

At the end of this month, almost four years after that now infamous referendum, the United Kingdom will almost certainly leave the European Union. However, beyond the small matters of Brexit and the country’s future relationship with the EU, 2020 is likely to be a year of significant constitutional change for the UK in other respects - in particular, the moving forward with the repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 , as promised by the Conservatives (and Labour) in their 2019 general election manifesto, and further trailed in the second Queen’s Speech of last year. The popular view is that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is bad legislation - monstrous and Kafkaesque even - which should be purged from the UK statute book at the earliest opportunity. In the most simplistic version of this school of thought, we would simply return to the status quo ante, where prime ministers could call elections on a whim for naked partisan advantage - the great British traditional way (thoug
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