Roland Smith has been mentioned before on this blog. His name isn't a well-known one in the Brexit saga, but he was formerly head of the Brexit department at the Adam Smith Institute and in 2015 wrote a piece supporting Brexit, which he declared was “not about detail, it is about principle.” He wasn’t advocating a no-deal exit as some hardliners wanted, and in 2015 authored a paper titled: Evolution not revolution. The case for the EEA option. It was a proposal not unlike Dr Richard North’s Flexcit about which I have written before. The opening paragraph of the executive summary states boldly, “Britain needs to leave the European Union, which over 43 years of membership has proven to be sclerotic, anti-democratic and immune to reform. It is a political relic of a post-war order that no longer exists.”
Ten years on, now independent, he has a Substack blog setting out how Britain should go about rejoining. I am not about to criticise Mr Smith for changing his mind; we need more of his ilk to do the same, and it takes a bit of courage to admit that you were wrong about something as fundamental as Brexit.
His Bluesky account describes him as: "Tracking the Right's journey after Brexit and the culture war's highly charged boundaries. Once a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute, now centrist. Telegraph watcher."
I’m not sure quite when his epiphany occurred and he may have written a mea culpa at some point or explained his thought processes, but I haven’t been able to trace anything. My apologies to him if he has done so.
His Substack post, which doesn’t mention his earlier pro-Brexit arguments at all, begins:
"The movement to rejoin the EU has been gaining some traction lately and the reasons are not hard to find: the now-widespread belief that Brexit has failed; the regular suggestions that Brexit has caused UK GDP to be 4-8% smaller; the turbulent politics - soon to be on our seventh prime minister in ten years; and the division and hate that was unleashed since the Brexit vote in 2016.
"Those on the front line of Brexit - people who have to navigate Britain’s international borders, sometimes daily - have borne the brunt of what Brexit means, causing lost business, slow and costly deliveries, raised prices and upset customers.
"The free marketeers who supported Brexit have been, perversely, proved right: trade barriers do reduce prosperity. Worse, this has had knock-on effects on generating jobs, tax receipts, and giving space for more public spending. Young graduates, in particular, are discovering it is much harder to find their first job in an economy that is misfiring."
His proposal for the road to rejoin is to first address Britain’s problems. We “need to ‘get our own house in order’ before applying to join again” according to him, then hold a referendum and finally apply to join the EEA and EFTA.
Essentially, his answer in 2026 is the same as in 2016, but going the opposite way. Ten years ago, the EEA was a stepping stone out of the bloc, now it’s a way back in.
However, before anybody starts to regard that as a serious option, I would take the time to read a thoughtful piece by Joël Reland for the think tank, UK in a Changing Europe.
Mr Joël Reland is critical of the LibDem plan to do the same thing. He argues that while it might make sense for Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland to adopt EU rules with little influence and no ability to veto things they really don’t like, it does not make sense for an economy as large as the UK, especially one with an outsize financial sector.
Furthermore, unless we also join the customs union, some trade barriers would still remain because we have a different tariff rate schedule. Finally, polling shows that option isn’t favoured by the public.
The net likelihood of people voting for Labour is much lower were it to propose joining the single market (-13%) than were it to offer a referendum on rejoin (+2%). Only fractionally more voters (four percentage points) would consider Labour if it was to propose single market membership than if it stuck with the status quo.
The voters are clearly quite savvy on that point.
The UK government certainly understands the problem of the UK becoming a rule taker, or should I say more of a rule taker, since Northern Ireland is already in that position, thanks to the Windsor Framework. We have rather shown our hand in the UK-EU 'reset' talks since the FT report that the British government has asked for a “decision-shaping” role in the EU rules and regulations that Britain has agreed and will agree to follow as part of its push for closer economic ties.
“However, the European Commission told member state ambassadors the idea was not feasible as it would give the UK more rights than countries such as Norway and Iceland that pay into the EU budget and participate fully in its single market.
“The UK request for 'decision-shaping' was a key part of British attempts to defend the deal against criticism from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party and the Eurosceptic right that the arrangement left the UK as a 'rule-taker' from Brussels.”
Just as an aside here, it shows once again, British ambivalence about EU membership. We have always wanted a half-in, half-out position, opt-ins here and opt-outs there, never fully committed wholeheartedly to the European dream as other countries are.
Having left, we continue to negotiate with Brussels because that was always inevitable after Brexit. Member states are in a permanent state of negotiating with each other, and having left the EU we are - more or less - doing exactly the same as we did before, but with no leverage. We certainly haven’t taken back control, otherwise we wouldn’t be demanding to have a finger on the steering wheel.
Next, Iceland, which is a member of EFTA, is holding a referendum in August on whether to quit the trade bloc and apply to join the EU. Given Trump’s daft claims on Greenland, becoming a member state would add considerably to Iceland’s sense of security. Norway’s opposition party has said its country too should hold a referendum on EU membership.
At this rate, EFTA would include only Switzerland and Liechtenstein, and they are both in the Schengen area and almost full EU members anyway. The EEA would become a virtually meaningless entity.
In any case, regardless of other difficulties, I am not sure the route that Mr Smith is proposing would even be available, that EFTA would accept the UK as a member, since its economy would dwarf that of the other members, or the British public would understand why Britain, almost alone in Europe, isn’t participating fully in the European Union.
The information that the FT has access to isn't mere speculation. It comes, I assume, via Ireland since the report is a joint effort by Peter Foster in London and Andy Bounds in Cork. It covers a lot of different areas such as an agri-food agreement, the single electricity market, youth mobility, carbon adjustment mechanism, etc, etc. This has to be taken seriously.
The UK is also pushing to be included in the EU’s Made in Europe plan to avoid its car manufacturers being treated the same as Chinese producers, according to The Guardian,
In another of his Substack posts, from May this year, Roland Smith also talks of sovereignty and concludes:
"Brexit Britain appears to be cast adrift, dependent in security terms on America and yet emotionally (increasingly) we are again fellow travellers with the Europeans. It turns out that a sovereign Britain making its way in the world out on the open seas is a rather rough and dangerous place to be.
"Indeed, Brexit has arguably become a textbook case for how to make a mess of sovereignty in the modern world. And it’s why other member states have not followed us out."
In 2015, he was arguing that one of the benefits of EFTA membership was that they had "full sovereign power", whereas we did not.
What is the point of raising all this here? I think it shows that some people who were presumably serious thinkers, logical and believed themselves well-informed in 2016 have finally realised what a complete folly Brexit has been, with zero benefits.
These issues won’t change whichever PM is in Downing Street. If Nigel Farage ever gets there, for all his bluster, he too would find himself doing the same sort of thing. British industry is telling the government it needs to have a better, minimal-friction relationship with the EU, and any government that wants to raise tax revenues without increasing rates needs economic growth.
Moving further away from Europe would only make our problems worse.
Finally, the IEA (Institute of Economic Affairs) is a right-wing think tank and was notably pro-Brexit with many of its luminaries advocating for the UK to quit the EU in favour of being some lightly regulated free market economy on the Singapore model.
So, it was surprising to note that in 2024, they published two pieces on Brexit being a mistake, if what its adherents wanted was a far more liberal market economy. Both are from serious people.
Dr Emmanuel Comte, a Senior Research Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) writes: Why Brexit was a mistake, from a libertarian perspective. He makes the point that Brexit, rather than decreasing government control, actually intensified it in the UK.
Dr Kristian Niemietz, the IEA's Editorial Director, and Head of Political Economy says: Brexit wasn't worth it. He argues that what Brexit has actually done is to poison the well so that now the few thousand who truly believe we need to become Singapore-on-Thames are treated as pariahs. They have lost the opportunity to persuade us that it is in fact a good idea.
This was always bound to be the case anyway in my view. Even the most rabid right-wingers in the media always call for things to be banned whenever a problem arises, and I really don't see voters wanting to give up employment and consumer rights. Becoming Singapore-on-Thames was never a serious possibility.
