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Comment by mmaniac | Hacker News Reader

I expect that the UK will end up rejoining the EU on much worse terms than we had before. Sooner or later it'll happen.

I doubt it. Politicians and voters will keep pointing the finger at Switzerland and Norway how they succeeded without the EU and that they can too.

Don't think UK can get a similar sweetheart deal as Switzerland has.

One of the immediately likely things after the election is for Labour to rejoin various eurpean standards things, like on Chemicals, accepting the EU rules with no direct say in them, just like Norway and Switzerland.

> [Labour Chancellor] Reeves said she does not think “anyone voted Leave because they were not happy that chemicals regulations were the same across Europe”,

She is correct. I really doubt anyone will care in practice, unless they're conditioned to care.

Thing is, the UK _was_ conditioned to care about this sort of thing, over a period of decades. Remember the bendy bananas? Basically since the UK joined, the UK's media engaged in a sustained campaign to convince people that EU regulations were unreasonable.

The EC actually had a website for this at one point: https://web.archive.org/web/20200131192225/https://blogs.ec....

>Remember the bendy bananas?

The WHAT?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromyth#Straight_bananas

Except much of the media in question are not the UK's media, being owned by a US citizen, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch had to renounce his Australian citizenship as the US doesn't allow foreigners to own media like Fox there, but the UK doesn't have such basic precautions against foreign influence, and ends up with grotesque situations like Eugene Lebedev (now Lord Lebedev), heir of a KGB agent, owning a major newspaper, The Independent.

Norway is effectively in the EU but without a vote; it's subject to ~all EU laws but does not participate in making them. Switzerland is messier, but it is subject to most EU rules via a series of treaties. The EC considers the Switzerland situation unsatisfactory and messy and would probably be reluctant to do another one (and Swiss business are still significantly disadvantaged vs European ones in trade with Europe).

I can't _really_ see people in the UK opting for a Norway type arrangement vs EU membership, though I suppose to some extent I suppose it does depend on how it's sold; per the Brexit referendum the public is not _that_ interested in the actual facts of the matter vs the marketing.

We know, but my point was that Brexit voters don't know that Swiss and Norwegian deals are basically EU membership fees and obligations on most things but without the voting rights.

Don't think EU will let them back in.

The EU would let the UK back in in a heartbeat; the current situation really is good for nobody. It would likely lose the special treatment it had under its previous membership, however.

Well Juncker said yesterday that UK can rejoin in a two centuries - maybe. EU leadership is against letting them back in, so I don't know where get that 'in a heartbeat'.

Juncker is a retired politician; he can more or less say whatever he wants. At the end of the day, the UK rejoining would be of benefit to everybody, and it's hard to imagine that much opposition.

2 centuries? Yeah no. 20 years? That's more likely.

I don't think the UK will try to join anytime soon, but the EU would be silly to not accept them back. The UK is already Europe's second biggest economy, and depending on how Germany goes, could be the biggest in a couple of decade. It has the biggest tech industry in Europe by quite a bit, a relatively healthy demography, a solid military, bases across the world, soft power _galore_).

Like, grudges and personal issues aside, the numbers say the EU would be greatly bolstered with the UK in it.

The EU has repeatedly said we would be welcomed back. Obviously we wouldn't be able to do that unless there was a clear political mandate for that. It would take (in my opinion) at least a generation before those conditions would be possible.

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