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Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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....

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.

>Remember the bendy bananas?

The WHAT?

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

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

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