
A cross-party pro-EU pressure group says it will bring High Court proceedings on the matter ©Sjiong, Wikimedia Commons
The dark and dusty corners of the internet aren’t wholly taken over by climate change deniers and crush videos. Constitutional lawyers have one too. And of late it’s been consumed with the Norwegian option.
In case you’ve forgotten—and I rather hope you have—Norway is part of the European Economic Area. It’s a kind of single market hinterland where the “four freedoms” apply—including free movement of persons (and you still make contributions to the budget, and you have less influence over the laws that apply to you) but where you get to strike your own trade deals and you’re outside the Common Agricultural Policy and… but anyway.
And constitutional lawyers have been talking about the Norway option because Professor George Yarrow, Emeritus Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, published an intriguing paper suggesting that by quitting the EU we could end up like, well, Norway.
And yesterday morning a brave archaeologist of the internet, the BBC’s Diplomatic Editor James Landale, took it from that corner and thrust it, blinking, into the light.
Richard B.
Luke A