Norwegian PM warns Britain against copying Norway's EU single-market arrangement

Norway's prime minister has warned Britain not to follow Norway's own example and join the EU single market as part of a "Brexit reset," the Daily Mail reports — because Brussels takes too much control.

Norway sits outside the EU but inside the single market through the European Economic Area agreement. The arrangement gives Norwegian firms tariff-free access and obliges Oslo to adopt single-market rules wholesale: they are written, amended and expanded in Brussels, where Norway holds no vote, then incorporated into Norwegian law by committee decision. Norwegians rejected EU membership in referendums in 1972 and 1994, and the compromise their governments have run ever since is the very model regularly pitched to London as the painless middle way in the reset now under negotiation.

The warning carries particular weight because the man delivering it administers the arrangement he is advising against. Norway pays for its access — into EU programmes and through the EEA grants that finance cohesion projects across the bloc — and each year's new single-market legislation arrives in Oslo as a condition of access rather than a choice. The prime minister's objection is not that the arrangement is unworkable; Norway has run it for three decades. It is that the control it costs is real, and accrues to institutions in which his country has no seat.

That is the model the British reset debate keeps reaching for: full market access, no membership, no vote lost at home. On the Norwegian government's own account, the vote is lost anyway — it is simply lost in Brussels rather than in Oslo.

Norwegians turned down EU membership twice, in 1972 and 1994, on narrow margins. Their prime minister's advice to London is that the half-way house they built instead still hands Brussels the control they were voting against.