Lefty
Well-known member
Except EFTA is not a purely Trading bloc.
EU is a Single Market AND a Customs Union.
EFTA is that EU Single Market according to same rules as EU, determined by EU. Those rules are not purely economic and certainly not purely trading.
You are right that Organisations evolve and that is fine.
You are also right that populations should have the right to determine whether they want to be part of what their Organisation has evolved into.
Major and Blair/Brown did not allow this.
It is also right that our population should have the future right to consider the next stages of evolution of that Organisation and decide what they want then.
And right for that Organisation to decide whether they want to extend an invitation to join.
I don't deny that there is barely anything that is purely an economic choice/decision/consideration. Whether we like it or not politics enter everything, otherwise we would be an entirely libertarian capitalist world with a free market race to the bottom. However having to engage with an organisation that has more political considerations or components doesn't mean you are political, it just means you are engaging with a political organisation. If you trade with a country they will have tariffs for a reason and that reason will be a mixture of economics and politics.
Never the less, we set EFTA up as a rival to the EEC because we wanted an economic free trade organisation and the EEC wasn't that because its founders were intelligent enough to realise trade and economics don't exist in a vacuum.
The mission and history of EFTA is distinctly different to that of the EEC and we chose EFTA, chose in fact to set up EFTA, because we didn't like the political union aspect of the EEC. We later wanted to join the EEC for our own economic reasons ie the EEC was doing well and we weren't. For Brexiters to complain that when we joined the EEC, or voted to confirm our approval in the early 70's the political aspect and aim of the organisation was kept secret from them is utter nonsense. The European question had been debated in Parliament and the media for a good 15 years prior to us joining the EEC. Those oldies claiming they weren't told the EEC was more than a Trading Bloc when they voted in 1974 are simply displaying they were ignorant then, which I can well believe given they are either still ignorant now or disingenuous.
I'm sure I've posted this or something very similar before over the last four years, but here is a twitter thread from the excellent Steve Analyst who sets out the history with evidence and facts (an anathema to many brexiters I know) to back it up.