Davis says EFTA and EEA membership would bind the U.K. to the EU’s rule book | Will Oliver/EPA Brexit Files Insight Norway? No thanks David Davis says joining EFTA during a transition period is no longer an option.

So much for the EFTA transition.

For a few weeks in the summer, the idea of the U.K. joining the European Free Trade Association — along with Norway, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Iceland — during a transition appeared to be gaining momentum among top officials in the U.K. The arrangement would have kept the U.K. within the single market while it negotiated a final deal on its future relationship with the EU.

Speculation that this would be the answer to all the riddles from ministers (you know the ones, about keeping frictionless trade in the single market while also refusing the single market’s rules on free movement) was heightened last week when Brexit Secretary David Davis said in a speech in the U.S. that an EFTA transition is “something we’ve thought about” — albeit adding that it isn’t “top of our list.”

Now he says it’s been struck off the list altogether.

Responding to a question from Brexiteer backbencher John Whittingdale in the House of Commons Thursday morning, he said that EFTA and European Economic Area membership would bind the U.K. to the EU’s rule book and to freedom of movement within the single market. He appeared to scotch the view of some EFTA advocates that an EEA rule called Article 112 would allow the U.K. to place limits on free movement while staying within the single market. Davis acknowledged such loopholes but said “none of them have worked so far.”

“In many ways, it’s the worst of all outcomes,” he said. “We did consider it, I gave it some considerable thought maybe as an interim measure but it seemed to me to be more complicated, more difficult and less beneficial.”

So that’s that then.

Whither then, the U.K.’s goal of a transition during which nothing much changes for the U.K. trading terms with the EU or for businesses, but which also ends freedom of movement?

Davis, perhaps optimistically, said an “off-the-shelf” transition arrangement such as EFTA would not be “as easy to negotiate as a bespoke arrangement” the likes of which we’ve not seen before.

He went on to clarify, once and for all, that the U.K. will not “formally” be in the single market during the transition, but that it “may well seek a customs agreement for that period and a similar arrangement on single market provisions.”

Looks like we’re back in the realm of riddles.

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