Jeremy Hunt is the first U.K. foreign secretary to visit Switzerland since 1996 | Peter Schneider/EPA BREXIT FILES INSIGHT UK may not like Swiss advice on post-Brexit future Bern’s fraught relationship with Brussels may be what Britain can expect once it departs.

Jeremy Hunt is in Bern for bilateral meetings with Swiss officials — the first such visit by a U.K. foreign secretary since 1996. U.K. officials say it’s highly likely that on the list of talking points will be a question that the Swiss are well placed to answer: How on earth do you get along with Brussels from outside of the single market?

That’s especially true for financial services. Switzerland ranks among the top European financial hubs, and so serves as a great litmus test for how Europeans allow them access to the single market. Based on the Swiss experience, it’s not looking good.

The U.K. government’s approach is that it wants to be able to diverge on some rules, fully acknowledging that it would lose EU access in that particular area. But the lesson to take from the Swiss decision is the EU is definitely not open to that — diverge in one area, and you will pay consequences in another.

The Swiss are currently locked in a showdown with the EU that could result in the termination in December of the ability for EU investment firms to trade on Swiss stock exchanges. That's because a Brussels decision last year that Swiss regulations are equivalent to the EU's — so granting market access — is time limited.

Why? Because the EU is making the stock exchange equivalence decision contingent on agreement in other areas, like state aid, and free movement of people. Earlier this month, the Commission said “no decisive progress” was achieved on those other issues, leaving the Swiss with the cliff edge on the stock exchange decision in December. As a result, Bern has been forced to come up with a contingency plan.

All the terminology in this tiff will be uncomfortably familiar to the U.K. “Nothing is decided until everything is decided,” Commission officials say, and the Swiss can’t “cherry-pick” the benefits of the EU.

At a POLITICO event last week, the Commission’s director general of the financial services department, Olivier Guersent, brought that point home, and then some. “Yes these things are technical, but they are also political,” he said. “This sort of idea that ‘Oh, if I respect equivalence in Field A, I’m entitled to get it, I can screw you in Field B,’ that is not the way it works … this global agreement needs to be adhered to in all its parts.”

The Commission has made it clear any deal with the U.K. on financial services will be based on the EU’s existing equivalence framework, meaning that Hunt would do well to get as much advice in Bern as he can. Something like the Swiss experience could become very familiar in future.

This insight is from POLITICO's Brexit Files newsletter, a daily afternoon digest of the best coverage and analysis of Britain’s decision to leave the EU available to Brexit Pro subscribers. Sign up here.