Brussels Rejects Boris Pipe Dream
The Brexit leader, who is the favourite to succeed David Cameron as prime minister, claimed that Britain would remain a member of the EU’s single market while introducing a points-based immigration system to limit the right of EU citizens to work in Britain.
British people would still be able to live, travel, study and buy homes on the continent but the same rights would not be automatically extended to EU citizens in the UK, he wrote. Britain would also be freed from sending “a substantial sum of money” to the EU budget, which he said “could” be used for the NHS.
Johnson insisted the only change – “and it will not come in any great rush – is that the UK will extricate itself from the EU’s extraordinary and opaque system of legislation”.
EU diplomats reacted witheringly to the idea that the UK could stay in the single market without following the rules.
“It is a pipe dream,” said the EU diplomat. “You cannot have full access to the single market and not accept its rules. If we gave that kind of deal to the UK, then why not to Australia or New Zealand. It would be a free-for-all.”
A second EU diplomat said: “There are no preferences, there are principles and the principle is ‘no pick and choose’.”
The diplomat stressed that participating in the single market meant accepting EU rules, including the jurisdiction of the European court of justice, monitoring by the European commission and accepting the primacy of EU law over national law – conditions that will be anathema to leave advocates who campaigned on the mantra “take back control”.