BRITAIN has been offered a fast-track ‘Switzerland plus’ deal to rejoin the European Union single market.
The move would restore free movement across Europe for UK citizens and could be completed ‘within months’.
The proposal was put forward in London this week by Bernd Lange, a German MEP who chairs the European Parliament’s influential trade committee.
He also played a central role in the original Brexit negotiations.
Speaking on a visit to the British capital, Lange said Brussels wanted Britain back at the table.
The comments came after a meeting with UK trade minister Anas Sarwar, whose team is drawing up Britain’s new position on European relations.
“I would love to see the UK back,” Lange said, according to The Guardian.
He added that the European Union (EU) missed Britain’s voice in decision-making because of its strong history of promoting open markets and democracy.
READ MORE: A decade after Brexit: Could Andy Burnham be the man to steer Britain back towards the EU?
Under a Swiss-style model, often viewed as a halfway house to full EU membership, Britain would regain ‘frictionless access’ to the single market in exchange for accepting regulatory alignment and the free movement of people.
For Brits living in Spain and second home owners pining for a return to free movement, it would mean scrapping post-Brexit border restrictions and the hated 90-day limit visiting the Schengen area.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has already thrown his weight behind a British return after UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham opened the door to reversing Brexit at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool on September 30, saying Madrid would welcome the UK back ‘with open arms’.
French President Emmanuel Macron also backed Burnham’s shift, calling it ‘very good news’ and a ‘wise decision’.
Lange said that while Switzerland’s existing framework was a ‘passive’ agreement that left Bern outside EU decision-making, Britain could go a step further.
“As a step by step process, of course, there are a lot of possibilities, but I would love to have the UK come back also in the political decision-making process and politically be engaged,” he said.
“So we have the model of Switzerland, Switzerland plus, I would say, as that has some kinds of engagement but not the full membership.”
He said the choice of relationship was entirely ‘in the hands of the UK’, adding that an agreement could be negotiated within months of a British political decision to deepen ties, despite potential political hiccups.
Switzerland is not an EU member, but it signed a new framework deal with Brussels last year that cemented single-market access across more than 100 bilateral agreements.
That package gives Switzerland access to the EU electricity market, space programmes, the Digital Europe research programme, the Erasmus student exchange scheme, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
In return, Switzerland accepted free movement of people and agreed to pay €375 million a year into EU economic and cohesion funds, which support poorer regions across the bloc.
Initial reports suggest the EU has told the UK it would need to make annual payments of approximately £1 billion (€1.16 billion) into EU cohesion funds to access the single market, a figure roughly proportional to Switzerland’s current contributions adjusted for the size of the British economy.
The offer from Brussels comes as Burnham prepares to meet European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa at a UK-EU summit in Brussels on November 20.
Addressing MPs in the House of Commons on October 12, Burnham said sticking with the Brexit status quo was not good enough for Britain and warned that turning away from closer European ties would be a ‘major dereliction of duty’.
While Burnham ruled out restoring free movement during the current parliamentary term to honour Labour’s 2024 election manifesto, he repeatedly declined to rule out putting free movement or a broader reversal of Brexit to voters at the next general election.
Opinion polls show a steady majority of the British public now favours undoing Brexit, with Burnham telling his party conference in September that around 60% of Britons believe leaving the bloc caused more harm than good.
Opposition politicians in Westminster have hit back at Downing Street’s approach, with Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accusing Burnham of attempting to unpick Brexit and giving away Britain’s negotiating hand ahead of the Brussels summit.
Meanwhile, Lange also backed Burnham’s push to prevent British suppliers from being locked out of the EU’s upcoming Made in Europe legislation, formally known as the Industrial Accelerator Act.
The law is designed to shield European manufacturing from cheap Chinese imports, but in its current form it risks excluding British companies from public procurement tenders and corporate contracts such as car fleets.
The boss of German carmaker Mercedes-Benz warned this week that Brussels would be making a ‘deliberate choice’ to harm the European car industry if it shut the UK out of the package.
Germany, Italy and the Netherlands all support including the UK, and French and German leaders were close on October 15 to agreeing a compromise that would let Britain in provided it aligned with the EU’s 2024 tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.
France, which drafted the original proposals, had opposed adding the UK and other allies for fear of delaying the law before next April’s French presidential elections, where anti-globalist contender Marine Le Pen could win power.
Lange said the UK should ‘of course’ be included because it already aligns with EU environmental standards and employment laws, describing Paris’s resistance as ‘not rational’ and ‘also so emotional’.
Excluding Britain could also trigger a legal dispute under the post-Brexit Trade and Cooperation Agreement, which guarantees barrier-free access to the single market for UK goods that meet EU standards.
Although the Made in Europe package is slated for political approval by early 2027, Lange said there was still time for Britain to secure changes as the legislation passes through three European Parliament committees.
“There are 5,100 amendments in the European Parliament process,” he said, “including one on UK inclusion.”
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