Could Britain join EFTA?

No, argues David Rennie in an interesting Spectator piece. Icelandic politicians argue that the EU only tolerate EFTA because most countries in it are relatively small. But former Icelandic Prime Minister David Oddsson believes that "Norway, a giant among the other Efta tiddlers, already pays nearly as much as it would if it became an EU member".

Rennie points out that

Switzerland, for all its bilateral deals, recently found itself ordered to levy a special tax on the savings of EU citizens in Swiss banks — and to send much of the proceeds to Brussels. Brussels has just ‘invited’ the Swiss to stump up extra funding for the ten new member states that joined the EU a couple of years ago: a cool £435 million over five years. The Efta–EEA trio, for their part, have agreed to cough up an extra £805 million for the same newcomers over the same period, with Norway paying the lion’s share.

Oddsson suggests that it would be very difficult for anyone to leave the Union and pay less, leading Rennie to conclude that

Withdrawal from the EU is not impossible, of course. The ‘join-Efta’ argument is not a wholly false prospectus. But when you hear that it might not save us any money, and might even wreck the whole EEA deal, the argument suddenly sounds a lot like false comfort.