Last November, Daniel Hannan advised Iceland to not join the EU. He wrote on his Daily Telegraph blog:
"Don’t do it, Iceland! I realise that times are tough – they are tough for all of us – but there is no crisis so severe that it cannot be made worse by Brussels.
"EU membership would be a product of despair, for you as it was for us. Don’t repeat our mistake, my friends. (…) In two generations, you have gone from subsistence farming and fishing to a global service economy. Believe me, you couldn’t have done it in the EU.
"Imagine that, in a moment of weakness, you decided to throw all that away and join the EU and the euro. What would happen? First, and most obviously, your currency would be frozen at its present exchange rate in perpetuity. A revaluation based on the recovery of your economy would be impossible. Similarly, any future economic shocks could no longer be absorbed in your exchange rate or interest rate; instead, they would be felt in output and jobs.
"Next, you would find, as we did, that your entry ticket carried a stiff price: your fishing grounds, for so long your most valuable renewable resource, would become part of the Common Fisheries Policy, defined in the Treaties as a “common resource” to which all EU vessels have “equal access”. (…) your ingenious quota system (…) would have to be abandoned. Your boats would be tied up while Spanish trawlers plied your waters; your skippers would be obliged to throw good catches, dead, back into the sea. Soon, your oceans would be as sterile as ours.
"(…) You built your success on deregulation, low taxes, free trade. But you would find that you had joined an essentially corporatist association, based on internal dirigisme and external tariffs. Your culture of personal freedom, an inheritance, perhaps, from your fishing and crofting grandfathers, would be overlaid by the Common Agricultural Policy, the Social Chapter, the ten thousand pages of the acquis communautaire. Your parliament, the oldest in the world, would be subjected to the directives of unelected Commissioners.(…)"
However, as Hjörtur J. Guðmundsson writes in his blog, EU News From Iceland, "Yesterday was a black day in Iceland when the Icelandic parliament narrowly voted in favour of a proposal allowing the government to apply for membership of the European Union. (…) 33 MPs said yes, 28 said no, and two did not vote. A proposal from the opposition that the decision to apply would be a subject to a special referendum was rejected narrowly with 32 votes against 30. The government (backed by most of its MPs) opposed that proposal strongly which suggests it simply does not believe that the people are in favour of this step."
