Robert Paston

speaker

388 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 10 Jun

Robert Paston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Rest Is Money · 274. Would rejoining the EU be the best growth strategy? · 29 Apr 2026 podcast

The milk has been spilled, as it were.

We had a chaotic exit.

We are out of the European Union.

You know, 8% of GDP has been lost, according to your projections.

So what do we do now as a nation?

We've got a government that right at this particular juncture is saying, I mean, it's not at all clear it'll be able to persuade the EU,

But its current approach is sector by sector.

Look at a particular sector.

Look at look at whether the businesses in that sector are saying that if we aligned our rules with this.

The EU's rules followed the rules set by Brussels.

If the businesses there are saying, yeah, we want to be a rule taker in that space, the government will then try and negotiate, as it were, the equivalent of single market access just for that sector.

But then there are, of course, lots of other, whether they're MPs or pundits or even members of the government, and if it's members of the government, they have to say this privately, who are just saying, actually, it's completely clear that we should simply rejoin the single market, rejoin the customs union.

And the most effective way to do that, rather than doing a sort of Norway deal or a sort of rather complicated Swiss kind of deal, we should just rejoin the EU.

I just wondered if you look at what the data that you analyze tells you, does it reveal anything about whether the rational thing to do is just to go the whole hog of rejoining the EU?

Or is there a method in the government's attempt, at least,

I mean, I have to say, I think there's a very good chance Brussels will just tell the government to hop off because, you know, they've always said they don't like cherry picking when it comes to access to the single market.

And what the government is apparently trying to do is cherry picking.

But if the EU are prepared to play ball on cherry picking, is that a perfectly reasonable approach?

I mean, I'm going to now do my little monologue about why the politics for the Labour Party probably mean that actually whoever's leader at the next election.

And it's by no means clear that will be Keir Starmer.

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