The noble Lord is uncharacteristically inaccurate; he normally does his homework before intervening in this way. He is quite right that I and many on the remain side argued against the EEA being the right solution but he is quite wrong to suggest that any of us argued that it was the worst solution. On the contrary, throughout the campaign I always said while it was a very bad solution, it was the least bad solution of all those on offer. I am on record as saying that and probably said it in debates in which the noble Lord took part. Indeed, that is my strong view today and is the case I now argue.
I wish we could stay in the EU—period, as the Americans say, or full stop—but if we cannot we must try to mitigate the enormous damage. That is the argument I have been making. The way to do that is to try to find a way to stay in the single market, and one way we could certainly do that is to rejoin EFTA, as my noble friend Lord Lea set out. It is extraordinary that the Government have excluded that possibility and I now come to their extraordinary behaviour.
The Government have not only revealed that the benefit for which they are prepared to pay this high cost is nothing like as great as it was always made out to be, but not even considered negotiating on the single market regime provided by the EEA and using that as a basis for trying to get some concessions on freedom of movement. My two noble friends suggested a way forward that might be possible. I do not think that we on this side of the House will be able to take over these negotiations but we want to know—it is important that everybody in the country knows—why the Government did not even think it worthwhile to sit down with our European Union partners and say we
would like to stay in the single market but we would also like to curb freedom of movement at least to some extent. We could have a negotiation on that basis.