The price list Britain has already read

Posted on: 18 September 2026

The two men met for the first time as heads of government at the Hill Dickinson Stadium on Wednesday, talked defence, then stayed for Everton against Wolves. When Everton scored the only goal, on eighty minutes, they embraced. It was the second embrace of Carney's day, because that morning in Strasbourg he had stood up from the front row of the European Parliament and hugged von der Leyen after she proposed a status for Canada that the EU treaties do not yet contain.

Andy Burnham, two months into the job, inherited from Keir Starmer a summit with Brussels that was meant to take place on 22 July and was postponed when Starmer resigned. Its centrepiece was a youth experience scheme for 18 to 30 year olds, under negotiation since the May 2025 summit and still stuck, according to the reporting, on a British cap of around 50,000 places a year and on whether young Europeans should pay home or international tuition fees. It was also reported in July that earlier this year the EU had turned down Starmer's attempt to negotiate a single market for goods without free movement of people.

Now set that beside what Ottawa wants. A Canadian government source told the Associated Press that the aim is an agreement allowing Canadians to live and work in Europe without a visa. Britain is haggling over the size of a capped scheme for the under thirties. Canada has put open-ended mobility at the top of its list, as a benefit, and the Commission president has offered it a new category of membership.

The man asking is also the man who ran the Bank of England from 2013 until March 2020, through the referendum and out the other side, leaving about six weeks after the United Kingdom left. And the British scheme under negotiation is, by the government's own description, modelled on the youth mobility arrangements Britain already has with Australia and with Canada. I will leave the irony there.

The most precise way to read Wednesday's offer is from Switzerland, where I live for half of every month, and where the word associate already has a price attached.

I moved back to Ticino in August 2024 on a Swiss B permit for people not in gainful employment, issued under the EU free movement agreement. It took less than two weeks. I showed sufficient means and health insurance, the canton checked, and the permit arrived, because the 1999 agreement gave me a right and the office had nothing to decide. A Canadian of my age with the same means would have gone through article 28 of the Swiss foreign nationals act, the route for people living off their own income, which adds a minimum age and special personal ties to Switzerland and leaves the final word to the discretion of the authority. I filled in a form. He would have submitted an application. I hold, for what it is worth, the British mirror of that right as well: a Frontier Worker Permit, open only to EU and Swiss citizens who were already working in the UK while living elsewhere before 31 December 2020. It is one of the last places where free movement still survives on the British side and nobody who started working here after 2020 can obtain it.

The word "first" in von der Leyen's offer holds only if read literally. The treaties provide for association, under article 217 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, and the Ankara agreement with Turkey has used it since 1963. The European Economic Area rests on the same basis, which is how Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein take on single market rules they do not vote on. Switzerland already has the word in writing. On 10 November 2025 the Federal Council signed the agreement that makes it an associated state in Horizon Europe, Euratom and Digital Europe, backdated to 1 January 2025.

How it got there matters mostly for the order of events. In May 2021 Bern walked away from the framework agreement and Swiss research found itself outside Horizon, treated as a non-associated third country. Talks on a new package restarted in March 2024, were concluded in substance on 20 December that year and signed on 2 March 2026. The bill is written down. Switzerland pays 130 million francs a year in transitional cohesion contributions from 2025 to the end of 2029, then 350 million a year from 2030 to 2036, with the sum renegotiated every seven years. Programmes are paid separately, and foreign minister Ignazio Cassis put them at around 650 million a year for research and 165 million for Erasmus+. Access to the single market, he said, is not free. Invoice first, title afterwards.

The package also brings dynamic alignment with EU rules in the single market agreements, and a dispute mechanism that anyone who read the Brexit withdrawal agreement will recognise. If Bern refuses to adopt a rule it is bound to adopt, the EU can go to a joint arbitration panel, which refers questions of EU law to the Court of Justice. If Switzerland still refuses after a ruling, Brussels may take proportionate compensatory measures, limited to the single market agreements, and Bern can have their proportionality reviewed. None of this applies until the package enters into force. Parliament in Bern is still examining it, and the country has spent almost eighteen months arguing over whether approval should need a simple popular majority or a majority of cantons as well.

A dossier from this summer shows what the arrangement feels like from inside. On 7 July the European Parliament voted by 511 to 87 to revise the regulation that coordinates social security, so that unemployment benefit for cross-border workers will be paid by the country of last employment rather than the country of residence. The Swiss economic affairs secretariat puts the extra cost to Switzerland at between 600 and 900 million francs a year, a figure it calls very approximate. There were 413,320 cross-border workers in Switzerland in the first quarter of 2026, just under 78,500 of them in Ticino. Bern did not vote on that text. It has to give explicit consent before the change applies to Switzerland, and in May the Swiss president, Guy Parmelin, called the reform unacceptable.

British readers have seen this menu before. In November 2022 a Sunday Times report that ministers were considering a Swiss-style relationship survived roughly a weekend before Rishi Sunak ruled out any arrangement relying on alignment with EU law. The Swiss model was rejected in London because of the price. Switzerland took it for the same reason.

Carney listed what Canada brings: energy at enormous scale, one of the world's largest endowments of critical minerals, some of the most sophisticated pension capital anywhere, Arctic geography. He said the arrangement would strengthen Canadian sovereignty, that the final text would go to a vote in the Canadian parliament, and that the alliance should be open to other democracies. He left the naming to Brussels.

The EU-Canada summit in Montreal at the end of October will separate two readings. If the text that comes out of it includes dynamic alignment, a recurring financial contribution and a dispute mechanism with the Court of Justice in the background, Canada is taking the Swiss road under a better name and Wednesday's embrace opened a negotiation about the price. That is the reading I expect to see disproved. If none of it is there, the EU will have shown that it runs two tariffs for the same status, one for neighbours who need its market and one for distant partners it needs. The way Carney spoke on Thursday points to the second.

The United Kingdom sits in an awkward place between the two. It is a neighbour, like Switzerland, whose largest trading partner is the EU. It also has what Carney was selling in Strasbourg, a defence industry, a financial centre and pension money. Burnham's delayed summit with Brussels is due later this year, after Montreal. Whoever writes his brief will have both texts on the desk, and a youth scheme capped at 50,000 will read differently once Canadians have been offered the right to move.