Centre for European Reform

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, who talks to European governments regularly, says the EU will extract its price for rebuilding links beyond security and defence cooperation. “EU leaders will tell him [Starmer] that if he wants things out of the EU – such as a deal on veterinary standards to reduce border checks on food, animals and plants – he will have to accept some of their asks. For example, the EU wants a deal on youth mobility, to make it easier for young people in the EU and the UK to spend more time on the other side of the Channel.

“He will have to convince Europe’s heads of state and heads of government by force of argument,” said Sander Tordoir, who is chief economist at the Centre for European Reform and previously worked at the ECB during Draghi’s tenure as its head. “I think that’s fundamentally the reason he was asked.”

The EU should rethink cohesion policy that focuses on developing remote or disadvantaged regions and target second-tier big cities that have substantial growth potential in services, argued the authors of a report from the Centre for European Reform.All about services: John Springford, Sander Tordoir and Lucas Resende Carvalho pointed to services exports within the single market as a big growth area that’s got more potential, especially for tech or finance.

John Springford, of the Centre for European Reform think-tank, said Labour’s decision to rebuff a youth mobility deal — one of the few concrete proposals from the European Commission so far — also sat uneasily with its demand for a deal on service professionals.