Breaking up is so hard to do

Press quote (The Australian Financial Review)
30 January 2021

There is pain on the European side too, of course, but it is less dependent overall on the Britain-EU trade relationship. And for Brusssels, says CER economist John Springford, Britain's pain is a necessary price. "The strategy of the EU has always been to play hardball because they need to show that Brexit hurts," he says. 

...Springford is unsure Britain will become a Singapore-on-Thames that will diverge from the more staid and red-tape-entrussed European bloc. "There will be a lot of performative divergence," he says. "It will be performative because actually there is no appetite for a rollback of employment rights... [or] to go back to the pre-GFC, risk-taking, freewheeling regulatory environment."