The EU-UK reset: What are the prospects for closer co-operation?

"Labour has not ruled out a role for the European Court of Justice, and it's spoken very positively - not only in the veterinary field, but also for example in chemicals - about the value to domestic industry of aligning with EU rules," Luigi Scazzieri, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, told Euronews.

"This is something that the UK is already doing spontaneously, so why not formalise that so that your businesses then have an easier time when exporting to the EU market?" he added.

..."While the previous (UK) government wasn't unconstructive, this new government doesn't come with the baggage of the Conservative Party, and in general has a much more pro-European narrative," Luigi Scazzieri of CER said.

"This (security) pact is not fully fleshed out, but from what the UK's foreign minister David Lammy has said, the idea would be to go fairly broad and to have a set of arrangements that allow the UK and the EU to cooperate more closely, from foreign policy proper, to also areas like migration, energy security, health security and critical raw materials," he added.

...But Scazzieri believes Brussels will likely limit security ambitions that have "an economic angle" for fears it could "be a way of circumventing the 2020 Trade and Co-operation agreement."

This could mean that the UK will not seek to associate itself with any new schemes spearheaded by the new Commissioner for defence, expected to be named by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in the coming weeks and tasked with streamlining the bloc's domestic defence industries to be more efficient and interoperable.

"That (would require) the UK making financial contributions to the EU's programmes, which I suspect there is a big block on in London," Scazzieri said.