Press

“El deal que se viene negociando desde la activación del artículo 50 [con el que se notifica la intención de un Estado miembro de retirarse de la UE] finalmente, con el acuerdo de Windsor, se puede considerar que está hecho del todo”, afirma Camino Mortera, jefa de la Oficina en Bruselas del think tank Centre for European Reform.

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty about what the ultimate steady-state relationship between the UK and EU is going to be, particularly how much the UK is going to diverge from EU regulations,” said John Springford, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank.That could trigger fresh conflicts in future, but resolution on Northern Ireland increases the likelihood that these will be settled in a way that involves “more compromise and less confrontation,” he said.

The labour market for low-skilled EU workers is “much tighter” now than before the Brexit deal was signed in December 2020, John Springford, Deputy Director of the Centre for European Reform (CER), told EURACTIV.Springford co-authored a CER study, published in January, which found that Brexit had led to a loss of 460,000 EU workers compared to 2019, after taking the COVID-19 pandemic into account.“The large shortfall of non-UK workers is mostly in sectors that disproportionately employ less-skilled workers”, the study reads.

He [Jeremy Hunt] cannot do much about the loss of European Union workers, estimated by the Centre for European Reform to be 330,000, but he will hope to address the loss of older workers, apparently lured away from the labour market and into early retirement. 

A joint report by the UK in a Changing Europe and the Centre for European Reform think tanks found the ending of free movement is “contributing significantly” to current labour shortages. The study found the low-skilled sectors – including hospitality, retail, construction and transportation – had been badly hit by the loss of EU workers after Brexit.

Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, says Putin can afford to ignore these distant protests.“Putin cares about what happens in Moscow and St Petersburg… everywhere else you can deal with it through a combination of bribery and coercion,” he said. “When things start bubbling in Moscow and St Petersburg, they are ruthlessly suppressed… I don’t think demonstrations by soldiers’ mothers in the periphery make much difference.”