Press

Sam Lowe, trade expert at the Centre for European Reform, has collated estimates for other potential EU agreements. The largest is for Japan, with an upper estimate of 0.76 per cent of GDP. But as he notes the majority of these gains are forecast in the areas of food, feed, and processed food, with much less coming from services. This is also the most optimistic forecast, the least optimistic has gains of 0.39 per cent. Forecasts for an EU-US agreement, unlikely as that now seems, come in around halfway between Japan and Canada.

“When MPs vote on Tuesday they should stick to their guns and pass the Lords amendment. It gives them an opportunity to transform parliament from a bystander into an active player in the Brexit talks,” wrote Agata Gostynska-Jakubowska, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform in The Times.

The European Union (EU) and China should work together for a better globalization, Chinese envoy to the EU has said in a speech earlier this week. In his remarks at the breakfast meeting on Thursday co-hosted by the Centre for European Reform, an European think-tank, and Kreab, a global consulting company, Ambassador Zhang Ming, head of the Chinese Mission to the EU, shed light on how to save globalization and appealed to the EU to join hands with China to buck unilateralism.

Sophia Besch a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform told the Committeethat CSDP was not at the heart of the UK’s strategic thinking and priorities but that the UK did have an interest in influencing the strategic and regional priorities in the debate on European Security. She suggested that the limited number of troops that the UK had provided to EU missions and operations had influenced the debate in Europe around whether the UK was a valuable part of CSDP.

Ian Bond, director of foreign policy for the Centre for European Reform, suspects some of Trump's insistence that NATO isn't doing enough is because he doesn't understand how the alliance works. "NATO is not going to start picking up random people who've been radicalized on the internet and want to blow themselves up," Bond told DW. "You're not going to deploy NATO's rapid-reaction force to a guy with a van and some knives on London Bridge. NATO is not the answer to most of the kinds of terrorism that western countries are now facing."

Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform think tank says that sectors which traditionally find rules of origin burdensome include textiles, food, machinery and vehicles.

Agreeing on what the backstop will look like has, therefore, become the central and most urgent issue in Brexit talks. As trade expert, Sam Lowe, wrote for BI last month: "The can kicking cannot go on forever."