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Charles Grant, of the Centre for European Reform, suggests it is worse than that. “There is another reason why they are they refusing to allow NGOs and journalists to visit, why they don’t want Frontex. They don’t want people monitoring their behaviour on the frontline.” 
The government is using the border crisis for political advantage, Grant adds. Poland has refused to take in migrants under EU quota schemes devised after the great wave that arrived in Germany in 2015. It is the classic political wedge, to play up against a “soft” opposition. “Liberals are in a mess about it.”

According to the Centre for European Reform think-tank, between early August and mid-October, there were more than 15,000 attempts to cross the border illegally.

The Centre for European Reform is making the case for why the bloc’s post-pandemic recovery fund based on mutual debt should be a permanent EU outfit. One argument: if the bloc is serious about its climate ambitions, the current fund is nowhere near sufficient for the green transition investments needed.

An analysis by the Centre for European Reform suggests Brexit so far has reduced UK goods trade by 15.8 per cent compared with what might have been expected if Britain was still in the EU.

The European Union has offered Poland help with its own border guards, known as Frontex, significantly expanded since the 2015 crisis and based in Warsaw, said Camino Mortera-Martinez, a Brussels-based fellow of the Centre for European Reform.

Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think-tank, said of the process: "In terms of the legal mechanisms we are very much talking about a process here that could drag on for a while."

The Centre for European Reform sought to model an imaginary, non-Brexit Britain alongside these actual figures, and concluded that the effect of Brexit - isolated from the pandemic - accounted for a drop of 15.8% in goods trade, as of August.

« Elle pensait, à tort, que le Royaume-Uni allait devenir une sorte de Singapour-sur-Tamise dérégulé. Elle voulait aussi capter des parts de marché à la City ou au secteur automobile », juge Charles Grant, directeur du Center for European Reform. « Paris a aussi tenu cette ligne très dure pour priver les partis extrêmes d’arguments en faveur du Brexit », ajoute l’expert.