Press

Sam Lowe, of the London-based Centre for European Reform, says patience and goodwill are running thin. “The EU is growing tired of Brexit, and increasingly views it as an opportunity cost, pulling resources away from other important business,” he says. “The EU needs the UK to decide whether it wants to leave with a deal that looks substantially like the one already on the table, leave without one, or call the whole thing off.”

Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, said that lowering tariffs to zero would potentially counteract some inflationary pressures after a no-deal Brexit scenario. But it wouldn’t be very effective. “Ultimately, at best this would ensure prices wouldn’t rise too much,” he told Yahoo Finance UK. “When you look at the literature, tariff savings are very rarely passed along to the final consumer…But when tariffs go up, that usually does get passed through,” he said.

As Sam Lowe, a trade expert in the Centre for European Reform in London points out, fewer checks at the border itself will mean more random checks and controls away from the Border, which would also be politically sensitive.

The leaders of other EU countries are becoming reluctant to hand Salvini "a win" in terms of his populist agenda, according to Luigi Scazzieri, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, a pro-European think-tank.

A think tank study claims Brexit has already cost the UK’s public finances £17 billion a year, £320 million a week or enough to pay 10,000 more police to patrol the streets and train nurses to fill every vacancy in England while paying for London’s current contribution to the EU budget. The Centre for European Reform estimated that the UK economy was already 2.3 per cent smaller than it would have been had Britain voted remain in 2016.

Jeśli premier May na cokolwiek liczy, to na to, że jak zostanie mało czasu, twardzi eurosceptycy pod przywództwem Jacoba Rees-Mogga z European Research Group skłonią się ku poparciu porozumienia, obawiając się, że negocjacje będą się ciągnąć w nieskończoność albo brexitu w ogóle nie będzie - mówi nam Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska z brytyjskiego think tanku Centre for European Reform. 

Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, said an agreement like that would be possible under the current terms of the backstop. “The EU has said they will consider technical fixes as part of the means of replacing the backstop. But the issue is that lots of this is untried and untested,” he said.