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Last May the Centre for European Reform, a Brussels-based think-tank, published a paper entitled The Big European Sort? The diverging fortunes of Europe’s regions. The “sort” refers to a sifting process that is steadily transforming the demography of EU member states, and driving the polarisation that increasingly defines politics in Europe and beyond.

The best Britain can hope for is the removal of tariffs and quotas on goods. But, as the Centre for European Reform’s Sam Lowe points out in a paper published this week, even that will depend on how far it submits to the EU’s level playing field demands.

In any event, many businesses would find adapting to a new a free-trade agreement just as troublesome as if the UK left without a deal, said Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. “It would still create a lot more trade friction and cost than currently exists,” Lowe said, citing the need for companies to grapple with issues such as rules of origin paperwork, customs and security declarations, and other import and export formalities. “No matter how ambitious the deal is, there are known limits to how much it can do to liberalize trade.”

“The French think that they can act unilaterally without talking to everyone and get away with it, because they have a dynamic young leader with power and no one else does,” said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, a research institute. 

The Baltic countries should expand their national guards as another precaution, said Ian Bond, former UK Ambassador to Latvia and director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think tank. “And I would definitely be building up relations with other significant European countries that might be able to come to my assistance in a crisis, whether that’s France, Germany Poland or Sweden, or someone else,” he said.

Sam Lowe at the Centre for European Reform says it would be hard to stop someone driving a car across from Great Britain, claiming it belongs to them, and selling it to a “friend”. But, in general, the proposals give the EU enough control. A joint committee of EU and UK officials will decide which goods are seen to be “at risk” of onward movement, and the EU will be able to monitor the checks HM Revenue & Customs carry out.But the UK’s pledge to allow “unfettered access” for goods moved from Northern Ireland to Great Britain clearly does create a back door into the UK market.

“Julian King is the Security Union, and the Security Union is Julian King,” says Camino Mortera-Martinéz, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform (CER). The syllogism means that King, as the first Security Union commissioner ever, has profoundly shaped his portfolio; it also means that, without Brexit and King’s surprise takeover, the Security Union’s portfolio would have never existed, and its multiple components would have been managed by several commissioners, rather than unified under King’s umbrella. “Without Brexit, the Security Union would have remained a nice sentence in official documents,” Mortera Martinéz says.