Press

"When you dig down into the details of what they (Labour) want to do, it's by and large relatively small things and even some of those would probably be quite difficult to negotiate with the EU," Ian Bond, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform (CER), said.

“The biggest challenge over the next six months will be to separate noise from actual impact,” said Zselyke Csaky, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think tank, “because I expect a lot of noise.”

"Aunque los poderes de la presidencia sean limitados, eso no significa que Hungría no pueda causar daño mientras ejerce este papel. Ya es bastante perjudicial que la UE esté representada por un país que ha socavado la democracia interna y que quiere tomar el control de Bruselas para promover su agenda antidemocrática. Si además Hungría intenta aprovechar la oportunidad que le brinda la presidencia para impulsar sus puntos de vista, podría crear confusión diplomática o incluso caos en el peor de los casos", relata a EL ESPAÑOL Zselyke Csaky, investigadora del Centre for European Reform.

John Springford, a trade economist at the Centre for European Reform think-tank, said a £2bn uplift would be “a nice to have” but still relatively meagre when set against total UK exports to the EU of more than £150bn a year.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, who talks to European governments regularly, says the EU will extract its price for rebuilding links beyond security and defence cooperation. “EU leaders will tell him [Starmer] that if he wants things out of the EU – such as a deal on veterinary standards to reduce border checks on food, animals and plants – he will have to accept some of their asks. For example, the EU wants a deal on youth mobility, to make it easier for young people in the EU and the UK to spend more time on the other side of the Channel.

“He will have to convince Europe’s heads of state and heads of government by force of argument,” said Sander Tordoir, who is chief economist at the Centre for European Reform and previously worked at the ECB during Draghi’s tenure as its head. “I think that’s fundamentally the reason he was asked.”

Christina Kessler, an analyst at the Centre for European Reform (CER), agrees that a defence industry commissioner would be appropriate in the next mandate, "not just because there is obviously work to be done in this area, but also because it would signal that the EU is taking this seriously and is willing to step up its game".   

The EU should reform its regional spending — known as ‘cohesion policy’ — to tackle the divergences that services trade promotes, according to a report from the Centre of European Reform. Given that living standards in newer member states are converging with those in western European, “more regional funds should be directed towards city-regions with high growth potential, complementing existing allocations based on relative poverty,’’ researchers John Springford, Sander Tordoir and Lucas Resende Carvalho said.