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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.

Großbritannien spart 350 Millionen Pfund wöchentlich durch den EU-Austritt? Dieser Traum der "Leave"-Kampagne ist aus. Im Gegenteil, sagt Christian Odendahl, Chefökonom des proeuropäischen Thinktanks Centre for European Reform (CER). Der Brexit werde für die Briten extrem teuer. 250 Millionen Pfund pro Woche, errechneten Odendahl und seine CER-Kollegen, könnten den Briten durch den EU-Austritt künftig verloren gehen.

As Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, says, this means that the EU, nervous of being undercut, will offer Britain only a relatively thin free-trade deal. That implies a harder Brexit with more trade barriers than Mrs May’s deal, raising the costs to the economy of leaving the EU.

“France is thinking a stricter extension could lead to a greater pressure to ratify the deal,” said Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska a Brussels-based analyst at the Centre for European Reform policy group.

The answer is not much, according to a research paper by Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform think-tank. He says that access is given, for example, for data processing software, advice and other things that support financial services, "but not for banks' main job - lending".

Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, said: "These declarations are lodged electronically where they are then assessed on the basis of risk. Presumably for NI exports to GB this process could be streamlined, considering that it is UK authorities operating on both sides of the sea.

“Under this deal, relative to May’s, the worst case scenario is worse,” said Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, a research organization.