Press

Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, said: “The EU offered just this sort of deal to the US as a way of de-escalating the trade war and the US turned it down. That makes me sceptical that doing these sort of sector-by-sector deals is politically possible in America."

In fact, Centre for European Reform’s trade expert Sam Lowe pointed out that "the reason for this is that the EU actually offered this approach to the US as a means of getting away from the trade war by saying 'let’s find a solution'.”

“From an international perspective it has long been incomprehensible that a country as fiscally sound and economically strong as Germany is not using the unique opportunity of low interest rates to invest in its future growth,” said Christian Odendahl, chief economic at the Centre for European Reform.

“The economic disruption will still be there,” says Sam Lowe, trade analyst at the Centre for European Reform. “It just might not be visible.”

Sam Lowe, a senior Brexit research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think-tank, said that while the “full consequences of no-deal will take a while to settle in”, he predicted that “issues will begin to emerge from day one”. He added: “Holding a general election days after seems remarkably reckless in that the management of no-deal will require a focused government committed to the task at hand, with ministers ready to take decisions, not half the cabinet on a battle bus in Devon and the civil service constrained by purdah.”

Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform think-tank, said the fact that both the migrant and Eurozone crises have now been contained provides grounds for cautious optimism that the rise in far-Right ideology and anti-semitism will not become the 'new normal' for Europe."The results of last May's EU elections from across almost all of Europe suggested that the far-Right populist surge has peaked in the majority of EU countries," he added.