Press

As Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform notes, this is a hollow threat. If she tries to turn the UK into a low-regulation Singapore undercutting the EU, the prime minister will upturn the one set of positive changes she pledges for Britain after Brexit: robust workers’ rights and – perish the word – a European industrial strategy.

Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform, said that parts of the EU were worried that Mrs May was being deeply unrealistic and that - like David Cameron's bold promises to reform Europe during his Bloomberg speech of January 2013, was setting herself up to fail.

As Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform put it, “governments and businesses in many parts of the world will understand the essence of May’s Brexit strategy to be this: what matters is limiting free movement of labour and the rulings of foreign courts, and the price to be paid – the result of lower levels of trade and investment with the EU – of slower economic growth, is too bad.”

"Wystąpienie May potwierdziło wiele oczekiwań ekspertów, ale europejscy partnerzy docenią, że brytyjski rząd wreszcie przedstawił zarys swojego planu" - oceniła w rozmowie z PAP analityczka z londyńskiego think tanku Centre for European Reform (CER) Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska.

Brussels-based justice and home affairs expert Camino Mortera-Martinez, of the Centre for European Reform, agrees that emergency measures have escalated, deepening an old split between those supporting state intervention and others championing privacy and individual rights.
“The question for me is do these measures make sense, are they reasonable?” she says. “It’s not possible in the current context not to have invasive measures on civil liberties in fighting terrorism, because of the exceptional state in which we’re in.”

Rem Korteweg, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform (CER), believes that there is an 80 per cent chance that the Mr Wilders will win. He said: “We have to take the polls with a grain of salt, but Wilder has really been able to create a significant lead over the past two months.” 

“There’s no doubt that economic activity has held up better than most economists thought,” Simon Tilford, of the pro-EU Centre for European Reform think-tank, conceded. Mr Tilford notes that not all pro-EU economists missed the mark, and - like many - remains convinced that the Brexit pain will eventually arrive. But he worries that the smooth sailing in the meantime could create a false sense of confidence and shift public support toward a more extreme form of EU exit.“The fact that growth has held up over the last six months is a negative because it’s emboldened the Eurosceptics and those who think that the UK can flourish outside the single market,” he explained.