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Tomas Valasek of the Centre for European Reform, wrote in a recent article that while the British government and the previous French administration saw it as an exclusively bilateral affair, the new administration views UAV co-operation as the core of a wider European effort.

"We're talking about the troika as if it's a monolith, but I'm beginning to wonder if there aren't disagreements cropping up," said Philip Whyte, senior research fellow at the CER, a think-tank in London.

For further reading on UK relations with the EU, by far the best thing published recently is this excellent CER pamphlet 'The continent or the open sea: Does Britain have a European future?' by David Rennie of the Economist.

En opinión de Charles Grant, director del Centre for European Reform, «la probabilidad de que el Reino Unido abandone de forma efectiva la UE antes de 2020 es del 50-50, la situación es muy seria», nos confesaba recientemente.

EU-focused Centre for European Reform  is more open than most about its sponsors. It told the Bureau that 11 per cent of its £1.2m annual turnover came from the financial services industry. These funders include Barclays, Citi, Deutsche Bank AG, JP Morgan and UBS, to name a few.

The Centre for European Reform has gained a strong reputation for its coverage of European economic affairs, especially because of the work of Simon Tilford, who has offered consistent clarity on Germany's role in the eurozone crisis.

"The fundamental problem with the eurozone is that what happens at the federal level in the United States still happens at the national level in the eurozone," said Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the CER. "Unless they correct that flaw, individual states are going to run into trouble, and when they run into trouble, the markets are going to question how much political appetite there is to keep that country within the eurozone."

Charles Grant, a regular Eurostar traveller and director of the Centre of European Reform, said he had faced delays of more than an hour disembarking, complaining that UK officials were worse than those in any authoritarian regime he had dealt with.  "The UK has a problem with its reputation and image at the moment. I do believe this borders problem – at airports and at St Pancras – is reinforcing the overall impression that we don’t like foreigners ...and that we are shutting ourselves off from the world," he told the Financial Times.

Leaders of the 27 EU countries agreed late last month on a bold plan to pump cash into Europe's troubled banks and help governments deal with their excessive debt and high borrowing costs. But the plan is likely to provide little immediate relief to Europe's youth. What they need is economic growth that produces jobs. "That's the real urgency," says John Springford, research fellow at the CER.