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John Springford, the deputy director of the Centre for European Reform (CER) think-tank, says Brussels has also grown frustrated with the Swiss system of translating EU legislation into its rulebook through and torturous parliamentary process that can end up changing the laws to bypass regulations. “This is very finicky and slow. And it runs up against the EU’s problem of cherry picking: they don’t want to give the UK partial access to the single market or part of partial participation in the single market,” he said.

Neither is better than the other and both are needed but "the most important thing for think-tanks, in general, is to be transparent in the way they are financed and the way they are affiliated," Camino Mortera-Martinez, head of the Brussels Office of the Centre for European Reform (CER), another (private) think tank, told Euronews.

« Ce n’est effectivement pas le Brexit qui provoque la récession, qui est due à la guerre en Ukraine et à la hausse des prix, comme partout ailleurs, mais le Brexit a réduit la vitesse de croisière de l’économie britannique », explique John Springford, du Centre for European Reform, un groupe de réflexion.

"People are pretty angry right now across Europe," said John Springford, deputy director of the London-based Center for European Reform, a policy institute. "There’s a general understanding I think that the high inflation we have been seeing is down to the war in Ukraine."

The Chips for Europe Initiative's €11 billion focused on commercializing research "would still punch below its weight" even if it all materializes, said Zach Meyers, a senior research fellow at London-based think tank Centre for European Reform. Meyers estimates that the U.S.'s chips strategy promises $13.2 billion in research.

But this week shifted “the trajectory in an almost dramatic way,” said Luigi Scazzieri, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, adding that an escalation of the current disagreements could throw relations back into “the darkest phase in Italian-French relations” in recent memory.

It would be very surprising if this reduction in trade hadn’t reduced growth, and indeed John Springford, of the Centre for European Reform, estimates that if you look at the UK’s performance compared to a basket of “similar” countries, our growth shortfall is about 5 per cent.

The real concern is over digital and Europe's dependency on Chinese technology. "I worry more about other kinds of vulnerabilities, such as in the case of 5G, the possibility that it could be used for espionage or the possibility that it could be just turned off altogether," Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform (CER) think-tank, told Euronews.