Press

“Obviously, this comes as a big blow to those who have been saying for a long time that Britain was going to do much worse outside of the European Union,” said Camino Mortera-Martinez, Brussels-based analyst for the Centre for European Reform policy institute.  

“If you put up large barriers to international trade, the expected result is trading becomes more expensive and difficult, and therefore there is less trade than if the barriers were not there,” said Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform on Twitter.

Trade in services is not well understood. Unlike trade in goods, where buyers and sellers physically transport objects across borders, it is possible to sell a service to a client on the other side of the world, unbeknownst to anyone else, without ever leaving the comfort of your living room.

“It’s probably the right thing to do but it points to some political failings because it was very predictable,” said Sam Lowe, senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform, a research institute based in London, referring to the government’s announcement Thursday. “Clearly the infrastructure isn’t in place to allow for full inspections in July.”

As Christian Odendahl, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform think-tank, puts it of her Christian Democratic Union party: ‘The CDU is not the party of ideas. It is the party of maintaining the status quo.’

Sam Lowe, trade expert at the the Centre for European Reform think tank, said the Biden administration would soon have to conduct a wider discussion about how it deals with Trump-era trade policies.“It is possible the UK gets excluded from the [steel tariffs], but the US has to have that conversation themselves,” he said.“I don’t think Biden will get rid of them entirely, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were left on China, but the conversation will be whether they get rid of them for key allies like the UK.”