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Sam Lowe, a trade specialist at the Centre for European Reform think tank, similarly questioned the premise that dropping tariffs on Australian food would lead to floods of cheap meat on UK shelves.
“What if Australian exporters are happy selling all over Asia?” he said in a trade newsletter this week. “And what if Australian exporters want to sell their higher-end food products to the UK, not the cheap stuff? And what if Australian imports are just as likely to displace EU food imports?”

The Centre for European Reform estimates that quitting the single market and customs union at the end of December 2020 reduced UK trade by £7.7 billion – roughly 11 per cent – in March. This came on top of a further £8 billion hit to trade between the referendum, in June 2016, and quitting the single market – a period which saw a significant fall in the value of Sterling.

Luigi Scazzieri, an expert on EU foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, told The National a Turkey-style deal was out of the question because it would involve housing migrants in Libya. “The way the deal with Turkey works is that migrants and refugees who arrive in Greece and did not qualify for asylum were returned to Turkey,” he said.

“This was an election fought in bars,” said Camino Mortera-Martinez, of the Centre for European Reform, who thinks it would be hard to replicate elsewhere in Spain, let alone in Europe. “The stance Díaz Ayuso took completely destroyed party lines. It was borderline populist if not populist altogether.”

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson decided he wanted "a run-of-the-mill free trade agreement", explains John Springford, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform in London. "Banks can blow up, so close trade relationships in financial services require common regulations, which Johnson didn't want," he said.