Press

“The fiscal consolidation over the last 10 years has not increased our ability to weather this crisis,” said Christian Odendahl, the Berlin-based chief economist at the Centre for European Reform. “We refrained from going on a massive spending spree or lowering taxes massively. For the health of the European and world economy, we probably should have done both.”

Sam Lowe, a trade expert at the Centre for European Reform think-tank, said a trade deal could be done with the Trump administration if there was a “big offer” on agriculture.

Trade expert Sam Lowe from the pro-EU think tank, the Centre for European Reform, disagreed. He said No 10 was too focused on tackling the virus to properly focus on trade talks.“We’re not in a place where we’re even thinking about that [negotiations],” he told the Independent. “In order to get to a point where you can make those compromises you have to go through a lot of political theatre, I think, and at the moment everyone’s focused on Covid-19. Which is fine.”

“The proposed cuts to the EU’s defence budget will not put an end to the EU’s ambitions,” says Sophia Besch, a research fellow focusing on defence and security policy at the Centre for European Reform.“But they show that, on defence, the union is only as effective as member-states allow it to be.”

Charles Grant, from the Centre for European Reform, said: “I think the EU will set three conditions for this, which will be very very hard for Boris Johnson’s Government to comply with. “The first condition is a so-called level-playing field — the EU will insist that our rules on social and environmental standards, state aid, taxation are automatically updated to follow EU rules. “Because they’re very worried, genuinely worried, that we will turn into Singapore-on-Thames, kind of slash and burn, cut our regulations and steal lots of investment from them by being a deregulated economy.”

“We’re all doing it,” says Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow and trade expert at the Centre for European Reform. “We all know what the limitations are when it comes to teleconferencing. You lose all of the informal interaction. Just by personalities interacting you get a much better grasp of the person you’re talking to.

“We are still seeing a divide in government between those who want to sign whatever the US puts in front of it,” Sam Lowe, a trade expert at the Centre for European Reform and a member of the UK government’s Strategic Trade Advisory Group, told EURACTIV. “The US, as with the EU, tends to get what it wants,” said Lowe.

"It's highly likely that international borders will remain partly closed until the pandemic is under control both in Europe and in the US, which is unlikely to happen at the same time," said Mr Luigi Scazzieri, an expert on migration and transatlantic relations at the Centre for European Reform in London.