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It's summed up in a quote from Philip Whyte of the CER: "Three views of the UK are now common across Europe: that it is unreliable and unconstructive; that it is an active distraction from solving the region's worst crisis since World War Two; and that it appears to be heading for the EU's exit door".

Government moves in Hungary and Romania "suggest to me that this is still a generation that doesn’t have democratic instincts in their blood," Tomas Valasek of the CER, said July 18 by phone. "It takes more for the generational change to cycle some of the old politicians out of the system."

The British government's focus on consolidating the public finances and push through supply-side reforms is at odds with the new French president's instincts, according to Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the CER. "France is almost at the opposite end of that debate," he told politics.co.uk.

Simon Tilford from the CER summed it up in a paper like this: "Unfortunately, the agreed measures (at the summit) were modest and have already prompted a backlash in various countries, not least in Germany and the Netherlands. Indeed, much of what was agreed at the summit is unlikely to come into effect. All this suggests that the limits of the politically possible may already have been reached."

"Il y a 50 chances sur 100 que Cameron ne puisse échapper à un référendum sur l'Europe au cours de la prochaine législature", dit le très europhile et très compétent Charles Grant, qui dirige à Londres le CER.

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.

"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.