Press

“On both sides there is some naked political opportunism at work,” said Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform. “On Netanyahu’s side, the more he can find people fed up with the EU mainstream and get them tactically to back him, even if only to annoy other members of the Union, the better.”

“There is a tradition in the E.U. of things being settled at the last minute,” said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. He noted that the Maastricht summit in 1991, for instance, came together at the last minute, and that the seven-year EU budget seems to be settled right before the deadline.

The economy is now 1.5 per cent smaller than the Bank of England forecast in May 2016 while the world economy has been stronger than expected. Compared with similar advanced economies, studies estimate the UK Brexit hit to be 2.3 per cent.

Franco-Italian friction From migration to the euro, Luigi Scazzieri at the Centre for European Reform charts the deterioration in Franco-Italian relations in the last year and why Rome will ultimately be the big loser: “Less frequent dialogue means relations are already damaged: in 2018, Italy and France did not hold an annual bilateral summit, as they usually do. And a planned ‘Quirinale Treaty’, an Italian-French pact modelled on the Élysée Treaty and designed to provide bilateral relations with more structure, is now frozen.”

“Donald Trump is less restrained in his foreign policy now than he was,” said Sophia Besch, a defence and security specialist at the Centre for European Reform think-tank. “The situation is particularly difficult for Germany. Berlin is Trump’s favourite target — but the mood between Paris and Berlin is also at a low point.”

That is the exercise that John Springford at the Centre for European Reform is regularly performing and he calculates that GDP was 2.3 per cent lower in September 2018 as a result of the Brexit vote. That roughly translates into the average household losing almost £2,000 worth of resources (mainly lower private consumption, but also lost public spending and investment). This number is broadly consistent with estimates the governor of the Bank of England gave in May, using a different method.

Christian Odendahl, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform think-tank, called for a comprehensive rewrite of the budgetary rules, which he argued amplified the booms and busts of the eurozone economy.“Europe’s fiscal rules do not allow enough stimulus in a recession, and allow too much spending during a boom,” he said. “An overhaul of the fiscal rules to protect investment spending and prescribe strongly counter-cyclical policies would help to counter the current slowdown.”