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John Springford, an economist at the Centre for European Reform, said Starmer’s suggestion that high levels of migration had contributed to stagnating output was “flat wrong”, noting that growth had been held back by high energy costs and Brexit. “The majority of economists think migration has a positive impact on GDP per capita,” he said.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, argues in a forthcoming paper that the Starmer government’s “ambitions are limited, which gave the EU an excuse to lower its own ambitions”. 

The most bulletproof method to invoke force majeure and defy lawsuits at court would be the approval of sanctions at the EU level, says Elisabetta Cornago, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform (CER), who admitted the positions by Hungary and Slovakia make it virtually impossible."This new roadmap the Commission is putting forward today acknowledges that difficulty but tries to find new pathways to technically deliver a phase-out of Russian fossil fuel imports, such as providing paths out of contracts to European companies," Cornago told Euronews.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, placed Trump’s second presidency among seismic historical events, comparing it to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 attacks. He warned that tariffs increase inflation, restrict trade, hinder growth, and introduce significant uncertainty into the global economy. Yet he also identified unexpected benefits: Trump’s tariffs are inadvertently strengthening European unity, restoring Germany’s leadership role within the EU, and nudging post-Brexit Britain closer to the European continent.

“The [European Central Bank] has the most ironclad independence of any central bank in the world,” said Sander Tordoir, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform and a former ECB staffer. “So if you’re worried about central bank independence, I think most investors will probably just have a bit more exposure to Europe and a little bit less to the US.”

Ian Bond, deputy director at the Center for European Reform, believes “it would be extremely difficult to make the case that Canada is a European country” for several reasons.Even if it were to pass the test of so-called Europeanness, “practical economics” would get in the way, he said.