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Research by the Centre for European Reform has shown Brexit has already made the UK economy 2.1% weaker than it would have been if voters had decided to stay in the EU. CER deputy director John Springford said: “Two years on from the referendum, we now know that the Brexit vote has seriously damaged the economy.
“And we know that the government‘s ‘Brexit dividend‘ is a myth, the vote is costing the Treasury £440m a week, far more than the UK ever contributed to the EU budget.”

The Baltic countries should expand their national guards as another precaution, said Ian Bond, former UK Ambassador to Latvia and director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think tank. “And I would definitely be building up relations with other significant European countries that might be able to come to my assistance in a crisis, whether that’s France, Germany Poland or Sweden, or someone else,” he said.

“Julian King is the Security Union, and the Security Union is Julian King,” says Camino Mortera-Martinéz, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform (CER). The syllogism means that King, as the first Security Union commissioner ever, has profoundly shaped his portfolio; it also means that, without Brexit and King’s surprise takeover, the Security Union’s portfolio would have never existed, and its multiple components would have been managed by several commissioners, rather than unified under King’s umbrella. “Without Brexit, the Security Union would have remained a nice sentence in official documents,” Mortera Martinéz says.

Sam Lowe, trade fellow at the Centre for European Reform, said: "The Level Playing Field commitments in the EU's Free Trade Agreements with Canada and Japan are unenforceable, because they are specifically excluded from the dispute settlement mechanisms. The government appears to be aiming for the same treatment."

As Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, says, this means that the EU, nervous of being undercut, will offer Britain only a relatively thin free-trade deal. That implies a harder Brexit with more trade barriers than Mrs May’s deal, raising the costs to the economy of leaving the EU.

“European governments have a very low regard for Trump anyway," said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. “They know that they need to work with the United States, but it confirms to them that Trump is incapable of thinking strategically, handing victory to the Russians in Syria.”

The answer is not much, according to a research paper by Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform think-tank. He says that access is given, for example, for data processing software, advice and other things that support financial services, "but not for banks' main job - lending".