Press

“Every German chancellor of any coalition would say, ‘let’s fix this Brexit and trade issue and come to a stable and trustworthy relationship and then we can talk,’" said Christian Odendahl, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform think tank. "So the best the UK can do to improve the relationship with Germany is to fix the conflict with the EU over the Northern Ireland protocol.”“If anything, Brexit has reinforced the tendency of German parties to agree on the EU, because Britain’s exit has meant that Germany is even more in the position of compromise seeker,” he added.

Sam Lowe, research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, said that it would be “quite an occasion” if Britain were to join USMCA, even though he was sceptical that it would happen. “You would have all the issues with a bilateral US relationship — they don’t go away,” he said. “But from an economic point of view a deal would not be negligible.”

Germany’s second economic miracle happened “without Merkel’s government doing . . . anything”, added Christian Odendahl, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform.

“Nobody in Germany has been thinking about Britain or Brexit. It just hasn’t been a feature of the campaign. It isn’t anybody’s priority,” said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. Underpinning this is a dwindling of our economic ties with Germany: in 2016 the UK was Germany’s fifth-largest trade partner; this year it is set to slip to 11th, behind the Czech Republic.

Sam Lowe, a trade specialist at the Centre for European Reform, said the list contained a mix of “things that don’t matter at all, things that might matter, and things that do matter”. But, he added, the test would be whether “divergence from EU rules delivers material economic benefits or just divergence for divergence’s sake”.

I was talking to a guy named Ian Bond. He's a foreign policy analyst with the Centre for European Reform. This is how he put it. "Potentially, this is a very big, very lucrative contract of great interest to the UK as a country, which has a long history of building nuclear submarines".

Luigi Scazzieri, a European security expert at the Centre for European Reform, said that any co-operation between Brussels and Ankara would be tense. He said Turkey may try to push migrants towards the EU to satisfy domestic calls for a tough line on refugees.

Sam Lowe, trade expert from the Centre for European Reform, added: "While there have been increased calls for the UK to make its foreign trade agreements (FTAs) conditional on partner countries meeting stringent environmental and climate targets, this confirms that such an approach has been deemed too tricky by DIT.
"It also clarifies that the UK is willing to liberalise trade in environmentally questionable goods if necessary to get an FTA over the line.

For Christian Odendahl, the Berlin-based chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, Covid-19 also showed how Merkel’s crisis management evolved over time, learning from past mistakes. “She misunderstood the euro crisis as a debt crisis when it was so much more than that,” he says. “The difference in how she reacted to the euro crisis and how she reacted to the pandemic is, I think, quite telling.”