Press

Robert Brinkley, who was our man in Ukraine, raised the issue of Russian kompromat and referred to Trump as “an agent of Russian influence”; but the meeting’s host at the Centre for European Reform, Ian Bond (former ambassador to Latvia), responded — reasonably, I thought — that it was the consequences of the US president’s behaviour rather than its possible causes that should most trouble us: Trump truly is the Kremlin’s most useful idiot.

„Europa bouwt de beste windturbines ter wereld. Dat is goed voor onze energie-onafhankelijkheid. Er zitten magneten in die we ook nodig hebben voor militaire radarsystemen.” Het is een sector die levensvatbaar is, zegt Sander Tordoir, maar het ontzettend zwaar heeft.

John Springford of the CER warns that the picture looks even gloomier when you measure UK performance against countries most like us — so excluding the US and Germany — and including Australia, Canada and the Netherlands.  “Trade intensity in countries whose trends most closely matched the UK’s before 2019 is about 10 per cent higher than before the pandemic. For an open economy dependent on trade for cheaper products, innovation and productivity growth, this is awful performance,” he says.

Die EU, der European Stability Mechanism (ESM) und die Europäische Investitionsbank sind mit einem „Triple A“-Rating bewertet. Der Chefökonom der Denkfabrik Centre for European Reform (CER), Sander Tordoir, empfiehlt das Auflegen einer Anleihe im Volumen von 500 Milliarden Euro für die Aufrüstung.

“Some of the most shameful comments uttered by a president in my lifetime,” Ian Bond, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform, wrote online. “Trump is siding with the aggressor, blaming the victim. In the Kremlin they must be jumping for joy.”

“Most politicians on the centre-left and centre-right recognise that immigration is needed to ease demographic pressures,” said John Springford, an associate fellow at the Centre for European Reform think-tank. “They have sought to focus on tougher – and often inhumane – asylum rules in the hope that stricter border enforcement will provide political cover for higher regular immigration.

“The CDU is focused on defence and tax cuts, the SPD wants more industrial policy, and the Greens want climate spending. Negotiations about the allocation of any additional funds borrowed by Germany will proceed in parallel with, not separately from, discussions about the mechanism of debt brake reform,” says Sander Tordoir, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank.