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Sam Lowe, trade researcher at the Centre for European Reform, said the effect of the deal is to place the EU’s external border in the Irish Sea. “There will be checks,” he said.

Yet even if he agreed to a free trade agreement on these terms, it would still create a lot more trade friction than presently exists, warns Sam Lowe, a trade expert, in a new paper for the Centre for European Reform. Exporters will still be obliged to submit to rules-of-origin checks to prove that goods entering the EU market originated in Britain rather than, say, China. British suppliers will face further disruption because their goods will no longer count as EU content under the terms of the EU’s own free trade agreements.

In any event, many businesses would find adapting to a new a free-trade agreement just as troublesome as if the UK left without a deal, said Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. “It would still create a lot more trade friction and cost than currently exists,” Lowe said, citing the need for companies to grapple with issues such as rules of origin paperwork, customs and security declarations, and other import and export formalities. “No matter how ambitious the deal is, there are known limits to how much it can do to liberalize trade.”

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.”

“Under Johnson’s withdrawal agreement and desired future UK-EU free trade agreement it is hard to see any reason why the UK would not be able to do a free trade agreement with the US, if it wanted to,” said Sam Lowe, trade expert at the Centre for European Reform, a London think tank focused on European Union policy. 

“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."