Press

The CER report is strongest on the real (nonfinancial) economic issues. The most contentious point here is whether the British economy is held back in some way by red tape imposed by Brussels or by European treaty obligations.It is very hard to find any such stifling effect in the data. The CER points out that product- and labor-market regulation in the UK are closer to that of the United States than to Western Europe, and the same broad pattern emerges from the OECD’s assessment of barriers to entrepreneurship.

"What has changed is that over the past year, eurozone governments have started to openly question" the wisdom of Brussels and Berlin's policy strictures, said Simon Tilford of the CER. In Portugal, Finance Minister Mario Centeno, who has a PhD in Economics from Harvard University, is introducing income tax and sales tax cuts, tax rebates, new subsidies for household energy bills and restoring government workers' pay that was cut. Those steps, he says, will stimulate consumption.

“Greece has effectively been asked to build an asylum system in two weeks,” says Camino Mortera, a research fellow for the Centre for European Reform and a specialist in EU law. “The EU claims there won’t be returns en masse but if you are not able to process people in a regulated fashion, how else are they going to deal with this?”

"In the public eye everything gets connected: the mass abuse in Cologne on New Year’s Eve and the attacks today," said Rem Korteweg, a security analyst at the Centre for European Reform in London, referring to the sexual abuse and robberies in Cologne on New Year’s Eve that were linked to migrants. “However different, in the public mind and for the euroskeptic populace, they’re all the same thing."

Camino Mortera-Martinez with the CER, said that legal challenges to the deal were inevitable unless it was substantially revised, or "decaffeinated". "This deal hasn’t been thought through and they are having to think though the implications after having already announced it," she said, "From political and practical point of view there is a lot to resolve in a very short period."

Many are shocked that the EU has made such a lavish offer when Mr Erdogan has nothing but contempt for Europe's values and is undermining the independence of Turkey's courts and media. Some EU members, particularly those with strong right-wing parties, regard visa-free travel as "very sensitive and problematic", says Camino Mortera-Martinez of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank.