Press

Divorce from Brussels has made GDP more than 5 per cent smaller than it would have been otherwise and investment 13 per cent lower, according to the Centre for European Reform. Last year alone, UK exports to the EU fell by 13 per cent.

Just yesterday, here is the deputy director at the Centre for European Reform. ‘I'm not a Scottish nationalist, but euro membership doesn't get forced on member-states’.

She [Giorgia Meloni] may be lukewarm, however, about any moves towards further European integration — seen by France, in particular, as a precondition for the further eastward expansion of the EU, said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. “This will be very bad for those who really care about enlargement, because the French and others are quite clear there will not be another country joining the EU until the treaties have been changed to have more majority voting,” he said.

“After focusing on electricity market interventions in September, the European Commission has now turned to measures to tame gas prices,” says Elisabetta Cornago, a researcher at the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank. “Price limits for gas transactions on the TTF exchange may be difficult to implement and might risk muddling incentives to save energy. Joint procurement of gas instead is a smart approach to negotiate more convenient gas prices, which should ultimately benefit consumers.”

In figures provided to me by the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think-tank, Britain’s average GDP growth rate (in real terms) from 1945 to 1973 - outside what was then called the European Common Market - was 2.8 percent.

Elisabetta Cornago from the Centre for European Reform think-tank, for example, has described the gas price-cap proposal as “kind of a cry for help. The bloc has run out of low-hanging fruit to address the energy crisis and is gradually moving away from orthodoxy, despite the potential perils the shift entails.”

This so-called “social climate fund,” initially designed as a €72 billion cushion for vulnerable households and to finance more energy-efficient buildings, could be retooled and launched sooner to fit the current crisis, argues Elisabetta Cornago, of the Centre for European Reform.

The other great test of Europe’s solidarity, this winter and beyond, will be its ability to share those gas supplies between countries in the event of shortages. Failure to do so, said Elisabetta Cornago, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think tank, would damage not only people’s well-being — but faith in the EU itself.