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Tightening up Schengen Raoul Ueberecken, a former EU official in charge of justice and home affairs, has written a report for the Centre for European Reform listing measures to reinforce the creaking Schengen borderless travel zone. 

“Macron has so many more ideas than other European leaders. But he would have more influence if he had the patience to build coalitions to defend them,” Charles Grant, director of the CER think-tank, recently pointed out.

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.”

"The US's priorities would be quite difficult for the UK to take on board because they focus on agricultural goods and medicines procurement," says Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow in trade at the Centre for European Reform. 

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.”

The Baltic countries should expand their national guards as another precaution, said Ian Bond, former UK Ambassador to Latvia and director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think tank. “And I would definitely be building up relations with other significant European countries that might be able to come to my assistance in a crisis, whether that’s France, Germany Poland or Sweden, or someone else,” he said.