Press

Volgens John Springfield van het Centre for European Reform zal de keuze tussen etnische homogeniteit en het in stand houden van de Europese welvaart de komende jaren acuut worden. Mensen van buiten de Europese Unie zijn nodig om de veroudering van de bevolking te compenseren.

A study by John Springford of the CER argues that boosting arrivals from non-European countries is necessary to safeguard the welfare system and overcome labour shortages.

Anton Spisak, the former UK government official and Centre for European Reform associate fellow who Miliband credited at the end of his speech, isn’t certain where Labour ends up on that question, but he is clear that nothing can really change without a political paradigm shift at the top of the British government and the EU.

That reality is central to the observation made by John Springford of the Centre for European Reform in his contribution to an excellent collection of essays on Labour and the economy produced by the Social Market Foundation think-tank (worth your time). Springford makes the obvious point that given the political constraints on alignment and not joining the EU single market and customs union, Labour is unlikely to offer “a dramatically different change of direction” if it wins power at the next general election.

„Es scheint, dass wir ein bisschen zu sehr schwarzmalen“, sagt Wirtschaftswissenschaftler Sander Tordoir. Aber er sieht auch die Gefahr, dass China und die USA ihre Vormachtstellung ausnutzen, um Europa zu spalten.

Sander Tordoir, a senior economist at the Centre for European Reform, told Euractiv that the data suggests that the supply shocks triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 “are really well and truly behind us”.“There is some life left in the European economy,” he said. However, he warned that growth in the bloc’s two largest economies, Germany and France, which both expanded by just 0.2%, remains concerning: “Germany remains weak; France is also not great,” he said.

According to Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, an influential think-tank: “Von der Leyen is by a long way the most powerful president since Jacques Delors”, who was the scourge of British Eurosceptics when he headed the commission for a decade from 1985.