Press

As John Springford at the Centre for European Reform has written, the choice is very clear: remain in an all-UK customs union, or leave and accept the need for a customs border in the Irish Sea that leaves Northern Ireland in a different relationship to the EU.

“It’s likely we will see populists use the EU as a scapegoat for all the misgivings they have about politics domestically, just as we saw in the UK’s EU referendum,” says Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska, a Brussels-based research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, a pro-EU policy group. “The whole election campaign will be about what the European project is about, what European values mean now.”

“If you look in the cyber arena, laying aside the disinformation operations, if you look at the traditional cyber attacks that we worry about, the attacks on our national critical infrastructure and so on, a lot of the tools you would need to deal with some of these things are not NATO tools, they are the kinds of tools the EU has or is developing, to deal with the resilience of electrical grids that stretch across Europe and so on,” said Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform.

En esta misma línea, Agata Gostynska, investigadora asociada del Centro para Reforma Europea, señala que es "cuestión de percepciones" y que, actualmente, es "más efectivo apelar a los miedos de la gente", como sucede con el sentimiento antiinmigración.

Writing in The Times Red Box today Sam Lowe, of the Centre for European Reform think-tank, warns that Britain will face huge challenges if it has to use the backstop. He says there will be export checks and delays at the border.

Charles Grant, of the influential think tank Centre for European Reform in London, described the French president as someone who “has got a rather Manichean view of good fighting evil and he wants to be the liberal global order fighting nationalism”.