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European leaders would not want Britain to benefit overall by leaving their club –and the price they want it to pay is becoming clear. The Centre for European Reform's trade wonk Sam Lowe tells me that the White Paper (which fleshed out Mrs May’s Chequers plan) "almost gets to Jersey", but that Mrs May would be expected to "accept that potential future divergence is not on the table" over goods.

Sam Lowe, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, another think-tank, said such efforts had yet to bear fruit. “We know very well what Corbyn is against on trade but not much about what he has to replace it with,” he added.

Last week, Donald Trump and Jean-Claude Juncker surprised many people when they announced an agreement to seemingly avert the trade war that many people had been expecting. While Trump has hyped this as a major breakthrough, many people have been more sceptical. John Springford, the deputy director of the Centre for European Reform, kindly agreed to discuss the implications for the deal with us.
The success of the deal “is yet to be seen”, says Springford. After all, “it’s not an agreement in itself, just an agreement to start talking about talks”.

"He [Macron] hasn't convinced enough people that what he's doing is not just franco-francais, that he's not just pursuing a French agenda and dressing it up in European clothing," said Charles Grant, director of the London-based Centre for European Reform.

"What we've seen in the last few years — really the sort of tragic and kind of embarrassing stories about the state of the Bundeswehr — that is certainly sinking in, and Germans are now supporting more defense spending than they have in the past," Sophia Besch, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, said on a recent edition of the Center for a New American Security's Brussels Sprouts podcast. 

But I am struck by how some of the best informed, most pro-European British experts, such as Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform, have begun to argue that the EU 27 side is being too rigid, too exacting, too punitive in its approach. 

The Centre for European Reform recently published a short Bulletin article on the future of the European economy. Here’s Bob Hancké‘s review:

“The EU and US tried to bunch together all the trade disputes they had been having for decades [in the TTIP negotiations], but the differences in regulatory culture, different levels of precaution and desire for protection in different sectors proved too high a hurdle,” said Sam Lowe, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform.