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Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform think-tank, said the ministers’ statement “shows a hardening of the EU line on the protocol”. “The new German government is a few notches tougher on the British than its predecessor,” he said. “In recent years it has often been the French who have taken the hardest line among the 27 — but the joint statement shows they are not alone. EU governments now say that the arguments over the protocol are not just about Northern Ireland, they are about the UK’s international reputation as a country that respects the rule of law.”

According to Zach Meyers, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform (CER), "if the French presidency gives up on an EU-wide directive to implement the minimum global corporate tax because of Hungary’s veto, then any alternative will be far less legally robust.""The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has already ruled that EU member states cannot stop corporates from taking advantage of lower tax rates available in other member states: when the UK was a member of the EU, it proposed to do this, and the regime was struck down."

The doppelgänger approach has been used extensively by John Springford, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform. His latest update, covering the period to the end of last year, was published earlier this month, and the results are striking.

John Springford, du groupe de réflexion Centre for European Reform, a comparé les statistiques britanniques à celles d’un groupe de vingt-deux pays développés. Il en conclut que depuis le troisième trimestre 2016 (juste après le référendum), la croissance britannique a été inférieure de 5,2 % à celle du groupe témoin, les investissements inférieurs de 13,7 %, le commerce de marchandises de 13,6 % et celui des services de 7,9 %. Cela ne signifie pas que l’économie britannique a stagné depuis 2016, mais simplement qu’elle a moins prospéré que celle des pays témoins.

It follows a recent study by the Centre for European Reform (CER) which found Brexit was “largely to blame” for billions being lost in trade and tax revenues in recent years.
The think tank said that by the end of last year, Britain’s economy was 5.2 per cent – or £31bn – smaller than it would have been without Brexit and the Covid pandemic.
“We can’t blame Brexit for all of the 5.2 per cent GDP shortfall … but it’s apparent that Brexit is largely to blame,” said John Springford, author of the CER study.

Brexit largely explains a shortfall of 5.2% – or £31bn – in the British economy at the end of last year, according to the Centre for European Reform. 

Camino Mortera-Martinez, head of the Brussels office of the Centre for European Reform (CER), described enlargement as the "trickiest" issue facing the EU and noted that the Commission's early lobbying on member states for Ukraine membership "is working.""Many think that Ukraine is not ready to join the EU yet, but they know the EU cannot afford to keep it in the waiting room for years, as it has done with other candidates like North Macedonia," she said.