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A solution to some of this comes to hand in the form of a paper by the Centre for European Reform’s Sam Lowe — “Big Sam” to give his official Trade Secrets title, though not that Big Sam. Lowe argues that the EU can adapt its current preference schemes for developing countries — Everything But Arms for the least-developed countries and the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) for middle-income countries — to exempt them from the carbon border measure.

Sam Lowe, a trade expert at the Centre of European Reform, says businesses have found themselves caught between tough regulations and unmanageable costs. “Lots of these companies are still struggling because they can’t get advice. They can’t get customs agents to do it for them. They’re struggling to provide the necessary information, or they just can’t take on the additional cost when it comes to trading with Europe.”

“They want a world without nuclear weapons, but acknowledge that it will take time to get there — they’ll first have to find other ways to reassure eastern and central European partners,” said Sophia Besch, an analyst with the Centre for European Reform in Berlin.

The Centre for European Reform estimated that quitting the single market and customs union at the end of December 2020 had cut trade in goods by £3.5 billion, or five per cent, by February.It stressed that this was on top of an £8 billion, or ten per cent, hit to trade between the June 2016 Brexit referendum and leaving the single market at the end of 2020, a period which saw a sharp fall in the value of the Pound.

Camino Mortera-Martínez, investigadora del Centre for European Reform, opina que el incidente es “el síntoma de una enfermedad más grave”, que es el “tipo de liderazgo que tenemos en la UE”. “Una presidencia será tan importante como la persona que esté al frente decida. Puede ser muy buena, irrelevante o mala”, sostiene la analista, que añade: “Dudo de que vaya a dimitir, pero también de que vayan a renovarlo el próximo año”.

John Springford of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, said that non-tariff barriers caused by the TCA that made trade with Europe relatively harder, would affect both goods and services.  “For example, the UK shellfish industry finds it much harder to export to the EU, as we’ve seen. Its costs go up, its market shrinks and some of its workers and capital shift over time out of fishing and into less productive, lower-paid economic activity,” he explained.

While in America gross fixed capital formation grew by just under 1% a year in 2016-20, in Europe it shrank, according to an analysis by Christian Odendahl and John Springford of the Centre for European Reform.