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Centre for European Reform trade expert Sam Lowe said he was surprised the UK agreed to eventually eliminate agricultural tariffs.
“When it comes to tariffs, we have a constituency-based electoral system which sees farmers heavily concentrated in Conservative backyards. The fact we are discussing duty free and quota-free trade is something that will have shocked everyone.”

"The language on China certainly goes much further than anything NATO has said before,” Ian Bond, Director of Foreign Policy at the think tank the Centre for European Reform, told Euronews. “I think this does reflect an increasing realisation that China is developing in ways that we hadn’t hoped for and perhaps we didn’t expect a few years ago when the talk was of China becoming a responsible stakeholder in the international system.”

Zach Meyers, a research fellow with the Centre for European Reform think-tank, said the EU’s moves “are unlikely to work and could even dissuade countries from agreeing to the OECD package”.

Sam Lowe, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think-tank, described the UK-EEA deal as “necessary” and a “good thing” but said its success depended on the baseline of measurement. “If you are comparing it to normal free trade agreements, then it is certainly true that the deal has raised the bar in some areas, for example mutual recognition of professional qualifications,” he said.