Press

EU-focused Centre for European Reform  is more open than most about its sponsors. It told the Bureau that 11 per cent of its £1.2m annual turnover came from the financial services industry. These funders include Barclays, Citi, Deutsche Bank AG, JP Morgan and UBS, to name a few.

The Centre for European Reform has gained a strong reputation for its coverage of European economic affairs, especially because of the work of Simon Tilford, who has offered consistent clarity on Germany's role in the eurozone crisis.

Charles Grant, a regular Eurostar traveller and director of the Centre of European Reform, said he had faced delays of more than an hour disembarking, complaining that UK officials were worse than those in any authoritarian regime he had dealt with.  "The UK has a problem with its reputation and image at the moment. I do believe this borders problem – at airports and at St Pancras – is reinforcing the overall impression that we don’t like foreigners ...and that we are shutting ourselves off from the world," he told the Financial Times.

"The fundamental problem with the eurozone is that what happens at the federal level in the United States still happens at the national level in the eurozone," said Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the CER. "Unless they correct that flaw, individual states are going to run into trouble, and when they run into trouble, the markets are going to question how much political appetite there is to keep that country within the eurozone."

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, said there was "a de facto dirty deal" between Britain and France, whereby London ultimately retained the rebate and French farmers continued to receive Brussels handouts. ..."What the Brits don't understand is they don't have any leverage," Mr Grant said.

"There's a greater and greater political trend toward an emphasis only on the eurozone," said Hugo Brady, a senior research fellow at the CER, referring to the 17 countries that use the currency.

Jo Johnson, un député conservateur - et frère du maire de Londres - va dans le même sens, dans un récent article pour le CER : "Une UE sans la Grande-Bretagne est désormais évoquée comme une vraie possibilité."

David Rennie, political editor of The Economist, puts it this way in an excellent report, 'The Continent or the Open Sea: Does Britain have a European future?', published by the CER. "The favoured strategy at the heart of current British diplomacy revolves around securing close bilateral relationships, which can enable the creation of coalitions of the willing when needed".