Hello and welcome. My name is Sophia Bash and you're listening to the CER podcast.

Hello, I'm here with John Springford today, who's an economist and the research director here at the Center for European Reform.

And he has just written a new policy brief, which will

have just been published when this podcast comes out. And in this new piece, John, you explore

what would be the best possible trade deal that the EU and the UK could negotiate, could hope

for after Brexit, based on original empirical research into the costs of trade between Britain and the

EU. And indeed, the title of your piece does give away some of your findings. The paper is called

Brexiting Swiss style, the best possible UK-EU trade deal. Let's start with the motivation for your

research. What was your starting point when you set out to write this paper?

Well, so a lot of people have been complaining about people just rim-owning and saying,

oh, it's just going to be so difficult.

So I thought, right, given the red lines that we have between the EU 27 and Theresa May have laid out,

what is the softest hard Brexit that I can think of,

which might work both politically and technically up to a point.

So, you know, the motivation was, let's find out what that might be.

And what do we know about the different sectors which the trade negotiation are going to have to

cover? And what do we know about the 27s interests when it comes to this kind of sectoral bargaining,

which is at the heart of all trade agreements, and what are the UK's interests?

And then let's try and think through what the best possible deal might be.

Okay, so there's a lot to unpack in there.

But you've mentioned that the most important thing is to keep the costs

of the divorce down, to keep down the costs of trade. And this is really one of the main themes

...