German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble told Tagesspiegel in an interview published yesterday, “We want to keep Britain close to us. London’s financial centre, for instance, serves the European economy as a whole. London offers financial services in a quality that one doesn’t find on the continent. That would indeed change a bit after a separation, but we must find reasonable rules here with Britain.” He also stressed, “We don’t want to punish the Brits for their decision” to leave the EU.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the European Council summit in Malta last Friday, “The history of recent years has shown that there will be multi-speed EU, and not all members will participate in the same steps of integration.”

This comes as MEP Daniel Hannan wrote in the Telegraph, “Let’s use Brexit to set a precedent, creating an outer tier linked to the EU by free trade, military alliance, and intergovernmental co-operation…Such a status could then be extended to any other nearby state – not just Iceland and Switzerland but, in time, Morocco, Israel, Ukraine and, more pertinently, other EU countries that wanted to swap full membership for something looser.”