The EU’s Brexit unicorns

The Brexit talks are at a critical stage as we approach this week’s European Council summit. The rumoured landing zone for a deal – essentially a version of the ‘Chequers’ proposals for customs, but applied to Northern Ireland only – is promising. But to get there, both sides will need to compromise – and that applies to the EU as much as it does to the UK.

In the Brexit debate, both politicians and governments in the UK are routinely accused of putting forward ‘unrealistic’ or ‘non-negotiable’ proposals. The word ‘unicorn’ is thrown around and often, the criticism is fair. Simplistic demands from UK politicians to ‘simply take out the backstop’, for example, have become so commonplace that they have become a semi-ironic meme on Brexit Twitter.

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Yet the EU is often just as guilty of proposing ideas which the UK is never going to accept, and this has received far less scrutiny.