The EU side regularly points out that the UK government hasn’t presented any detailed proposals on what it wants to replace the backstop with. At a Cabinet committee meeting this week, the Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay set about explaining to ministerial colleagues why this was. As I report in The Sun this morning, He told the Committee that the EU had set three tests for any new proposal. First, it must avoid any infrastructure on the border that would be incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement. Second, it must protect the integrity of the EU’s single market. Third, it mustn’t involve any checks on the island of Ireland.
Barclay said that the UK could meet the first two of these tests, but not the third. He said that there was no point in presenting any detailed proposals until the EU shifted on the question of checks. One government source explains that if the UK did the ‘EU would nuke the proposals and we would be in chaos’.
So, the challenge for Boris Johnson is to get the EU to move on this third point.
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