Negotiations between European governments and the UK on the form and shape of Brexit are reaching their denouement. Over the coming months, two fundamental principles will be at stake. Who decides the direction that Europe takes – elected governments of EU member states or unelected bureaucrats in Brussels? And what is the EU really about – abstract ideology or the prosperity and well-being of Europe’s citizens?

After Ireland, Malta will be the EU country whose economy will suffer the most in the event of a hard Brexit. That is the conclusion of a study commissioned before the British EU referendum by Bertelsmann Stiftung in collaboration with the Centre of International Economics at the Ifo Institut, University of Munich.

The EU as a whole would lose 1.5 per cent of GDP in the event of a hard Brexit according to the International Monetary Fund’s recent analysis. No responsible government would sign up to a plan that damages its citizens’ future prosperity.

After much political chaos and mis-direction, the UK government has finally found a fragile political pathway to put forward the Chequers plan – a template for future relations between the UK and the EU. It is now down to the leaders of the EU member states to make sure that serious negotiations take place over the summer and that some kind of agreement is reached before the end of the year. Intransigence on either side of the table would be irresponsible.

In essence, the Chequers plan calls for the UK to remain aligned with EU rules on trade in goods – including agricultural products – while being free to diverge on trade in services. The plan also calls for alignment on environmental and labour standards so that the UK does not gain an unfair competitive advantage. As part of the plan, the UK would also pay the EU some €40 billion in liabilities, participate in a number of EU programmes and regulatory frameworks, and continue to provide the EU with its security and defence capabilities which are the best in Europe and without which lives of EU citizens would be put at risk.

The plan fulfils many of the desired outcomes for a post-Brexit arrangement. It avoids a hard border between Ireland and N. Ireland (or between N. Ireland and the rest of the UK). It avoids chaos at ports of entry in Europe and the UK (the mayor of Calais is tearing his hair out at the prospect of a no-deal Brexit). It maintains the viability of European supply chains for European and UK manufacturers and does not give the UK any special treatment on trade in services.

Yes, there are many technical details still to be sorted. How customs and VAT arrangements will actually work in practice being the most obvious one. But technical details can be sorted. First of all, there needs to be an agreement of principle that this is the way to go.

After Ireland, Malta will be the EU country whose economy will suffer the most in the event of a hard Brexit

Apart from the technicalities, there are two potential objections in principle to the deal. The first is the EU’s mantra that the ‘four freedoms’ of the single market (free movement of goods, services, capital and people) are inseparable. This is, and has always been, a piece of ideological nonsense. The Single Market in services is, to put it mildly, incomplete. Banking union has been resisted by a number of Member States, particularly Germany, because it doesn’t suit its national interest. Nobody has forced them to move forward because the four freedoms are inseparable. The free movement of capital has proven to be a disaster – and not just for the EU. It is now widely accepted that excessive capital liberalisation has led to financial instability and a huge surge in money laundering and tax evasion. As regards the free movement of people, that is under threat from the immigration debate not from Brexit.

The second objection is the irrational fear that the UK is seeking to cherry-pick – take from the single market that which suits it and abandon that which does not. There is a fear that others will want to do the same.

What this argument ignores is that the UK, somewhat remarkably, is seeking to follow EU rules on goods without having a seat at the table in setting those rules. How many EU Member States would want the same deal – to lose their voting rights in exchange for cherry-picking?

Some will argue that the Chequers plan does not even have full political support in the UK, so it is not worth pursuing. That is the EU’s opportunity. If the EU were to be seen to swing behind the principles, even if not the details, of the Chequers plan it would significantly strengthen UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s negotiating hand at home, exerting significant pressure on the right-wing Conservative lunatics who would rather see a collapse in negotiations than any kind of sustained relationship between the UK and the EU.

It would also take the wind out of the sails of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) on which May depends for her majority. An unreconstructed sectarian party that would like to see the return of a hard border in Northern Ireland and the collapse of the Good Friday Agreement while being able to pin the blame on the UK government or, even better, on an intransigent EU.

There is little doubt that the EU bureaucrats will continue to find all sorts of reasons to blow holes in the Chequers plan. But Brexit has always been a political issue not a technocratic one. It demands a political solution. If the EU allows the technocratic tail to wag the political dog, if modern day unelected and unaccountable Rasputins like Martin Selmayr have more influence on negotiations than the heads of government of the EU Member States, then any semblance of democratic legitimacy of the whole EU project will have totally disappeared.

The EU has already made a historic mistake. By being intransigent and inflexible in its negotiations with David Cameron, it provided invaluable ammunition to the UK campaign to leave the EU. As a result, the EU has been weakened by the loss of one of its most important and influential member states. Will inflexibility and petty technocracy continue to define the EU all the way to its own self-destruction?

Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is a terrible system except for all the alternatives. The same can be said of the Chequers plan. It is time for heads of State to take charge. Time that everyone stopped making the perfect the enemy of the good and starts putting the interests of their citizens above abstract ideology that risks splitting the EU apart.

Dr Joe Zammit-Lucia is a co-founder and trustee of Radix, the think tank for the radical centre (radix.org.uk) and author of Backlash: Saving Globalisation From Itself.