At Westminster, it has the august name of the Malthouse compromise, after the housing minister, Kit Malthouse, who united two warring factions of the Tory party over the Brexit plan. In Brussels, it is known in less lofty terms. The “bonkers no-deal plan” is how one EU official described the compromise, reflecting a consensus that it is a non-starter. But why is the EU so opposed?

A recap: what is the Malthouse compromise?

The main aim of the plan is to take the sting out of the Irish backstop, the fallback arrangements to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland. The EU would be offered a choice between two variants of the current withdrawal agreement. Plan A involves extending the transition period to December 2021 and would ditch the backstop in favour of a basic free-trade agreement, using “proven solutions” to avoid border checks. Plan B is a managed no-deal that would extend the transition until December 2021 to give both sides time to prepare for the collapse of existing trade arrangements.

The EU does not want to restart negotiations

For the EU, Brexit negotiations finished on 25 November 2018, when Theresa May and fellow EU leaders signed off the withdrawal agreement, the 585-page legal text painstakingly negotiated over 18 months. While May hopes to keep the Tory party together, the EU has many other priorities. Although the EU is open to redrafting the non-binding political declaration, should UK red lines change, it has repeatedly ruled out reopening the treaty. The prime minister’s decision to renege on the deal she made with EU leaders in November has exasperated officials and deepened mistrust.

The EU sees the Irish backstop as non-negotiable

Contrary to the claims of Malthouse supporters, the EU sees nothing new in the proposals or other “alternative arrangements” for the border mooted at Westminster. While Brussels has promised to examine alternative arrangements, including technology after Brexit, to help the UK avoid falling into the backstop, it does not see these solutions arriving anytime soon. The EU’s deputy Brexit negotiator, Sabine Weyand, said last week that negotiators had looked at “every border on this earth [and] every border the EU has with a third country” and there was “simply no way you can do away with checks and controls”.

Fact-checking « alternative arrangements » re #Brexit backstop: Can technology solve the Irish border problem? Short answer: not in the next few years. https://t.co/9xBhSGhntr — Sabine Weyand (@WeyandSabine) February 3, 2019



Won’t the rest of the EU break with Ireland on the border issue?

Some have speculated that the EU’s other 26 countries will abandon Ireland on the backstop, fearing a no-deal Brexit. So far, there is no sign of that happening. The EU, a peace project and an organisation composed of small countries, thinks it is vital to prioritise Ireland over a departing member state. But there is also self-interest. The EU wants to protect the integrity of its single market. The current alternative arrangements mooted at Westminster are seen as a threat to the internal market. Inadequate checks or lack of alignment between the UK and EU could mean that American chlorinated chickens, dangerous toys and all kinds of tariff-free products would start leaking into the European market via the backdoor of the Irish border.

Even countries with strained relations with Brussels, such as Poland and Hungary, show no or limited appetite for helping the UK. Poland climbed down on a proposal for a time-limited backstop, while Hungary is in line with other member states. “The only way to deal with Brexit is to deal with it from a common standpoint,” Hungarian government spokesman Zoltán Kovács told journalists last week.

But doesn’t the EU always renegotiate at the last minute?

Many Brexit supporters contend that the EU always comes up with a compromise at five minutes to midnight. So far, there is no sign that is happening, and there are no Brexit meetings planned between May and her EU counterparts.

While the EU has come up with numerous post-negotiation fixes in the past, such as guarantees to secure Belgium’s ratification of the EU-Canada trade deal, or Irish ratification of the Lisbon treaty, these tend to be fine-tuning rather than reconstruction of the entire deal.