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Leading contenders in the race to become Britain's next prime minister have called for the controversial clause, designed to avoid a border checks between Ireland and Northern Ireland, to be changed or scrapped.
"To me no backstop is effectively the same as no-deal because what the backstop is is ... a legally operable guarantee that we will never see a hard border emerge again," Varadkar told RTE radio. "If we don't have that, that is no deal."