Lord Frost gave a speech on Monday at the Centre for Policy Studies, a right wing think tank much favoured by Margaret Thatcher. The speech is worth preserving, as are other speeches made by the former diplomat, former head of the Scotch Whisky Association, and former chief Brexit negotiator. They ought to be kept for future reference and perhaps as evidence in case there is a public inquiry into Brexit and who bears most responsibility. Frost will be near the top of the list.
He seemed to be a remainer in 2016 at the SWA but was described recently as the Brexit hardliner’s hardliner. He has clearly been on quite a journey.
The speech is titled: If we can’t persuade people that freedom is the best way forward, we lose. This portrays Britain as having been imprisoned in the EU, a notion most normal people will find hard to accept. We entered the EU of our own free will and we left it in the same way, wrongly in my view and aided by a lot of lies of the kind he uses nowadays.
The oppression he claims is just as illusory as the freedom he says is the best way forward.
In my opinion he consistently demonstrates he knows little and has learned nothing over the past two years and his speech shows that. I want to take a look at a few parts of it, which was typical of the stuff he's been coming out with recently. Firstly (my added emphasis):
And that [persuading people that free markets and free institutions are the best way forward] is all the more important because we are on our own now. Our destiny is in our own hands and we have to step up and compete at a global level. It is no longer good enough to be the most attractive economy in the EU.
We face global competition and we have to benchmark ourselves against the whole of the world. That is a big challenge – for government as well as the private sector.
We haven’t been globally competitive for years. One of our biggest exports for example is cars, but we haven’t got a British car industry. Exports are by Japanese and German companies assembling cars here. The government's flawed thinking is that we are somehow world-leading but the world for reasons unexplained, don't seem to realise it. He has no idea how big a 'challenge' that will be.
Next:
We are phasing in our new domestic agriculture regime, while our immigration system has been reformed to give us much greater control over who comes into the UK and facilitate the shift to a high-wage, high-skill economy.
The ‘greater control’ he talks about is the madly bureaucratic immigration system which is delivering labour shortages across the board. In agriculture a story in The Guardian this week explains it. A strawberry grower said last year, he recruited 88 British staff under the government-backed Pick for Britain campaign. “Most of them didn’t last three hours,” he says. “Imagine the paperwork, to put 88 people on the books.” Only two people stayed for more than a few days." Think about it.
But we are also short of drivers, nurses, doctors, social care workers, vets, butchers, builders and just about every trade or profession you can think of. How this will help the economy grow goodness knows. Next:
And we are conducting a systematic review of all the Retained EU Law which we have inherited, laws which never received proper democratic scrutiny before being implemented in the UK, and looking at ways to reform and change it so we can put ourselves on the best possible basis to meet the competition.
This government allows zero scrutiny of trade deals and almost zero scrutiny of major pieces of legislation flashing through the House. MPs waived the EU Withdrawal Agreement through in a few hours and are now complaining about it. The idea that we have ‘proper democratic scrutiny’ now and didn’t before is risible. In fact it is the opposite. Next:
The formula for success as a country is well known. Low taxes – I agree with the Chancellor, as he said in his Budget speech, our goal must be to reduce taxes.
Taxes are at a seventy year high and we are still mired in austerity. The OBR are forecasting anaemic growth over the next few years so don’t expect taxes to fall anytime soon. Borrowing last month was the second highest on record for an October at £18 billion. If inflation bites and interest rates have to increase, debt interest will take a larger portion of state spending and we will be in a real downward spiral.
We can’t carry on as we were before and if after Brexit all we do is import the European social model we will not succeed. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the European Union from Britain with Brexit, only to import that European model after all this time.
Everybody thinks this means social and employment protections will be weakened. Britain already has the most flexible labour market, with lower job security, lower sick pay and pensions than comparable west European nations.
So we need to reform fast, and those reforms are going to involve doing things differently from the EU. If we stick to EU models, but behind our own tariff wall and with a smaller market, we obviously won’t succeed.
There have been so many red tape initiatives and drives to cut regulations that I’ve lost count. Oliver Letwin started it in 2012 and there have been three or four since. IDS with his TIGRR group submitted another report in April. We have known we’re leaving the EU’s single market for over four years but even now we have no idea what these ‘reforms’ are, what regulations might be scrapped and in what time scale or even if any of them will be politically feasible.
Every time they go through the statute book looking for excessive regulation they end up with nothing. The Grenfell tragedy showed just how much MORE regulation is needed. And in any case, the notion we are being held back by over zealous EU law is just crazy.
Quite apart from this, talking up divergence in regulations while trying to persuade the EU that there should be little or nothing in the way of border controls between us and them is hardly calculated to be helpful.
While he waffles on he might want to look around and smell the coffee. The United Kingdom itself is in danger. Take a look at this tweet:
Flemish President states Flanders needs to start preparing now for #ScottishIndependence. He says that "when Scotland becomes independent in a few years and re-joins the EU, our harbours (Antwerp/Zeebrugge) need to be ready to support that transition" https://t.co/V5jgkN7QVh
— John G. Burns (@ScaryHighlander) November 22, 2021
While he makes vacuous speeches other countries just get on with it.
