Lord Frost has an article in this morning's Telegraph which smacks of desperation. The man described recently as a low ranking civil servant totally out of his depth in the Brexit negotiations, is obviously becoming concerned that his Jerry-built monstrosity is in danger of being demolished - as he should be. His Telegraph piece: The ultra-Remainers are mobilising to prepare the ground for rejoining the EU, is sub-titled, It is so important to get on with our own reforms to improve productivity and growth. All the levers are now in our hands.
It is one of his usual efforts to play down the malign impact of his Brexit and talk up the 'opportunities' - the ones that all of the previous Brexit secretaries have struggled even to define. Jacob Rees-Mogg is the latest incumbent still scouring Whitehall for some tangible benefit and reduced to having to ask readers of The Sun for their ideas.
I honestly believe Frost knows Brexit is not going to last and in his own lifetime it will all come crashing down, shown to have been the greatest foreign policy error and act of gross self-harm in our entire history.
In any case, if I was him, I wouldn’t worry about 'ultra-remainers' (AKA sensible people) but the voters Johnson convinced that Brexit would be good for Britain, those who voted to leave in 2016. An IPSOS poll recently shows only 28% of respondents think Brexit has had a positive impact while 45% think it’s had a negative one.
Here’s the Tweet:
Within the new data drop from @IpsosUK is this - attitudes to Brexit remain remarkably stable, particularly when compared to shifts in views on the political parties, the PM and the economy since January. https://t.co/UlkThccQgp pic.twitter.com/s3h1yawdJ2
— Alan Wager (@DrAlanWager) April 6, 2022
These are terrible figures for Brexiteers but not altogether surprising. I think more and more people are seeing that Brexit is a slow burning fire and companies are experiencing the impact of all the barriers to trade that Frost has helped to erect with no counter balancing improvement in trade elsewhere.
As for the ‘levers’ now being in our hands, yesterday the Environment select committee published a damning report about labour shortages crippling the food and farming sectors. This is something we now have total control over but it has resulted in an issue that the committee say will ‘permanently’ shrink the food and farming sector unless the government tackles the problem.
Does anyone think the government is going to address the labour shortages impacting food processing and farming? The select committee's report is interesting by the way and I'll cover it in more detail tomorrow.
It's odd to me how those on the extreme right think the private sector can solve every problem while the civil service (over which they have total control) is uniquely hopeless, and then believe in designing a system of labyrinthine immigration controls that is throttling key industries and operated by civil servants. It will never work.
Frost castigates the doomsayers in the OBR for suggesting that GDP will be 4 per cent lower in 2030 than it otherwise would have been. Forgetting that Brexit was sold on a lot of implausible predictions - notably by Gove and Johnson, he says:
"This is of course not a fact but a prediction, though the distinction seems lost on many. Moreover it is a prediction based on an assumption: that higher trade causes higher productivity. But the association is just as plausibly the other way round. The link between trade and productivity growth found in many analyses of Brexit is often based on evidence from emerging markets or ex-Communist economies, where increased trade went with huge improvements in the way the countries were run more broadly. It doesn’t hold up anything like so clearly for advanced economies. Indeed, the UK’s own trade openness has grown since the financial crash, but productivity has not."
He overlooks the uncomfortable fact that most EU member states have higher productivity under EU rules and seems to insist that exceptionally, we in Britain can only succeed if we design our own unique rules. I wouldn't bet on that.
Even if it was true, what good would it do us if we can't sell goods into the EU single market (a) because we are undercutting their employment and social policies or (b) the goods don't meet EU standards?
He contradicts the explicit comment in the last OBR Fiscal outlook after Sunak's spring statement about Britain becoming "a less trade intensive economy, with trade as a share of GDP falling 12 per cent since 2019, two and a half times more than in any other G7 country." Frost claims this morning that, "The UK’s own trade openness has grown since the financial crash." No it has not.
Frost says it is "important to get on with our own domestic reforms" so I am sure he will have read a report that appeared last week from The UK in a Changing Europe, when they published a third regulatory divergence tracker detailing the changes that have taken place since January 2021 when we got our hands on the levers. The results are absolutely derisory.
It’s not that there has been no divergence, there has, both active (consultation on changes to air passenger compensation or possible minor changes to an on-line safety law) and passive where the EU change their rules and we don’t. There has been no big-bang and a lot of fiddling around the edges. This is what might be troubling Lord Frost.
Where there has been bigger changes - to immigration policy for example - it is a disaster area which threatens to 'permanently shrink our food and farming sector.'
This remember, is six years after the referendum and still with no tangible benefits and no impact assessment published by the government.
Frost ends by quoting an economist, Tim Worstall, who said “the EU had 1973 to 2020 to show that UK membership was a good idea. 47 years. Let’s measure Brexit by that same standard” and of course he agrees with that.
The problem for Frost is that the Labour party went into the 1983 election, barely eight years after the 1975 referendum, on a manifesto pledge to take us OUT of the EU. Also, the single market - a centre piece Margaret Thatcher's European policy - didn't start until 1993 and in the main it did show EU membership was a good idea, I can personally testify to that.
Ukraine's desperate efforts to join the EU shows how highly membership is valued. Georgia and Moldova have also applied.
No, Frost is a worried man, as he should be. History will paint him as fool who did more damage to this country that almost anyone before him.
