There are suggestions that Liz Truss might offer David Frost a senior position in her cabinet, even as foreign secretary but more likely as chief of staff. It would be a terrible choice and would be seen in Europe as a sign we will soon be back with business as usual and another fractious relationship with Brussels. But it’s the kind of message she wants to send I think. There is little hope in the EU that Truss will represent a change but Frost would be seen as highly provocative to say the least.
Anyway, he has written a paper for Policy Exchange with the title. Holy illusions: Reality based politics and sustaining the Brexit revolution.
Needless to say there is very little reality in it and using Brexit in the same phrase is surely an oxymoron. It is the Frost doctrine on what his own personal plan for government would be but I wouldn’t bother reading it because you probably already know what it says.
He harks back to Margaret Thatcher when she first came to power in 1979 and in doing so he essentially disowns the last twelve years as if some other unnamed party has been in government since 2010. You would think Cameron, May and Johnson were all rabid left wingers and Truss is coming in to launch a Thatcherite free-market revolution.
The paper is not much more than 26 pages of sophistry and waffle and I wouldn't take his ideas too seriously except to say that he thinks the Tory party hasn’t really been serious in the recent past about tax and spending cuts. I don't now what he thinks the last decade of austerity was all about. Perhaps he might tell us one day.
He actually uses the word 'revolution' with respect to Brexit and says, “Brexit in itself creates neither huge economic advantage nor disadvantage. It is a tool that gives us back full democracy and puts all the levers back in our hands.”
So, all that about £350 million a week and signing trade deals to boost exports was apparently all nonsense since it wasn’t about getting any economic advantage, Brexit just meant we can make ourselves poorer and less influential.
He compares what is to come with Thatcher:
"The pre-1979 Conservative Opposition was not a group of inherently wise strategic thinkers. Like all politicians, they found it difficult to focus on the long run and the important under the pressures of managing day-to-day politics. Nevertheless, the sponsorship of Keith Joseph paid off: Margaret Thatcher was persuaded, and “Stepping Stones” formed an important intellectual underpinning of the early years of the Thatcher Government.
"The value of the exercise was in forcing decision-takers to contemplate the measures that were necessary to solve Britain’s problems and then to try to create the political conditions in which those measures were possible. It was an attempt to change the prevailing mood of defeatism, in which measures incapable of dealing with Britain’s problems seemed to be the only ones possible. As Hoskyns [Sir John Hoskyns - policy adviser to Thatcher] wrote in his report, 'It is not enough to settle for policies which cannot save us, on the grounds that they are the only ones which are politically possible or administratively convenient'.”
These questions Frost says are, "self-evidently, once again relevant today."
He seems to believe that Brexit has returned us to 1979 with a ‘mood of defeatism’ pervading the nation and in a way he’s right, a growing number of people now think (as he did in 2016) that Brexit is a disaster.
So he wants to ‘sustain the Brexit revolt’ which he says has “suffered a setback” under Johnson because of a “failure to capitalise on the mood for change and its reversion to establishment policy-making norms on taxation, on net zero, and on regulation meant that a huge amount of momentum for change was lost.”
You would think Johnson’s cabinet was packed with remoaners instead of arch Brexiteers. What have they not been doing that Frost thinks should have been done? He sets out three 'pillars' which he says are essential:
The first pillar is to begin the process of reversing the economic trends of recent years, get markets working properly again, get the state back to a normal size, and re-establish the cultural, political, and economic value of freedom. These are the only economics that work and there is no avoiding them.
The second pillar is to start to rebuild an effective state, capable of delivering results. That involves showing that an effective state is not a big state — indeed in many ways the bigger a state is the less effective it is — and indeed that the state must shrink from its current size over time.
The third and final pillar is to make a determined effort to re-establish the viability, the attractiveness, and the cohesion of the United Kingdom as a country and to bed in the view irreversibly that leaving the EU was the necessary precursor to achieving this.
To achieve these 'pillars' we need, he says, a short-run plan, a long-run plan and a communications strategy. I won't trouble you with all the details because they amount to more tax and spending cuts and slashing regulations as you might have guessed. There is however, one short-run thing he wants which is to 'resolve the NI Protocol issue so as to put Northern Ireland firmly, durably and fully within the UK.'
He is too modest to mention how Northern Ireland came to be thought of as not durably and fully within the UK. He does say:
"Just as in the Army of a hundred years ago, we have today created a country that 'faithfully mirror[s] its makers’ ideals, equipment, and mental attitude'. That is the problem and that is what needs to change. The habits of the last two decades will not enable us to make a successful country in the next two.
"What needs to be done will be turbulent and disruptive. But it is necessary. Everyone will need to play their part. There is genuinely no alternative if we wish to heal the divisions, get to grips with the underlying causes of generational inequality, and hand on a better society to our children."
What I think this means is that Brexit, far from being 'done' as Johnson claimed in 2019, has not even started. What is to come will be 'turbulent and disruptive' - whatever that means. Watch out.
It’s an admission that what he is suggesting is basically impossible. It’s all very well talking about having to do stuff beyond what is politically possible but what he implies is that Brexit means doing what is politically impossible. In 1979 people may have wanted big changes but I am not sure that's true now and certainly not the spending reductions and regulation slashing which he implies.
Is it going to happen? No.
To see the Dystopian future that men like Frost are aiming for read this Twitter thread about a speech given by Nigel Farage to a CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) in Dallas recently:
Nigel Farage has spoken and it might be good to listen to the things he said, which CPAC Dallas cheered to the absolute raftersHere's what he said:— Laura Jedeed (@LauraJedeed) August 6, 2022
"Ladies and Gentlemen, we are under attack!," Farage opens. "The threat is not external! The biggest threat we face is from within. The biggest threat we face is the fifth column in all our countries that is attempting to destroy the family unit, Judeo-Christian Culture..."
"Farage describes Critical Race Theory as "this terrible virus, worse than anywhere else in teh world. This is a Marxist attempt to break Western civilization! A Marxist attempt to destroy everything we are. And we are going to fight back hard against it!"
ENORMOUS applause
"Farage lists several insufficiently conservative international leaders, including Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison of Australia. He says that setbacks at the ballot box are due to parties being insufficiently conservative and the audience sure does like that talking point"
And if you think that's mad, Andrew Neil, writing in The Mail blames it all on the, "Left Blob, which is now omnipresent in British public life, dominant in the citadels of power, including most of the media (above all the broadcasters), the Civil Service, the NHS, the legal system (including the judiciary), education (especially the universities), social media, most public bodies and private charities. It’s even wheedling its way into boardrooms."
We are certainly living in dangerous times.
