Britain’s chief negotiator says Brexit was a vote of confidence in Britain – the Tory Party must rediscover that spirit in 2023. I seem to remember May and Johnson both won votes of confidence but sank without trace soon after. Frost has a touching faith in democracy, perhaps we should all vote to be wealthy and successful? Our troubles would soon be over, wouldn't they?
Brexit was sold in 2016 as an easy win (not by Frost admittedly). The EU is holding Britain back and if we leave, the nation will simply leap ahead like a coiled spring being released. More money for the NHS, higher wages by stopping cheap labour, and so on. Nobody was going to have to break their backs, it would simply be so as if by magic. Nobody explained how.
Now Frost in a strange musical analogy likens the PM to an orchestra conductor and muses if Sunak has the right qualities for the job and if so, asks what kind of political music we want him to conduct.
“What many people seem to want in the next 18 months is a gentle adagio, quiet, undemanding – politics as a Classic FM Relax playlist. Politics in a style that does not challenge, does not confront – and does not strain the fragile unity of the Conservative Party.”
"Those who advocate a focus on stability, on calm, on managerialism, often seem to believe current political and economic forces must be accommodated, not changed. If you think the Conservative brand is irrevocably damaged, that young people will never vote Conservative again, that health costs will always go up, that people always want higher spending, then obviously you will go down the road we have seen in recent years."
You can see his point. Brexit has allowed politicians to flex their muscles and do things differently to have a conductor who is more energetic and prepared to push the orchestra into less comfortable stuff. Think the LSO becoming more like ELO.
Unfortunately, Truss and Kwarteng tried that back in September. Lord Hannan (in the same newspaper) has already concluded that people don’t want “deregulation and low taxes” after the now disgraced pair had the country teetering on the brink of disaster. Frost appears to think voters still hanker for chaos, meltdown, and financial disaster.
I am not sure they do.
He urges Conservatives “to fight for the party and not be tempted by a Reform UK vote.” Good luck with that. The forces he helped unleash are still going to be demanding all the impossible delusions that Johnson and Gove claimed in 2016. They are already flocking to Reform.
Frost wants to "see the government defending Brexit effectively. Somehow, we have allowed our exit from the EU to become defined as the problem not part of the solution to our problems."
That is because our exit from the EU has indeed created problems and it is precisely those problems that are defining Brexit. You can't escape it.
Some of the things he writes are downright bizarre. What does this mean:
“We must never stop reminding people that leaving the EU was a constitutional project to re-establish democracy and self-government. When people say 'Brexit has failed', what they are actually saying is 'Self-government has failed'. How can that be a plausible proposition about the world’s most successful constitutional democracy? Our opponents should be made to feel embarrassed to say it.”
Err no. What we are saying is that a policy has failed and the government that gave us that policy ergo must have failed. It's nothing to do with self-government. We and all the rest of the EU27 have always been self-governing, we just decided to work together to help the prosperity of all.
If you reject the notion of deep cooperation in favour of sovereignty, you are bound to pay a price and it is this dishonesty that is at the heart of Brexit's problems. If voters had been told it meant chaos, loss of rights, and a very different Britain they may not have voted to leave the EU. If they had done so, the Tory party wouldn't be in the difficulty they are now.
He talks of wanting "the government to challenge the voodoo economics of the pro-EU think tanks and stop allowing Philip Hammond’s gloomy economic assessment of Brexit to be endlessly replicated.”
We are just entering what the Bank of England has called the "longest recession in 100 years" so it's not easy to persuade voters that all the 'gloomy assessments' were just 'voodoo economics'. It is all too real. We are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis and Brexit is seen by many to be (a) partly to blame and (b) entirely self-inflicted.
Conservatives, Frost says, need to convince the electorate that "we have the answers to the big challenges the country faces. In my experience voters are very well aware of these challenges and are frustrated that politicians don’t seem willing to speak honestly about them."
They can't speak honestly because the problems are caused by the very policy he says they should be defending. It is an impossibility.
There are no solutions offered in the article only (as usual) calls for solutions from others. His idea is for the party to establish, "a political team to devise genuinely Conservative responses to these huge problems – the health service, energy production and resilience, housing and planning reform, government and civil service reform, getting spending and taxes down again – and shaping them into a form in which they can be put to the electorate. After all, an election is coming before long. It could come sooner than many think. Let us make sure we are ready."
One might think if the party hadn't obsessed about Brexit for the last seven years they might have gotten around to doing something about the "huge problems" he talks about, which have been growing while ministers and civil servants have occupied themselves with such a self-destructive policy.
It is all a waste of time now. The party's fate is sealed.
