Lord Frost: Brexit IS working but the EU is trying to ruin it
BREXIT is working despite the efforts of Brussels to wreck it, Lord Frost said yesterday.
The former Brexit minister said there was ‘no cause for regrets’ about the decision to quit the EU – but urged the Government to move much faster to realise the full benefits.
In a speech to mark the sixth anniversary of the referendum vote, he said the UK had made clear democratic gains since leaving the EU. And he said criticism of the economic impact of Brexit was ‘generated by those with an axe to grind and cannot be supported by any objective analysis of the figures’.
Lord Frost insisted that global events like the pandemic and the war in Ukraine made it ‘hard to be confident what, if any, changes in UK trade are due to Brexit’.
But he said that leaving the EU should be viewed as a ‘gateway to national renewal’ rather than an end in itself, and that the Government and civil service had been too slow to seize the advantages. Lord Frost said that 40 years of EU membership had resulted in ‘policy elites’ losing the habit of ‘defining goals, creating strategies to deliver them, and crafting policies that support the strategies’.
He added: ‘They have found it very diffitions cult to draw up genuine proposals for liberalisation... it is as if we have forgotten how to govern.’
Lord Frost became one of the Prime Minister’s closest allies during the Brexit negotiations, when he hammered out a deal that enabled Boris Johnson to fight and win the 2019 election. But their relahave become strained after he quit the Government in December in protest at the direction it was taking on Covid lockdowns and tax.
Yesterday he criticised the PM for making ‘factually incorrect statements’ about employment levels in the UK, in reference to a claim made by Mr Johnson that there are more people in work now than before the pandemic. Addressing the think-tank UK in a Changing Europe, he said: ‘If Brexit is to produce a visible economic payoff then it [the Government] needs to raise its game massively.’
Lord Frost also accused the EU of trying to frustrate Brexit, describing the attitude of Brussels as ‘not encouraging’ amid nitpicking over Northern Ireland and ‘policing UK goods trade as if it had not come from a neighbour with a highly reputable and transparent policy regime’.
He also noted that Brexit is ‘not complete yet’, particularly in Northern Ireland, where the onerous EU checks on goods arriving from the rest of the UK are blamed for causing serious economic and societal problems. Ministers confirmed yesterday that the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which will give ministers sweeping powers to suspend the checks, will go before MPs on Monday.
‘Government needs to raise its game’