David Frost, Lord Frost of Allenton, is a former British diplomat, civil servant, and politician who served as a minister of state in 2021 at the UK Cabinet Office. Among his many roles, Frost has served as ambassador to Denmark and as special adviser to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in Theresa May’s government. When Johnson became prime minister in 2019, Frost became chief negotiator for exiting the EU and then served as Johnson’s Europe adviser. In September 2020, Frost was elevated to the House of Lords as a life peer. He became minister of state and a full member of the cabinet in March 2021, but resigned from the government in December that year over lockdown policy. This interview was
conducted in London on 19 March 2024.
Sceptical Europeans often maintain that, if the UK had remained in the European Union, it could have played a key role in turning back the inexorable process of integration. David Frost disagrees. As a member state of the EU, Frost recalls, the UK often promoted views that differed from the mainstream European orthodoxy—but, despite winning tactical victories, it could never influence the strategic direction pursued by EU officials towards ever closer union. This is why Frost considers leaving the EU not only as having been necessary but an outright political success.
He thus argues that, despite growing electoral support, the emerging ‘sovereignist’ parties in Europe will never achieve a strong enough coalition to stall the European process of even greater integration. Any possible populist success in the European elections in June will neither arrest the tide of ‘cosmopolitan liberalism’ in Europe—nor affect the dominant ideology of technocratic rule by European law.
By contrast, Brexit has allowed Britain to reclaim its sovereignty. Frost gives Brexit a surprising score of 8/10. He notes that negotiations after 2019 delivered free trade agreements to the UK—and “an almost complete national independence.” Of course, he admits that “some things have gone wrong.” The big problem was the Northern Ireland Protocol (now known as the ‘Windsor Framework’), which keeps the European Court of Justice—as the supreme point of authority for goods and trade—in place for Northern Ireland. Nevertheless, the forthcoming general election will be the first in 50 years where the British nation can decide its overall destiny.
Brexit and ‘real conservatism’
Despite its release from European governance, Frost says the post-Brexit Conservative government hasn’t used its new powers effectively. The problem is that much of the British establishment “still lives in the mental world of EU membership.” He explains that despite Brexit, the business, media, and academic elites still refuse to diverge too much from EU and international law.
In this context, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is a major inhibition—stopping changes, for example, to the laws on migration. Frost has thus come to the “reluctant conclusion” that the British government will have to override— or leave—the ECHR in order to regain control of migration, reduce the number of refugees, protect clear borders, and restore citizenship. (Left unsaid is whether other countries within the EU may also have to consider a similar decision.)
In the meantime, the so-called Rwanda bill— technically, the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill—which is currently being debated in the House of Lords as a means of deterring illegal immigration doesn’t cut through this Gordian knot. In other words, Brexit afforded Britain the strategic opportunity to turn conservative policies into practice—yet the current UK government is simply not winning the argument. It is “doing very badly in the polls,” Frost admits, but this is largely because it is in some important respects conservative in name only.
What then would a real conservative philosophy involve? Frost thinks that the enthusiasm for ‘big state conservatism’—one that rejects the free market—is misguided. “We have forgotten the arguments and failed to make the case for market reforms,” he says. A free market economy, properly understood, should be compatible with rebuilding a sense of nationhood in “the social, political, and values sphere.” Yet, Frost claims, too many free marketeers today dismiss the importance of the nation-state when it comes to the promotion of international rules governing trade, investment, and the liberal norms of governance. The Brexit referendum was a reaction against this.
By contrast, nation-state conservatives today—that is, conservatives who want to rebuild national confidence, control borders, and rebuild a sense of pride in Britain—all too often tend to think the government should run the economy along conservative but ‘big state’ lines. This is a fallacy, says Frost. The only thing a conservative government should do is establish a business-friendly environment comprised of low taxes, limited government spending, affordable energy, high levels of freedom, and a free labour market. A properly conservative government would focus on what a government can usefully do—namely, control borders, provide for the national defence, and build a government machine that works.
The dangers of degrowth
This hasn’t happened. Instead, an elite obsession with ‘net zero’ and low-cost migrant labour has added to the current economic decline of both the UK and the West. EU membership—and, particularly, single market integration from the late 1990s—distorted the UK’s economy and labour market, and led to its increased dependence on high levels of low-wage, unskilled migrants. This has to end, Frost says. The “sugar feed of unlimited labour that doesn’t need training” needs unravelling. The economy must reorder itself.
At the same time, the cult of ‘net zero’ has become an ideology, not the basis of a policy. Frost accepts that there is evidence that human influenced climate change has occurred—but thinks that the rational policy response is to adapt and evolve a modern low-carbon energy sector based on a mix of gas and nuclear power. Instead, the UK has adopted a regressive renewables model that doesn’t deliver sufficient energy and requires an expensive back-up system. This only drives up fuel costs and requires people to adjust to a world of insufficient and expensive energy.
In his sober view, there is no apocalyptic environmental crisis; there is only an energy security problem that we can address pragmatically over time. “And we don’t need to destroy Western civilization—and the economy—to get there.”
But the ‘green’ worldview that sees humans as a problem for the planet also demands limits to growth. In fact, there is a fashionable enthusiasm among elites for ‘degrowth.’ And, says Frost, “the UK is starting to achieve degrowth” with per capita income in the UK actually having fallen over the last two years. A degrowth world prevents human flourishing; it breeds friction and social conflict as competition increases for diminishing national economic resources. The West’s economic success was built on growth and innovation—not degrowth.
Political fragmentation and national identity
Degrowth also feeds into destabilising social tensions over race, religion, and a lack of social cohesion. The UK, Frost avers, is a “successful multiethnic society—but not a successful multicultural society.” Political fragmentation reflects an attenuated sense of national identity.
A powerful academic and media orthodoxy upholds and promotes the view that the UK was an artificial construct built in the time of a supposedly brutal imperial order—and that it should thus revert back to the four separate countries forced into this arbitrary union. But the UK is, in fact, a unitary state possessing a unique history and culture. Unfortunately, “we don’t have much of a sense of what the UK actually is nowadays,” Frost says.
The continual “rubbishing of national heroes” and the preoccupation of elites with the negative aspects of Britain’s past are unusual even by European standards. There is little clear understanding of what it means to be British. And there is no awareness of the emotional connection that Brits have to their own history— and no idea how this could help build a sense of solidarity and cohesion among citizens. Instead, myths concerning the UK’s ‘dark past’ of slavery and colonialism proliferate and have become entrenched in the educational establishment. The state, Frost argues, has a responsibility to push back against this ‘orthodoxy’ and, instead, push for a fair presentation of its history and culture.
To some extent, COVID—“a period of madness”—facilitated the rise of identity politics. It also ushered in a greater preoccupation with minority differences and ‘structural racism.’ This allowed views that were already present at the fringes of the radical Left to boil over, spread, and feed into today’s more divisive politics of diversity and exclusion.
Meanwhile, the endless inquiries into the government’s handling of COVID has degenerated into an exercise in ‘gotcha politics,’ merely satisfying important stakeholders rather than pursuing a genuine inquiry into the economic and political costs of the lockdowns. Frost maintains that there is only one question that such inquiries should address: namely, were lockdowns the correct policy to pursue? Unfortunately, no one is answering that question, so the possibility that “we could do it again” remains—and that is a profound concern.
Despite the difficult policy choices that Britain currently faces, the political establishment still clings to the view that, when it comes to international politics, the UK has an important global role to play. This role has long been as a leading supporter of the ‘rules-based international system.’ As a result, the Foreign Office has been preoccupied with rules and international law, and finds itself uncomfortable thinking about ‘hard power’ or how to defend the national interest (rather than the international interest).
Other major powers are now challenging this system. Meanwhile, the UK—and the West in general—are in relative decline, and neither has adapted yet to this new world. So Frost says it is crucial to now build a sense of Western cohesion and strive to construct effective defences, both of which require growing economies and a clear-eyed, realist view of the post-COVID world.
On the issue of Ukraine, Frost believes it is important—whatever the rights and wrongs of Western policy over the last decade—to keep in mind that a great wrong has been done to Ukraine by Russia, and that Russia must not emerge from the war as the ‘winner.’ Despite growing criticism of the West’s involvement, Western arming of Ukraine remains crucial, he says. But they now need to think hard about their real war aims if further escalation is to be avoided.
The West, then, needs to do some hard thinking in 2024—a year of transformative elections but no effective leadership. And while the world does not look to be in great shape, it is possible to be overly pessimistic, cautions Frost. Democracies are beginning to respond to what people really worry about—namely, the economy, migration, and national identity. And it is vital that they do so, for if mainstream parties don’t address these issues, fringe parties will emerge on both the extreme Left and Right.
The limits of techno-managerial solutions
Frost argues that one of the problems facing Europe is that its ruling elites are preoccupied with techno-managerial solutions and have tried to eliminate political choice. Europe has effectively reduced politics to a matter of administration and process, rather than seeing it as a real contest of ideas. This has distorted the European project, which was initially a reasonable attempt to facilitate trade and cooperation in postwar Europe.
Over time, the EU has developed into a juristic endeavour, a project that seeks to remove differences between member states and impose homogeneity around a single model. The EU’s accretion of power over areas that were at the heart of national sovereignty—such as citizenship, borders and migration, national currencies—has meant that what should have been a simple legal process has become instead a driving homogenizing ideology that seeks to remove political choice. And now there’s a reaction. This is hardly surprising, given that EU member states can no longer, in practice, change fundamental policies at elections. This has profound consequences for European democracy.
What is striking is the disappearance and disintegration of mainstream centre-right parties in many places, notably France and Italy. Europeans are looking to new parties that might be able to change things—but this creates a disturbing tendency towards fragmentation and political extremism (on both Left and Right). In this context, thinks Frost, the UK has perhaps better political ‘antibodies’ to resist political extremisms of the Left and Right. Unlike Europeans, British politics can respond to social fragmentation. “We now have sovereignty: we can choose and make decisions in the national interest. It’s just that we haven’t done enough of it.”
This notwithstanding, Frost finds the prospect of a new Labour government deeply worrying. He doesn’t subscribe to the view that there is little difference between the mainstream parties. Labour always likes to control and tell people what to do. More regulation and control at a time when growth is driven out by higher taxes, higher spending, and more regulation will not solve the UK’s current ills. A Labour government that does not stand up for the nation-state and its history, and just delivers more of the same, will soon have a problem.
There is the risk of being too declinist. So, Frost reminds us that the UK economy has proven to be remarkably flexible and resilient. Britain managed to dig itself out of the COVID morass by virtue of its own political strengths. Ultimately, Frost says, you can’t prevent open debate and a diversity of ideas on policies in the UK. To be sure, Labour will continue to offer more of the same: a slowmotion decline. As the Sybil told Aeneas, it’s easy to continue down the road to Hell; but to come back up to the light of day is the hard bit—that’s the difficulty. And that’s what the UK must now find within itself to do. It’s done so before and it can do so again.
David Frost, Lord Frost of Allenton, is a former British diplomat, civil servant, and politician who served as a minister of state in 2021 at the UK Cabinet Office. Among his many roles, Frost has served as ambassador to Denmark and as special adviser to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in Theresa May’s government. When Johnson became prime minister in 2019, Frost became chief negotiator for exiting the EU and then served as Johnson’s Europe adviser. In September 2020, Frost was elevated to the House of Lords as a life peer. He became minister of state and a full member of the cabinet in March 2021, but resigned from the government in December that year over lockdown policy. This interview was
conducted in London on 19 March 2024.
This essay appears in the Spring 2024 edition of The European Conservative, Number 30:52-55.
