00:02:15.260And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:02:20.740Our brilliant guest today was Britain's chief negotiator with the European Union during the Brexit saga.
00:02:26.140Lord David Frost, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:02:27.780Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:02:29.000It is really good to have you here. We're going to get into all the issues in the conversation.
00:02:33.580Before we do, though, we've got a lot of people abroad who may not know who you are.
00:02:37.900Tell everybody, who are you? What has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?
00:02:42.460Yeah, so I spent much of my early life as a diplomat, professional diplomat for UK government, so civil servant.
00:02:52.220I worked as the Foreign Office's Director for EU affairs, lead on trade affairs, that sort of thing.
00:02:58.560I got frustrated with being a civil servant and not being able to say what I think.
00:03:02.960So I went off to run a big trade association for a bit, Scotch Whiskey Association, which a lot of people say is the greatest job in the world, sadly.
00:03:12.460I only did it for three years until Boris Johnson asked me to become his foreign policy EU advisor
00:03:20.920when he was foreign secretary and then as prime minister.
00:03:23.940And that's how I ended up doing the Brexit negotiations coming in when everything seemed to have got stuck.
00:03:32.780I was for a time thereafter a minister in Boris's government until I stepped down at the end of last year
00:05:24.360Second, I think the choice, these are different kinds of choices.
00:05:31.500The choice between sort of wokeism and non-wokeism, if you like, is a kind of political choice.
00:05:37.600You know, I happen to think one is better than the other, but it's basically about your worldview and how you want society to run.
00:05:44.900The choice between do you have free market economic policies or do you have more statist economic policies is a real world thing.
00:05:53.180We know in the real world, free market policies tend to reduce more prosperity, more growth, better outcomes than others.
00:06:02.500So if you just look at this as a political thing and say, you know, the way politics has evolved means that it's sensible for us as a Conservative Party to take on left-wing policies.
00:06:15.200You're actually condemning yourself to ideological and actual defeat because you're choosing an economy that isn't going to grow as fast.
00:06:23.180And people are not going to like that.
00:06:24.640So that's why I think politics is about persuasion, politics is about encouraging people to, you know, kind of take on your worldview.
00:06:36.320And we should be standing up for free market, liberal policies focused on growth, focused on productivity, focused on the productive capacity of this country and persuading people they are the best policies.
00:06:49.360And I hope we're beginning to do that now, actually.
00:06:51.600But isn't the problem, David, that the Conservatives had a huge majority in the 2019 general election because they promised, in their own words, to get Brexit done, which, to be fair, you did.
00:07:02.940And you have all these red wall seats who aren't naturally conservative.
00:07:08.680Therefore, you have MPs representing these people who want more left wing policies because they're more economically disadvantaged, thus creating an imbalance in the party.
00:09:08.480I think it's well known that I resigned in part because of it.
00:09:12.680I think, you know, we are, people make the comparison with the 1970s quite often.
00:09:18.540And I think one of the reasons that's correct is that it's the end of an era.
00:09:23.860You know, the last 20, 25 years of doing things is coming to an end.
00:09:28.540And people are, you know, they're responding in different ways.
00:09:31.120But I think a lot of people feel that.
00:09:33.440And, you know, what we're seeing is that, you know, this collectivism,
00:09:37.800This statism has been reinforced by the bailouts from the crash, by the lifestyle politics imposed by climate politics, and then by the pandemic.
00:09:51.460And all of that has reinforced the sense that statism is the right way to go.
00:09:56.500Government telling you what to do is the right way to go.
00:24:03.020all of these things. So I get that. But David, this is what I want to ask you, because a lot
00:24:08.380of the people who watch our show from the UK will be those red wall people, some of whom will
00:24:15.780absolutely agree with you. I can think of several of our supporters who already will be on your side.
00:24:20.280But there will be a lot of people also who, as we've talked about, we've had a long period of
00:24:25.580time now where if there is a problem, government's the answer. What is the economic argument at its
00:24:33.520core that you're making about the free market, reducing regulation, reducing taxes? Why is that
00:24:42.980better? How does that work? You mentioned the economy, this is how it works. Explain that at
00:24:48.600a very basic level for us. Why is your view of how the economy should be managed better?
00:24:53.640that people make better choices for themselves they they obviously you need a a framework and
00:25:01.800the state sets the framework but basically people know better themselves what they want to do and
00:25:08.840how they want to live their lives and where they want to spend their money and what they want to
00:25:13.380spend it on um than uh the government does and where the government tries to do it it tends to
00:25:20.860get it wrong it imposes its own judgments on people it makes them do things they wouldn't
00:25:26.260otherwise choose to do it accepts it sets up a a single view of the good society which you're
00:25:35.300forced to buy into uh and you have to live by the government rules and i think that historically
00:25:42.540has been shown not to work uh where it's been tried now you know nobody's going to try the
00:25:47.700extreme forms in this country. Although, you know, during the pandemic, there were some quite
00:25:53.720extreme things happening. But if you allow people to make their own decisions, you know, accumulate
00:26:00.560money for themselves and their families, live their lives as they want to, they'll make better
00:26:08.540decisions, they'll invest, they'll become more prosperous. That's the fundamental core, I think,
00:26:13.640of this. I hear you. And from where I'm sitting, the obvious and very easy way to attack your
00:26:19.680argument is to say, but what about the people who can't help themselves? What about the disabled?
00:26:25.140What about the people who are chronically ill? Every time we reduce the size of the state,
00:26:30.100yes, you know, we unleash the brilliance of billionaires and millionaires in this country
00:26:34.960to build businesses, even if we are that charitable to your argument. But the people who really suffer
00:26:40.940Are there people living in deprived communities, people who, like I say, rely on the NHS to survive, people who are disabled mentally or physically?
00:26:50.080All of these people surely will suffer as we reduce the size of the state, would be the argument.
00:26:56.160Everybody would agree that the state should be generous to people who can't work for whatever reason it is.
00:27:05.120The problem is that we have, over the years, got a state system that is much more generous than that.
00:27:14.600And that's kind of undermining support for it for a lot of people.
00:27:20.180The universal credit system, for example, you can claim universal credit if you're on the average wage.
00:27:27.220And in what sense is that a kind of benefit for people who can't help themselves?
00:27:32.660It's a big, complex system that funnels money from one part of the economy to another.
00:27:39.220And in so doing, it's undermining support for state transfers as a whole.
00:27:43.560It's making people who have no need to be dependent upon the state.
00:27:48.180Of course, we must help people who can't help themselves.
00:27:52.960The government's actually not very good at that, it seems to me, in many ways.
00:27:58.240And focusing on that would be a better thing to do.
00:28:01.640So people have forgotten, I think, that the state is the biggest it's ever been.
00:28:07.920We can't continue to see the state growing and growing and growing
00:28:12.640because we think it's the right thing to do.
00:28:15.920You have to draw a line somewhere and focus the state back down on its core tasks.
00:28:21.920Under Tony Blair, the state was 5% GDP smaller than now.
00:28:26.700Everyone seems to think Tony Blair time was quite a good time
00:28:29.760And, you know, people who I don't agree with politically quite liked it.
00:28:33.580And, you know, life went on, even though the state was a lot smaller.
00:28:42.520I agree with you that it does need to be smaller because at the moment it's economically unsustainable and it's not really a conversation that we want to have.
00:28:49.500And the big elephant in the room to me is the NHS, which is becoming more and more unfit for purpose when you see how much money is being ploughed into it.
00:28:59.040and yet the ordinary person struggles to get a gp appointment you think the waiting list i don't
00:29:06.160know however many millions it goes seems to go up by a million every week or something ridiculous
00:29:10.040like that and people waiting to get cancer appointments checkups it it doesn't work does
00:29:17.260it it doesn't it doesn't or it works in a very sort of crude um inefficient fashion and that's
00:29:26.000we get when you know you've got one half million people and a budget of 160 billion a year all run
00:29:32.900from the centre. Inevitably you get these outcomes and I mean I'm encouraged that I think for the
00:29:39.320first time in my political life I suppose we're beginning to hear people say actually this isn't
00:29:46.920working very well. I don't like it that I can't get to my GP. I don't like the fact there's a
00:29:51.740waiting list. Every time, you know, when I go into hospital, I see a different person every day,
00:29:56.860they lose my papers, I'm not confident, they're not giving me, you know, they're giving me the
00:30:00.760right drug. So you hear this kind of all the time from people's day-to-day experience.
00:30:05.060And there's only so long, I think, that people can hold the day-to-day experience in parallel
00:30:10.680with the sort of religious belief about the system. In the end, one undermines the other,
00:30:17.140And I hope we're beginning to see that.
00:30:20.120I think actually also people have, you know, lots of people have got experience of the European systems now, whether they live in Europe or have visited it.
00:30:28.040They've seen what it's like to get treatment somewhere other than the NHS.
00:30:32.700And they don't think it's that bad necessarily.
00:30:35.320And I think it's beginning to kind of permeate through.
00:30:38.960So the problem is that you can't change the NHS overnight.
00:30:42.940you know it is the task of a generation really to change this this monolith you've got to start
00:30:49.760somewhere you've got to stop adding new tasks you should take off some of the sort of frivolities
00:30:55.120that people should pay for themselves and i think gradually you've got to try and bring in some sort
00:31:03.060of market insurance elements out the margins probably first and get it working in a more
00:31:11.180functional way but that's going to take 20 years if you started today i think and that's why people
00:31:17.400shy away um what do you mean by the frivolities david what are we talking about with the word
00:31:22.260frivolities well uh sort of lifestyle surgery maybe you know i don't know some people would
00:31:28.500say ivf for example people should pay for themselves i mean i think there's a debate
00:31:32.180we had about that but i think all at the moment all the pressure is the other way that you know
00:31:36.620new kind of things get added into NHS treatment all the time.
00:31:41.360And, you know, again, you've got to draw the line somewhere or not.
00:31:46.700I'm not making a direct comparison here,
00:31:48.560but if you look at, like, veterinary services, for example,
00:32:14.580So you've got to try and bring elements of rationality into it, I think.
00:32:18.920And what would you say to those people who go, look, if we do that, what we're going to become is effectively the United States,
00:32:24.380where people are essentially made bankrupt every time they get diagnosed with cancer.
00:32:29.140cancer treatments cost tens of thousands of dollars if not hundreds of thousands how do we
00:32:33.920stop that from happening so i think that there is always this um artificial comparison made between
00:32:41.560um as if the only two models are our model and the u.s model and um you know it bedevils the
00:32:50.520debate we have on this actually you know people need to get that we are the outlier hardly anybody
00:32:55.360runs their health service like we do, with virtually everything being delivered by government.
00:33:00.760The only countries that do are the Scandinavians and the Irish, much smaller countries where you
00:33:06.960don't have this sort of massive monolith problem that we do in the UK that's 10 times as big.
00:33:13.740The norm in an advanced country is to have some sort of social insurance system, quite a lot of
00:33:21.060competition, quite a loss of private provision in the system, and a lot more patient and consumer
00:33:28.400choice. That is the international norm across Europe, and we could go there. So let's break
00:33:34.200that down. What does that actually mean, a social insurance system? Because I'm sure there's people
00:33:37.620watching and listening to this thinking, what, what, what, like, Bupa? Is that a social insurance
00:33:41.920system? Well, not really, because it's kind of outside the system altogether. What we're seeing
00:33:47.680at the moment, I think, and we've seen quite a lot in the last year or two, is that we're getting
00:33:53.140two systems in this country. We've got the NHS that doesn't work, and then you've got a completely
00:33:59.500private system, which is totally separated from it. There's no sort of tax benefit or any other
00:34:05.140kind. It's entirely for people who've got the ability to pay for it. However, you do get
00:34:10.840treatment quickly. The way most European systems work, and they're all kind of different,
00:34:17.400So there's no single model. But that there is a sort of compulsory insurance element. You know, you join maybe one of a number of insurance schemes. You can choose the level at which you go into these schemes.
00:34:35.760quite a lot of the provision is contracted for by these schemes or sometimes by the government,
00:34:42.960private clinics, private doctors, whatever. But the whole system is backed up by the government.
00:34:49.640It's still largely free at the point of use, but it's not run by the government. And there's much
00:34:56.440more efficiency in the way treatment happens. And, you know, you simply, you know, apart from
00:35:02.280the special case after the pandemic you simply don't get these sort of massive waiting lists in
00:35:07.500many european countries that that we do here and if people understood that i think they'd be more
00:35:13.100well that is actually something uh just as an aside because i want to move on but that is
00:35:16.580something i think people in this country really don't understand is how extraordinary it is that
00:35:21.660as a wealthy country you have a health care system where you have to wait you have to wait at all i
00:35:27.380I mean, in Russia or Ukraine or countries that I've grown up in, the notion that you would wait for an appointment to see your doctor, it's absurd.
00:35:42.220I want to move on, though, David, because coming right back to the beginning of our conversation and Matt Goodwin sitting here, one of the things that he talked about, and I hear Nigel Farage talking about this quite extensively.
00:35:55.080Essentially, Nigel Farage's argument is because of what's happening with immigration now,
00:36:03.180the people who will fill the space that he's vacated will be, in his words, I think,
00:36:08.780far less pleasant to the chattering classes than even he was.
00:36:12.260And I think it's fair to say that when people voted to, quote, unquote,
00:36:18.340take back control of the borders. They did not vote for immigration to increase as it did under
00:36:26.240your former boss. And they certainly did not vote for thousands of people to come into this country
00:36:33.840illegally every month. What is the new prime minister going to do about this?
00:36:42.280So I think it is really important, first of all, that the state works properly.
00:36:53.120And this is one of the areas where it needs to work properly.
00:36:56.160So although I'm often caricatured as a kind of crazed free marketeer of some kind, actually, I think it is really important to see the two things in parallel.
00:37:04.780Well, the private economy, the market economy needs to work in a free market way, but the state also needs to work properly and be properly funded.
00:37:14.680And that means things like controlling the borders properly.
00:37:19.520It means proper law and order, police on the streets, a justice system that works and prisons that aren't a sort of disgrace, frankly, to a civilised society.
00:37:30.580it means the benefits working properly
00:37:32.700in the way that we were talking about earlier.
00:37:35.000So, you know, there definitely is a big role for a state.
00:37:38.880The problem is, again, it's taking on more and more
00:37:41.580kind of frivolous tasks the whole time,
00:37:44.680getting distracted from its core duties,
00:40:36.220So, I mean, it is an incredibly complicated question,
00:40:38.880And I think Boris Johnson got blamed unfairly, actually, for not caring about this problem.
00:40:45.220I know he really did try and had meetings sort of every two or three days on the subject for a lot of the time I was there in number 10.
00:40:52.200It was not for want of trying or thinking this was not a problem.
00:40:56.180It was because it is an extremely intractable problem.
00:41:00.100There is the practical problem that, you know, when people are coming over in a small, unseaworthy boat, you know, kind of common humanity means you've got to handle them in a certain way.
00:41:16.340Therefore, you end up having to sort of bring them into the UK, where they're then surrounded by the panoply of sort of legal protections, judicial reviews, the amateurish and slow way we run our asylum system that produces an incentive to come here and risk it.
00:41:37.000So, there are lots of things that need changing. I think the government is going to have to get
00:41:45.100more robust on this. I think it's going to have to say, if you come here illegally,
00:41:53.080you don't get the right to stay. You have to work out what the consequences of that are.
00:41:59.140And I think it's going to have to take on the ECHR issue. The ECHR Convention of Human Rights
00:42:04.860is part of the, is the ultimate reason why there are so many legal challenges, so many
00:42:12.780problems in the legal framework that we've got. And I think we're going to have to try and cut
00:42:19.500through that in some way in the next couple of years. I can't see how we can solve this problem
00:42:24.020without doing that. Hey Francis, do you like ideas? Of course I do. My favourite idea was
00:42:32.120getting that Chinese takeaway last night.
00:42:34.480I was talking about important ideas, ideas that matter.
00:48:33.900But, you know, UKIP, you know, arguably took enough out of the Conservative vote to force the referendum when it was announced in 2013.
00:48:45.300So, yeah, they have a function in the system.
00:48:48.460But I don't think – I still think it's better for democracy to have, you know, a couple of big parties that represent world – different world views.
00:48:58.300The problem with systems like that is when you get two parties that think the same thing about important issues like climate change, the obvious example recently, or to a large extent the pandemic, then there's no debate.
00:49:12.300So they have got to represent different views about things properly.
00:49:15.920Right. And I was actually going to move on to global stuff, but speaking of climate change and net zero, what is, in your opinion, the future of that issue under the current Tory regime?
00:49:37.780Is it going to be a slash and burn? We're going to abandon net zero entirely?
00:49:41.940I doubt it, because it's pretty well embedded as a target now, 2050.
00:49:49.880But I do think that, you know, a lot of people think that we're rushing at it too fast and doing it in a way that, you know, makes no sense, that just deprives us of actual energy to power our economy.
00:50:03.020And, you know, going at it in a way where government picks the route, you know, and all this sort of stuff about heat pumps and electric cars and all this kind of thing.
00:50:16.120You know, government picking winners never works.
00:50:19.580If you're going to do this, the rational way would be to have a carbon tax and just increase it a bit every year and let the market sort out what the best way of doing it was.
00:52:37.880I think we, you know, one of the things that I find people do react against a bit
00:52:42.280is, you know, we can be a bit preachy about things.
00:52:45.260And I kind of, I don't like our embassies going, you know, sort of endlessly going on demonstrations about this and that fashionable cause.
00:52:53.860I think, you know, you've got to look at the world as it is a bit.
00:52:57.220And, you know, sometimes that means dealing with people who you don't necessarily like very much or approve of everything they do.
00:53:05.020But they've got stuff that you need, so you've got to, that's just the way the world is.
00:53:10.020So a bit more realism about the world, a bit less preachiness, but a bit sort of standing up for things that we believe in.
00:53:20.380I think Britain is a force for good, but we've got to put the money into sharing that, I would say.
00:53:28.900And that's just beginning, really, this new role.
00:53:33.400I agree with you. We do need to do that.
00:53:35.720The problem is, David, is you look at the kids coming out of universities, you know, they, on the whole, seem to be very sceptical,
00:53:44.880sceptical, seem to be very anti-British, there's constant focus on empire.
00:53:49.120And look, you know, as somebody who has just read a little bit about it, obviously we weren't angels, but no empire is.
00:53:56.260You know, people think that the Ottomans were woke.
00:53:59.940So the problem is, is that we talk about this, and I think we can all agree on that.
00:54:05.020But you look at the younger generations coming through the universities and you look at people who are more on the left and the Labour Party, they think completely differently.