TRIGGERnometry - Lord David Frost: "The Budget Was Absolutely the Right Thing to Do"

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

SPONSOR: The Ridge Wallet! Win a Ford Bronco or $75k when you purchase Ridge Wallet products. Use Code “TRIGGER” for 10% off your order at https://www.ridge.com/TRIGGER David Frost, the Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allenton CMG, is a British politician and former diplomat who was the UK's chief Brexit negotiator in 2020. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The people who voted subject in those scenes, yes, it was partly about Brexit. Brexit was a way of kind of, it was important to a lot of people. But I think it was also the thing that sort of tipped people over from realizing that actually maybe they weren't really Labour voters. But when they look to what they actually value, now they saw the world, maybe they were really conservatives. And Brexit enabled them to kind of recognize that. It's the end of an era. You know, the last 20, 25 years of doing things is coming to an end. And people are, you know, they're responding in different ways,

but I think a lot of people feel that. The state is the biggest it's ever been. We can't continue to see the state growing and growing and growing. And, you know, what we're seeing is that, you know, this collectivism, this statism has been reinforced by, you know, the bailouts from the crash, by the lifestyle pole, imposed by climate, climate politics, and then by the pandemic. And all of that has reinforced the sense that, you know,

stateism is the right way to go. Government telling you what to do is the right way to go. And we've got to stop that. The state is bigger than it's ever been in this country. You know, government rules, influence over your own behaviour has become stronger and stronger. And it must stop. In a free society, you've got to call a halt to this. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kis.

And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today was Britain's chief negotiator with the European Union during the Brexit saga. Lord David Frost, welcome to Trigonometry. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. It is really good to have you here. We're going to get into all the issues in the conversation. Before we do though, we've got a lot of people abroad who may not know who you are. Tell everybody who are you, what is been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Yeah, so I spent much of my early life as a diplomat, professional diplomat for UK government, so civil servant. I worked as the foreign officer's director for EU affairs, lead on trade affairs, that sort of thing. I got frustrated

with being a civil servant and not being able to say what I think. So 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, I only did it for three years until Boris Johnson asked me to become his foreign policy, EU advisor when he was foreign secretary, and then as Prime Minister, and that's how I ended up doing the Brexit negotiations coming in when everything seemed to have got stuck. I was for a time there after a minister in Boris's government until I stepped down at the end of last year because I wasn't able to support the prospect

for another lockdown over COVID. So that's where I am now. And we're after our own heart, although we didn't step down from anything. But David, in the interest of full disclosure for our audience, you and I were speaking and you mentioned that you'd watched or listened to our interview with Matt Goodwin, who we have a lot of time for in this show. And as we were speaking about the future, the Conservative Party,

you said that you had some different thoughts about all of that. So what are they? So I think, you know, the politics has changed over the last sort of 10 years or so. And as many people have said, it isn't just about economics anymore. It's about culture and, you know, shorthand wokeism, though I hate the word. where does that? I hate it partly because I don't see how a past participle can become an abstract now and just sort of reacts against that.

But so it's got more complicated. And what I hear people like Matt and others saying is that it is a possible position for the Conservative Party to be in to be sort of anti-woke in culture, but quite statist and left-wing on economic policy because we've taken in red wall seats and people who used to vote Labour. And I think my view is that's a fallacy. It's a fallacy for two reasons.

One, because people who vote conservative, I think one should assume they actually want conservative policies until it's kind of proved otherwise. Second, I think the... The choice, these are different kinds of choices. The choice between sort of wokeism and non-wokism, if you like, is a kind of political choice. You 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.

The choice between do you have free market economic policies or do you have more statist economic policies is a real world thing. We know in the real world, free market policies tend to reduce more prosperity, more growth, better outcomes than others. So 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, you're actually condemning yourself to ideological and actual defeat because you're choosing an economy that isn't going to grow as fast. and people are not going to like that. So that's why I think politics about persuasion, politics about encouraging people to, you know, kind of take on your worldview. And we should be standing up for free market liberal policies, focused on growth, focused on productivity, focus on the productive

capacity of this country, and persuading people, they are the best policies. And I hope we're beginning to do that now, actually. But 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. And you have all these red-wool seats who aren't naturally conservative. Therefore, 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. because if the MP for a red wool seat doesn't represent their constituents and their desires, they're going to lose their seat and they're going to be out of a job. So I think

the people who voted in those seats, yes, it was partly about Brexit. Brexit was a way of kind of... It was important to a lot of people, rightly so, but I think it was also the thing that sort of tipped people over from realizing that actually maybe they weren't really Labor voters. They were doing it for historical, traditional, other reasons.

But when they looked at what they actually value, now they saw the world, maybe they were really conservatives. And Brexit enabled them to kind of recognize that. We shouldn't forget that Mrs. Thatcher won a lot of red wall seats in 1983. She held onto them in 1987. It's not quite as new as some people say that we've had, these supporters. And she won them with an appeal to free market, running your own life, freeing yourself from the shackles of state housing, state benefits, people telling you what to do

all the time. And I think that appeal is just the strong nowadays. And we need to lean into it and bring people into that supporter group, not be embarrassed about it. I completely agree with you. but if you look at what the conservative policies have been over the last couple of years, as in not telling people what to do in no state involvement, I mean, the government voted conservative. They got left of Corbyn, didn't they, in many ways? I'm the last person to defend the economic record

of the last couple of years. I think it's well known that I resign in part because of it. I think, you know, we are, people make the comparison with the 1970s quite often. And I think one of the reasons that's correct is that it's the end of an era. You know, the last 20, 25 years of doing things is coming to an end. And people are, you know, they're responding in different ways, but I think a lot of people feel that.

And, you know, what we're seeing is that, you know, this collectivism, this statism has been reinforced by, you know, the bailouts for the crap from the crash, by the lifestyle politics imposed by climate, climate politics, and then by the pandemic. And all of that has reinforced the sense that, you know, stateism is the right way to go. Government telling you what to do is the right way to go. And we've got to stop that. The state is bigger than it's ever been in this country.

You know, government rules, influence over your own behaviour has become stronger and stronger. And it must stop. in a free society, you've got to call a hold to this at some point. You do, but isn't the problem as well when you've got a population who become used to the big state, that the moment you start taking it away, you're going to threaten your own chance of being re-elected because all of a sudden you're going to become the mean nasty Tories who are only interested in big business. And let's be fair, has Trump, no, Trump, sorry, has trust made a bit of... There's a slip.

And then you've got trust, basically, you know, with bankers, bankers, bonuses, etc. Well, I mean, ideally you'll be doing this at the start of a four or five years term. And for reasons we know about that, that hasn't been possible. There's only two years or so left. But, you know, I still think you've got to do the right things. If we're going to go down to defeat, let's at least do it, having had the argument, done what we said was the right thing, tried to, to persuade people rather than half-heartedly doing things that we don't really believe in

in a belief that it might keep everybody happy. People can recognize intellectual confidence and authenticity, I think, and it appeals to people. So let's lean into that. Let's do the things we believe in and believe will work. And I think they will work. I think two years is long enough to start seeing some of the results of this. But we have to have intellectual confidence. We have to start talking about, you know, the role of profits, the role of a normal interest rate in a capitalist economy, the things that make it work can be honest about this, not be embarrassed about it. Are you tired of using bulky old wallets, giving you a bulge where you don't want it to be?

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Because Ridge are such great guys, they're going to give you 10% off and free worldwide shipping and returns. To take advantage of this incredible offer, go to ridge.com forward slash trigger. That's Ridge.com forward slash trigger and use our special code, which is of course, Trigger. David, I think you put your finger on something that is obviously very important, particularly in terms of your comparison. with Thatcher. And I imagine as someone who used to be this country's chief negotiator with the EU, even though you're very softly spoken, you must know how to carry a big stick too. However, in the current prime minister's situation, it must be extraordinarily difficult to, yes, she speaks confidently and softly at the same time. But how do you carry a stick when you've

got no mandate whatsoever? That is difficult. I wouldn't say we've got no mandate because, you know, that is the way our system works. It's not the first time the prime minister's changed midterm and people accept that's part of the way the system works. I think you've just got to have this trust, the team, got to have intellectual confidence and say, you know, be honest about the mistakes were made in the last couple of years,

be honest about where things have gone wrong, be clear that things are going to a different direction, say judges in a couple of years. If you don't like it, obviously, there is another route. But to be clear, make sure people understand what we're trying to do and why and what the goal is. And that's the crucial thing at the moment. People are just not being talked to honestly for so long about things. And we can change that.

I agree with you on that. I really do hope we change that. And I suppose this morning you came in, you were quite chipper. As we're recording this, it will be a few days before it goes out. The Chancellor, the new Chancellor, was just announcing, I mean, I don't think many people would have expected, who are the general public who are not obsessed with politics like the three of us, would have expected that in this current climate, the thing that the government would be doing is slashing taxes, abolishing the top rate of tax next year and all of the other things that are now happening.

you must be delighted. Yeah, I think it's absolutely the right thing to do. We must get things, we must get the economy onto a different path who've got to change expectations. Yes, there's going to be an uplift in borrowing in the short run, but we must get people thinking that we are trying to improve the productive capacity of this economy.

We've got to get investors, people who look at this country, saying, yeah, the Brits get it. They can't do everything straight away, but they understand what needs to be done and they're getting on the right path. And there needs to be that sort of psychological shock, change of expectations, belief things can get better. And I think that's what the Chancellor was trying to deliver today. I actually believe that, you know, in the capitalist economy, you need interest rates that are above zero. I think they're going to have to go that further, not just to control inflation, but, because that's how the economy works.

We probably are going to have to see a lower pound because we need to be on a different forward curve. And to support the economy, it's right to do a bit of borrowing and tax cuts so demand doesn't collapse. And I think this is a perfectly rational way forward. And all the sort of world-weary economists who are out there saying, what about borrowing, what about this, what about that,

it's irresponsible, what are the Treasury officials think of it all. I just think that is, that is, they're still talking a story that is irrelevant to the challenges that face the country after Brexit and in this new world. Well, I do agree with you, but I am one of those, not economists, but certainly world wary in terms of the amount of borrowing. But I think we have to distinguish between different types of borrowing. If you're borrowing on a credit card to go and have a night out, that's one thing. If you're borrowing to build a business, that's completely different. And this brings me to the two issues that Francis and I talk about all the time, which is we've borrowed to pay people to stay at home.

Before that, we borrowed to pay bankers to stay afloat. What about the housing crisis? What about infrastructure in this country? Because I've got no problem borrowing more money to do those things, to create jobs and to get the economy moving. Are we going to get those two issues solved with just, cutting taxes and allowing some people would argue money just to accumulate at the top with no productive activity being generated.

It can only be the first step. This is about changing expectations and making people believe that things can be better and the economy can improve. I think the government has announced today some improvements to, or at least prospects, some improvements to infrastructure, getting through quicker. Let's see what that looks like. It is really important. Obviously, the housing market is a massive, massive problem in this country.

And, you know, it's a huge part of the productivity problem, I think, not being able to move house is obviously part of that. We're going to have to build more houses. There's no two ways around that. We're going to have to build houses in place where people don't want houses to be built. We're going to have to find a way of making that possible. I think it is more possible than people believe, but it's going to have to be done. And, you know, I hope the government is going to take this on in the end of the same story. I'm not hearing, forgive me, but I'm hearing we're going to have to, as opposed to that's what's going to happen.

Do you believe it's going to happen? I believe it is going to happen, actually. I don't necessarily think it's going to happen like tomorrow because sequencing is important and getting people used to ideas. is important. And I think one of the problems we've had, actually, one of the consequences of this sort of collectivism over the last 20 years is that people have not been prepared for the scale of the challenge that has to come. We've not talked about how market economies work. We've not talked about what that means for your own individual prospects, how you have to prepare yourself, how you have to skill, all this sort of thing. We've just not talked about it. So you can't, I think, suddenly

people with a million things that are a completely different world view and expect people to put up with it. We have to allow some time for persuasion, for getting people used to ideas, for testing things and showing that actually it isn't so bad, maybe, when you do this, hopefully fracking, for example, is going to be one of those things, and gradually change the debate. So you shouldn't rush at everything. I think the crucial thing is also to have a really convincing manifesto for the next election is based on a real story for which you can get a real mandate to do some actually difficult things. And some of that you've got to prepare for. You can't just do it all straight away. But isn't also the problem as well, David, is that, you know,

you get a lot of these conservative voters who are NIMBYs, not in my backyard. And also, you know, a lot of them own property. You are essentially, if you're going to build large swaps of housing to solve this crisis, and it is a crisis, you're essentially devaluing their assets, aren't you? Well, that is a risk. I mean, you know, there is so much pressure in the housing market, particularly in southern England, that, you know, it's going to take a lot to sort of devalue people's assets over a sustained period. I think, you know, we're really just talking about keeping a lid on things and hoping that, you know, inflation and growth, you know, kind of enable people to catch up over time.

So I think people are more worried than they need be, probably, about this. But I think, you know, people like me, people, you know, who have benefited from the boom, the illusory boom, actually, in many ways of the last 20 years, have got to accept that, you know, we have an intergenerational responsibility, and part of that is getting more houses built, even if there's a cost. I just think that is part of the story that has to be told. To me, it's one of the biggest problems with our society because we talk about wokeism or progressivism

or however you want to describe it, but how can you possibly expect young people to be conservative or to adopt conservative values when they literally have nothing to conserve? They rent a one-bedroom flat in Hackney for the best part of two grand a month. Yeah. Well, I couldn't agree with you more.

You know, the, we have to, there's been so much, so many imbalances for so long in asset prices and the asset market, housing market generally, is going to take a long time to to unwind this. The pressures are so great. I mean, you're already, there's a huge benefit from setting up a business in Northern England, buying a house in Northern England, it's already a lot, lot cheaper than in the boom areas. South yet people don't do it. The pressures are still to come to the South. It's going to take a lot to reverse that, but you have to start somewhere and you have to start giving people a feeling that if they work, if they do save, actually it's a worthwhile thing to do and not

completely pointless thing to do, which is how people feel at the moment, I think. Yeah, that's not untrue. And Francis and I, again, as trigonometry becomes a small business, we have staff, we pay tax, all of these things. go to America and you kind of realize like it's not that easy to run a business in Britain. It's not that easy to do these things because there are a lot of taxes to pay. There's lots of rules to follow. There's lots of boxes to tick, all of these things. So I get that.

But David, this is what I want to ask you, because a lot of the people who watch our show in from the UK will be those red wall people, some of whom will absolutely agree with you. I can think of several of our supporters who already will be on your side. But there will be a lot of people also who, as we've talked about, we've had a long period of time now where if there's a problem, government's the answer. What is the economic argument at its core that you're making about the free markets, reducing regulation, reducing taxes? Why is that better? How does that work? You mentioned the economy, this is how it works.

Explain that at a very basic level for us. Why is your view of how the economy should be managed better? That people make better choices for themselves. Obviously, you need a framework and the state sets the framework, but basically people know better themselves what they want to do and how they want to live their lives and where they want to spend their money and what they want to spend it on than the government does. And where the government tries to do it, it tends to get it wrong.

It imposes its own judgments on people. It makes them do things they wouldn't otherwise choose to do. It accepts. It sets up a single view of the good society, which you're forced to buy into, and you have to live by the government rules. And I think that historically has been shown not to work where it's been tried. Now, you know, nobody's going to try the extreme forms in this country, although, you know, during the pandemic, there were some quite extreme things happening.

But if you allow people to make their own decisions, you know, accumulate money for themselves and their families, live their lives as they want to, they'll make better decisions, they'll invest, they'll become more prosperous. That's the fundamental core, I think, of this. I hear you. And from where I'm sitting, the obvious and very easy way to attack your argument is to say, but what about the people who can't help themselves? What about the disabled?

What about the people who are chronically ill? Every time we reduce the size of the state, yes, you know, we unleash the brilliance of billionaires and millionaires in this country to build businesses, even if we are that charitable to your argument. But the people who really suffer are the people living in deprived communities, people who are, like I say, rely on the NHS to survive, people who are disabled in mentally or physically, all of these people surely will suffer

as we reduce the size of the state would be the argument. Everybody would agree that the state should, you know, be generous to people who can't work for whatever reason it is. The problem is that we have, over the years, got a state system that is much more, generous than that. And that's kind of undermining support for it, for a lot of people. The universal credit system, for example, you can claim universal credit if you're on the average wage. And, you know, in what sense is that a kind of benefit for people who can't help themselves?

It's a big, complex system that funnels money from one part of the economy to another. And in so doing, it's undermining support for state transfers as a whole. It's making people who have no need to be dependent upon the state. Of course, we must help people who can't help themselves. The government's actually not very good at that, it seems to me, in many ways. And focusing on that would be a better thing to do. People have forgotten, I think, that the state is the biggest it's ever been. we can't continue to see the state growing and growing and growing

because we think it's the right thing to do. You have to draw a line somewhere and focus the state back down on its core tasks. Under Tony Blair, the state was 5% GDP smaller. But now everyone seems to think Tony Blair time was quite good time and people who I don't agree with politically quite liked it. And life went on, even though the other state was a lot smaller. You can get it smaller.

You can focus down on the core tasks. I 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. And 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 plowed into it. And yet the ordinary person struggles to get a GP appointment,

the waiting list, I don't know however many millions, it goes, seems to go up by a million every week or something ridiculous like that. And people waiting to get cancer appointments, checkups. It doesn't work, does it? It doesn't. It doesn't.

Or it works in a very sort of crude, inefficient fashion. And that's what you get when you, you know, you've got one half million people and a budget of 160 billion a year all run from the centre. inevitably you get these outcomes. And I mean, I'm encouraged that I think for the first time in my political life, I suppose, we're beginning to hear people say, actually, this isn't working very well.

I don't like it that I can't get to my GP. I don't like the fact there's a waiting list. Every time, you know, when I go into hospital, I see a different person every day. They lose my papers. I'm not confident. They're not giving me the right drug. So you hear this kind of all the time from people's day-to-day experience. And there's only so long, I think, that people can hold the day-to-day experience in parallel with the sort of religious belief about the system.

In the end, one undermines the other. And I hope we're beginning to see that. I 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. They've seen what it's like to get treatment somewhere other than the NHS. and they don't think it's that bad necessarily. And I think it's beginning to kind of permeate through. So the problem is that you can't change the NHS overnight. It is the task of a generation, really, to change this monolith. You've got to start somewhere.

You've got to stop adding new tasks, which will take off some of the sort of frivolities that people should pay for themselves. And I think gradually you've got to try and bring in some sort of market insurance elements out the margins probably first and get it working in a more functional way. But that's going to take 20 years if you started today, I think, and that's why people shy away. What do you mean by the frivolities, David?

What are we talking about with the word frivolities? Well, sort of lifestyle surgery maybe. I don't know, some people would say IVF, for example. People should pay for themselves. I mean, I think there's a debate we had about that, but I think at the moment, all the pressure is the other way, that new kind of things get added into NHS treatment all the time. And, you know, again, you've got to draw the line somewhere or not.

I'm not making a direct comparison here, but if you look at, like, veterinary services, for example, completely private service, obviously, and nobody's suggesting we should do that. But there is no shortage. You can get to see a vet kind of tomorrow, because the market works. And in the NHS, we have no market meaningfully at all.

The only sort of sorting system is by a queue, and that's what happens. So you've got to try and bring elements of rationality into it, I think. And what would you say to those people, go, look, if we do that, what we're going to become is effectively the United States where people are essentially made bankrupt every time they get diagnosed with cancer,

cancer treatments cost tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands. How do we stop that from happening? So I think there is always this artificial comparison made between as if the only two models are our model and the US model. And it be devils the debate we have on this. Actually, you know, people need to get that we are the outlier. Hardly anybody runs their health service like we do with virtually everything being delivered by government.

The only countries that do are the Scandinavians and the Irish, much smaller countries where you don't have this sort of massive monolith problem that we do in the UK. There's 10 times as big. The norm in an advanced country is to have some sort of social insurance system, quite a lot of competition, quite a lot of private provision in the system, and a lot more patient and consumer choice.

That is the international norm across Europe, and we could go there. So let's break that down. What does that actually mean a social insurance system? Because I'm sure there's people watching and listening to this thinking, like Bupa, is that a social insurance system? Well, not really, because it's kind of outside the system altogether. What we're seeing at the moment, I think,

and we've seen quite a lot in the last year or two, is that we're getting two systems in this country. We've got the NHS that doesn't work, and then you've got a completely private system, which totally separated from it. There's no sort of tax benefit or any other kind. It's entirely for people who've got the ability to pay for it. However, you do get treatment quickly. The way most of the European systems work, and they're all kind of different, so 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. Quite a lot of the provision is contracted for by these schemes, or sometimes by the government, private clinics, private doctors, whatever. But the whole system is backed up by the government. It's still largely free at the point of use, but it's not run by the government. and there's much more efficiency in the way treatment happens. And, you know, you simply, you know, apart from the special case after the pandemic, you simply don't get these sort of massive waiting lists

in many European countries that we do here. And if people understood that, I think they'd be more open. Well, that is actually something just as inside because I want to move on, but that is something I think people in this country who really don't understand is how extraordinary it is that as a wealthy country, you have a healthcare system where you have to wait, you have to wait at all. I 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. Yes. It's absurd. I agree. It's completely absurd. So, I mean, I hear you on that one. I want to move on, though, David, because coming right back to the beginning of a conversation

and Matt Goodwin sitting here, one of the things that he talked about, and I hear Nigel Farage talking about this quite extensively. Essentially, Nigel Farage's argument is, because of what's happening with immigration now, the people who will fill the space that he's vacated will be, in his words, I think, far less pleasant to the chattering classes than even he was. And I think it's fair to say that when people voted to, quote, unquote,

take back control of the borders, they did not vote for immigration to increase as it did under your former boss. And they certainly did not vote for thousands of people to come into this country illegally every month. What is the new Prime Minister going to do about this? So I think it is really important, first of all, that the state works. properly. And this is one of the areas where it needs to work properly. So 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. 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. And that means things like controlling the borders properly. It means proper law and order, police on streets, a justice system that works and prisons that aren't a sort of disgrace, frankly, to a civilised society, it means benefits working properly in the way that we were talking about earlier. So, you know, there definitely is a big role for a state. The problem is, again, it's taking on more and more kind of frivolous tasks the whole time, getting distracted from its core duties, and that's what it's got to do. So that's the context. And, um, On the immigration thing, I mean, I think immigration must come down.

It's not sort of straightforward to look at this year-on-year because you don't control a number of people who leave the country, for one thing. So they're always kind of, you know, the graph will always vary year-on-year. It's the overall trend you've got to look at. The truth is our economy has... benefited from or has we've developed an economic model that's been based on lots of cheap labour from Europe for the last 20, 25 years. You can't turn that off overnight. I don't think we should turn that off overnight, given there's so many other economic problems going on. But I do

think we have to set a trajectory that is down and be clear that it's going to go down and set that in a credible way. And the problem again at the moment is that over the last year, we've talked tough about immigration, but after the numbers have, you know, if anything gone up, I think it's not entirely clear because, of course, not every European would have shown up in the system beforehand. But nevertheless, it remains high, and it has to come down. We have to move to a different model where business adjusts to the fact that there isn't an indefinite supply of free labor and invests in the people they've got. But that is going to take a bit of time.

Okay, that's the first part. But the other part, and this is something I can tell you, something you already know, illegal immigration pisses people off like nothing else. And it pisses people like me off, who are first-generation immigrants, came to this country, followed the process,

a process that isn't always pleasant or fair or cheap or whatever, right? But I don't think, I think one of the defining features of this country is the sense of fairness. And I don't understand how people in politics seem to not understand or how crucial addressing that issue is.

And it's not because contrary to what people like to say that it's about racism or xenophobia, whatever it is. I think it's about fairness. People don't feel that anyone should come into this country illegally. I totally agree. And we have thousands of people coming in. And we have no idea who they are as well. there's a security dimension to this. There's a fairness dimension. I mean, you can look at it in many

different ways. First of all, how is it even possible that, what, six years on from Brexit, there are people coming here in boats from war-torn France? How is that happening? So, I mean, it is an incredibly complicated question. And I think Boris Johnson got blamed unfairly actually for not caring about this problem. I know he really did try and had meetings sort of every two or three days on this subject for a lot of the time I was there in Numbert 10. It was not for want of trying or thinking this was not a problem. It was because it is an extremely intractable problem.

There is the practical problem that 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. The French won't take them back. therefore 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. So there are lots of things that need changing. I think the government is going to have to get more robust on this. I think it's going to have to say, you know, if you come here illegally, you don't get the right to stay, have to work out what the consequences of that are. And I think it's going to have to take on the ECHR issue. The ECHR Convention on human rights is part of the, is the ultimate reason why there are so many legal challenges, so many problems. in the legal framework that we've got.

So I think we're going to have to try and cut through that in some way in the next couple of years. I can't see how we can solve this problem without doing that. Hey Francis, do you like ideas? Of course I do. My favourite idea was getting that Chinese takeaway last night. I was talking about important ideas, ideas that matter. So was I.

That lemon chicken was... Well, there's the battle of ideas. Ooh, is that a competition between the best takeover? because I know which one would definitely win. Right, if I promise to buy you some lemon chicken, will you shut up and do this ad with me? Sir, yes sir! The Battle of Ideas is a free speech festival

which is held in Church House in London on the 15th and 16th of October. They have a wide and diverse range of speakers from across the political spectrum who debate the most important issues facing our society. I'll be there in conversation about my book and Immigrants' Love Letter to the West. And Francis is doing a panel as well. Whatever issue you're most passionate about, you'll find it discussed at the Battle of Ideas.

They have panels that will debate everything from big tech, education, the arts and free speech. Plus, the audience gets a chance to ask the panel questions as well. Like what's their favourite Chinese? No! Click on the link in the description and use the code to trigger 2-2 to get 13% off. That's right. click on the link in the description, use the code trigger 2-2, and get 13% off. We'll see you at the Battle of Ideas in London.

Oh, and there's also a great Chinese round the corner. Like Nigel said, the problem is, is that if this issue isn't being dealt with, then what you get is what I call, you know, the Tommy Robinson factor, where you get somebody unpleasant who comes along, points at an issue like grooming gangs and goes, they're not doing anything, they're not listening to you, they don't care. But I do and I will. Yeah.

And that's a real danger for our democracy. 100% agree. That's why it's so important. You know, the state gets a grip on it. And, you know, there are lots of, there are lots of reasons why it doesn't. They're partly bureaucratic. They're partly kind of cultural, I think,

why the police don't tackle some of these issues. And they go quite deep. but, you know, you can't stop people caring about things. And if the government doesn't respond to their concerns, then other people will respond to them. And that's just the way it is, and government has to accept that. Because if, let's say Labor win the election,

which is perfectly possible in the next couple of years, that could well happen, I mean, they're going to be even worse at dealing with this situation, the Conservatives. Yeah, I think so, because they don't have any of the sort of presumptions about how these things should work. I mean, they just will not have the will to tackle it in any way. And we know, you know, a good chunk of the modern Labour Party, the membership,

not the supporters, I think, for the membership, you know, don't really believe in borders at all. They don't really believe in the nation state as a concept at all. And, you know, there's no way they're going to be able to tackle this. I really fear for things actually in those circumstances. Do you think this two-tier party system, do you think it's got a future? Because there's lots of people making perfectly valid criticisms about it, David, and going, who did the Conservatives represent? Who do Labor represent?

I mean, I think every party's, every country's sort of political system is determined by stuff that's quite deep in the way the country's, works. And I don't think you can just change bits of it without having all kinds of unintended consequence. I mean, the fixed term Parliament Act's a good example of that where it was a bit bolted on from a PR-type system and it never worked. And in the end, we've had to get rid of it. I mean, I think the advantages of our system, so a short version is, yes, I think it can and should survive. The advantage of it is that it forces parties to be coalitions themselves

they can't become so ideological and just respond to a very small niche of people. They have to sort of have these sort of debates and the single member constituency means people don't get, you know, it's not possible to get completely out of touch with what people are thinking in the way that in some of the European PR systems where you're on a list and you never meet an ordinary voter,

you just sort of lose touch. So I think every system has the problems of its advantages, but I think ours is the right one for us. Because you do need fringe parties in many ways to hold the bigger parties to account, like the Brexit party really needed to hold the Conservative party's feet to the fire to make sure that what people voted for was enacted. Yeah, it did.

and, you know, but I think that was a sort of freak situation in some ways. You know, it destroyed the Conservative Party briefly in those European elections in 2019. We're down to whatever it was 9% nationally. But it was a freak situation. The Constitution was breaking down, you know, a lot of the norms had just were on hold. But, you know, UKIP, you know, arguably took enough out of the conservative vote to force the referendum when it was announced in 2013.

So yeah, they have a function in the system, but I don't think, I still think it's better for democracy to have a couple of big parties that represent world, different worldviews. The problem with systems like that is when you've got two parties that

think the same thing about important issues like climate change, the obvious example recently or to a large extent of the pandemic, then there's no debate. that's the problem. So they have got to represent different views about things properly. Right.

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? So I think... Is it going to be a slash and burn? we're going to abandon net zero entirely. I doubt it because it's pretty well embedded as a target now 2050.

But I do think that, you know, a lot of people think that we're rushing out 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. And, you know, going at it in a way where government picks the route. and all this sort of stuff about heat pumps and electric cars and all this kind of thing. You know, government picking winners never works. If you're going to do this,

the rational way to have a carbon tax and just increase it a bit every year and let the market sort out and what the best way we're doing it was. I don't know whether we'll do that, but I think we will see much more focus on energy security on energy cost than on the so-called climate impact.

I mean, I just don't think we're in a climate emergency. So I don't think the thing is as urgent as people say. The one emergency we are in is the one that you refer to because I think particularly in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, energy security, food security

and border security, these issues which we all pretended were not issues for quite a long time, I think, ideologically, they've now come to the fore. and the current Prime Minister and we as a country for a long time are going to have to reckon with all of this. The world is decoupling, it's de-globalising.

How best to approach our role in that world for Britain? Yeah, I think we, you know, it's the cliche, you know, we lost an empire, we didn't find a role, now we've lost the European Union and we're still looking around for a kind of international role. I think we tend to underplay ourselves as a country. I think people look at Britain from the outside much more than we realize. A hundred percent.

I can promise you that. When I speak to people where I'm from about Britain, their view of Britain is much more, they see Britain and value it much higher than we do in this country. Yeah, that's my experience when I was as a diplomat. I think we are still a pretty big. big economy. We still stand for some important things. I think our, you know, the, I think it should be about resilience to a very large extent. We're going to have to push up defense spending. We're going to

have to try and revive NATO properly as a sort of CERA security and defense organization. We've got things like the Orcas Pact with the Australians and the Indo-Pacific Tilt that I think is going to be important as we sort of try and deter China. I think we, you know, one of the things that I find people do react against a bit is, you know, we can be a bit preachy about things. And I kind of, I don't like our embassies going, you know, sort of endless to go on demonstrations about this and that fashionable cause. I think, you know, you've got to look at the world as it is a bit. And, you know, sometimes that means dealing with people who you don't necessarily like very much or approve of everything they do,

but they've got stuff that you need, so you've got to, that's just the way the world is. So a bit more realism about the world, a bit less preachiness, but a bit sort of standing up for things that we believe in. I think Britain is a force for good, but we've got to put the money into showing that, I would say. And that's just beginning, really, this new role.

I agree with you. We do need to do that. The problem is, David, is you look at the kids coming out of universities. You know, they, on the whole, seem to be very skeptical, skeptical seemed to be very anti-British, his constant focus on empire. And look, you know, as somebody who has just read a little bit about it, obviously we weren't angels, but no empire is. You know, people think that the Ottomans were woke. So the problem is that we talk about this and I think we can all agree on that but 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. I mean, how do we unify this country?

Yeah, I think it is a, I mean, it's gone along, we've gone a long way down this road. That's the problem. And I think one of the consequences of, you know, fat people in their 20s, 30s, maybe even 40s, don't have a stake is in society, you know, don't have a house, maybe defer having kids till they're a bit later, this sort of thing, is that they can sort of live in a world of kind of illusions of, you know, how the world is and how it works for a bit longer than they used to be able to.

And that is part of what we're seeing. You know, there's a kind of sort of fantasy world being created about, how it works and how we got here and what is important to Western civilization and advanced economy. And I actually think it's time for the government and people like us to be even more assertive about that. So I thought, you know, your book constantly is great on this subject. This is what has made us, this is what is important in a Western society. Keep telling yourself about it because otherwise people start to think different. things. But it's very difficult when university, like I said before, is telling these kids that

we're evil and we're wrong. Yeah. It's gone very deeply. And I, you know, this whole sort of assault on Western culture and history and so on. One of the questions I ask myself, and I haven't heard people answer, is, you know, why is it happening? There is, what has driven it? How have we got to this point. And I see, you know, there are kind of two answers, I think. One is that there's a bunch of sort of cultural Marxists, you know, going through the institutions trying to destroy Western society in the universities and so on. And the other is that this is just liberalism sort of push to its endth degree. As you knock over one taboo, you look for another taboo, in order to stop that looking kind of absurd, you have to create this sort of alternative

reality so that things don't look absurd and there is, you know, the sort of emperor new clothes thing can survive. And I think that's actually more what we're seeing, that's the kind of liberalism, social liberalism that, you know, kind of started in the 60s, in universities, in the intellectual classes, has just been pushed and pushed and pushed so that there are no taboos left. And that doesn't mean it was wrong to do what happened in the 60s, but it does mean that sensible people have got to say, you're pushing this too far. The world isn't like this. It's like this.

And just be more honest about that. David, I wish we could talk for longer, but we're not as good negotiators as you said. So the deal we did with the builders across the road that they would stop building for a while is now expired. And we're going to have to ask you our final question and wrap up. What is the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should? be. So I think it's not so, it's the subject that we, we are talking about a bit, but not enough and it's about devolution and the union of this, this country. I think there is far too great an acceptance that the country has divided up, or is divided up into four different units. We're in a

sort of confederation because it is kind of convenient to everybody, but it could be different. And meanwhile, we should let Scotland and Wales kind of do their own thing and not worry too much about it. And, you know, I think it's hard to get people in England to kind of care about what's happening in Scotland and increasingly in Wales, which seems we're going down the same road now. And I think we've got to have an honest conversation about, you know, where devolution has taken us, is undermining the kind of unity of this nation state. And, you know, you go to Germany, go to France, go to Italy. They would regard the kind of debate we have about, you know, the different components this country is entirely bizarre.

The idea you could just detach and go a different way will be quite wrong. So I think we need, you know, it's very difficult. People don't like every time you sort of tell the SNP or the Welsh Labour Party that it can't be like this, you get this sort of torrent of, you know, pushback. But we've got to start having this conversation again. This is a unitary nation state. devolution is one thing and path to independence is a different thing

and got to start pulling it back together again it was incredible to me that we essentially devolved our travel policy who could come in and out of the country during the pandemic to the Scottish and Welsh governments who seem to be allowed to do their own thing nobody thought that was what devolution was about and it shouldn't be what it's about

and we've got to pull that back. It will be very uncomfortable, but I think it needs to be done. Lord David Frost, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. It's been great. Enjoyed it. And thank you guys for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or a show.

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