13th October 2021
Yesterday the Brexit minister David Frost gave a speech – and it is a speech that is worth considering carefully.
One reason to consider it carefully is that – unlike many ministerial speeches (and articles) that are produced by advisors and other functionaries – it is plain that this speech is the product of the minister’s mind.
As such, the speech has more historical and probative value that the usual erratic yet dry sequences of banalities, evasions and misdirections that constitute most ministerial communications.
We have an actual insight into one key minister is thinking (or not thinking) at this key moment, and this is rare, and we should appreciate it.
And as he is the minister who negotiated the two Brexit agreements – the withdrawal agreement and the trade and cooperation agreement – an insight into his thought (and lack of thought) is especially important at this time.
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The explicit inspiration for the title of yesterday’s speech is a pamphlet by the eighteenth-century Whig writer and politician Edmund Burke.
And yesterday’s speech is, in turn, expressly a sequel to Frost’s Brexit speech in February 2020, which was also named after a publication by Burke.
In that February 2020 speech, English-born Frost described Burke as ‘one of my country’s great political philosophers’.
Burke was Irish.
And Burke died in 1797, before the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland.
This is just not a debating point: the slip is indicative of the shoddy combination of showiness and shallowness – about Ireland and other matters – in both of Frost’s speeches.
The Burke cited is the Burke of the quotation dictionaries, and of the beginnings and conclusions of C-grade A-level history essays, and not the Burke of history.
The Burke of history would probably have impeached this illiberal government in an instant.
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The two Frost speeches, looked at together, reveal tensions.
For example, the February 2020 speech praised agreement negotiation at speed.
Referring to the then-prospective trade and cooperation agreement, 2020 Frost said:
‘…we can do this quickly. We are always told we don’t have enough time. But we should take inspiration, I think, from the original Treaty of Rome back in 1957. This was negotiated and signed in just under 9 months – surely we can do as well as that as well as our great predecessors, with all the advantages we have got now?’
But 2021 Frost does not like agreement negotiation at speed: the Northern Irish Protocol was ‘drawn up in extreme haste in a time of great uncertainty’.
The problem here is that there is no deeper thought beneath the phrases employed.
Frost has a fine phrase for negotiation at speed, and he has a fine phrase against negotiation in extreme haste.
But he does not realise nor care that the two phrases conflict: they are both simple expedients to get him through to his next paragraph.
This explains why during the Brexit negotiations Frost has been so constantly wrong-footed.
There is no substance, for all the paraded erudition.
The big negotiation taking place here is not between the United Kingdom and the European Union, but between the David Frost of 2020 and the David Frost of 2021.
And, somehow, both are losing.
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Looking more closely at yesterday’s speech, you will see that it is structured (superficially) as a sequence of five ‘points’:
‘First to say that Brexit has changed our international interests and hence will change our patterns of European relationships – not necessarily fundamentally, but significantly. Second, that Brexit means competition – we will be setting a different path on economic policy. Third, that Brexit was about democracy – it is a democratic project that is bringing politics back home. Fourth, that the EU and we have got into a low-equilibrium somewhat fractious relationship, but that it need not always be like that – but also that it takes two to fix it. And fifth and finally, that fixing the very serious problem we have in the Northern Ireland Protocol is a pre-requisite for getting to a better place.’
Each of these points, however, turn out to be exercises in characterisation.
The United Kingdom position is characterised, and the European Union position is characterised.
Each characterisation is loaded and self-serving: the United Kingdom is portrayed as blameless and misunderstood, and the European Union is depicted as ignorant and even spiteful.
These characterisations are so extreme that both are better described as mischaracterisations.
And so the characterisations dissolve on closer examination as nothing more than excuses and accusations.
For example, take the issue of policy.
At one point Frost says that the United Kingdom will develop more substantial policy relationships with some European Union countries and not others, rather than the European Union as a whole.
But then he complains that the European Union is too rigid in binding the member states together in matters of policy:
‘In most EU member states many important things can’t be changed through elections – trade policy, monetary policy, fiscal policy, important elements of immigration policy, indeed some important aspects of industrial policy.’
Frost does not seem to realise that the United Kingdom is – and will be treated as – a ‘third country’.
The tactic of trying to circumvent the European Union and with engaging member states directly did not work during the Brexit negotiations, and there is no reason to believe it would work now.
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But the most important part of this speech is about Northern Ireland.
Here he makes some general contentions about sovereignty and the role of the European Court of Justice.
He then insists that the import of these contentions is that the Northern Irish protocol needs to be replaced.
In a way this is a reversal of the usual caricature of continentals being obsessed with airy abstractions, in contrast to our robust Anglo-Saxon empiricism.
For the complaint as articulated by Frost does not amount to much more than a general objection to the European Court of Justice on conceptual grounds.
And, in the meantime, the European Union is proposing a range of practical measures to give efficacy to the Protocol but without removing the minor and residual role of the European Court of Justice.
And so he is wrong-footed again.
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The one thing in common between the two speeches is that Frost is brashly defiant in his support for Brexit.
He is certain that it was a historical necessity that the United Kingdom had to break free.
This, in turn, means he sneers at the European Union for not understanding the true nature of Brexit and its implications.
But both the 2020 and 2021 speeches reveal that the real failure to understand the implications of Brexit are with Frost and other United Kingdom ministers.
The European Union, on the other hand, seem to understand the (current) United Kingdom government all too well.
Frost complains about lack of trust: ‘we are constantly faced with generalised accusations that can’t be trusted and are not a reasonable international actor’.
But these accusations are not ‘generalised’ – instead they are, to use a phrase, ‘very specific and limited’.
And, according to statements today from a former Brexit adviser, the accusation of bad faith is well grounded.
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So, yes.
Frost’s speech has historical and probative value.
But it is not an impressive piece of work.
Characterisations (and mischaracterisations) do the work of propositions; accusations pile upon excuses; assertions are implicitly undermined by other assertions; and (ahem) very specific and limited concerns are dismissed as too general to matter.
And so the true historical and probative value of the speech is not as an insight into the thinking of the government at this stage of Brexit, but to its lack of thought.
Here it should be noted that Frost relies on the (supposed) popularity of Brexit as its ultimate justification:
‘That’s why I don’t see anything wrong with Brexit being described as a populist policy. If populism means doing what people want – challenging a technocratic consensus – then I am all for it.’
The wise counterpoint to this populism, of course, was once put as follows: that our ministers and representatives owe us their judgement – and that they betray us instead of serve us if they sacrifice their judgement to public opinion.
And who made this compelling counterpoint so eloquently?
Edmund Burke.
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