'Get taxes down, get spending down, stop borrowing so much...'

BREXIT negotiator Lord Frost talks about the British economy as if it is a patient in danger of a heart attack.

- By David Williamson

“The arteries of the economy have just furred up,” he warns, calmly, sitting at a highly polished table at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

The former diplomat who went head-to-head with the European Commission’s toughest negotiators now fears Labour is putting Britain back in the orbit of Brussels - a move he argues will do nothing to help the troubled economy recover.

Lord Frost has found a berth at the fabled think-tank at a time when the UK has stopped growing.

And he has a ready prescription for bringing the economy back to life.

It includes “getting tax down, getting spending down, stopping borrowing so much money” and “ending the net zero programme”.

He views Sir Keir Starmer’s Brexit reset agenda with grave unease. “Obviously I take it as read that everybody in the leadership of the Labour party wants to get back in the EU,” he says. “That’s where they would really like to be.”

Yet Labour made a manifesto commitment to “stay out of the EU” and Lord Frost reckons the party leadership are now “regretting tying their hands quite so much”. He warns that the present strategy of aligning with EU rules “bit by bit” is the “worst of both worlds”.

“We have to accept EU laws on food, agriculture, the electricity single market [and] carbon pricing without any say in those laws.”

The 61-year-old is scathing about “Labour's view that the EU is the solution to Britain’s growth problem”. He says: “There’s no reason at all to think that makes any sense.

“The EU has just as many problems as the UK, and in many cases they’re worse.

“All of Europe is suffering in some ways from the same sort of malaise of high taxation, high spending, high regulation, crazy energy policies and so on. It’s not going to get any better by joining them. What we're doing is losing our own freedom to take a different path.”