It was a pleasure to welcome Lord David Frost to our latest briefing event, Britain Unleashed: Returning to Growth, presented in association with Glint.
In his powerful speech, Lord Frost argues that Britain has descended into a stagnant, high‑tax, collectivist system and must now undertake the difficult, deliberate work of shrinking the state, restoring free markets, reclaiming national sovereignty from foreign institutions, and rebuilding a cohesive, nation‑based democracy in order to create a freer, happier, and more prosperous country.
You can read Rt Hon Steve Baker’s reflections on Lord Frost’s speech here:
You can read the full text of Lord Frost’s speech below.
In Book VI of Vergil’s Aeneid, the great epic of Rome’s early foundation, the hero Aeneas meets the Cumaean Sybil, a prophetess, and asks her if he may descend to Hades to see his dead father.
Famously she replies:
“Facilis descensus averno
The way down to Hell is easy.
Night and day the gate to gloomy Hades stands open
But to retrace your steps, to pass out once again to the upper air
Hoc opus, hoc labor est
That’s the real task. That’s the difficult part.”
So it is in Britain today. The gate to gloomy collectivism has stood open and we have willingly walked through it. Now we are a zero growth economy, with the highest ever levels of taxation and spending. We have over the last 20 years been all too open to easy decisions and short-run palliatives, to borrowing rather than earning, to taxing and distributing rather than encouraging self reliance. We have lost faith in the market economy as the route to prosperity. Now we have to retrace our steps and return to the upper air, and, as the Sybil says, that is the hard work. That is the labour that lies before us.
It won’t get any easier by delay. Parties on the Right, non-socialist commentators and intellectuals, all need to face up to the reality of what now has to be done and work to create an effective political movement to do it. There is still time. But the work of education and persuasion will be accomplished only slowly. We need to start now.
That political movement needs to be honest about the challenges but also honest about what can be accomplished. It needs to show that, with effort, we can create a freer, happier and more prosperous society, one that is attractive and fulfils human potential, one which people want to be a part of.
We know very well how to make such a society. We have plenty of experience from our own history and from looking around the world. It is about freedom; it is about an effective state not a big state; and it is about fostering a sense of nationhood and belonging.
Freedom and free markets are the only way to create prosperity. Those on the left, and some on the Right, who claim there is some other way are fooling themselves. Look around the world and you will see that the successful countries are those with low taxation and high levels of economic freedom. That’s what supports enterprise, prosperity, and growth.
Unfortunately Britain has got on the wrong path. In the 2026 edition of the Heritage Index of World Economic Freedom, you can see there has been a collapse in the UK ranking over the last 2-3 years of the last Tory govt, from which we have not recovered. Not because of covid, but after it. We are now well below not just the usual leaders, Singapore, Switzerland, Nordics, but countries like Germany, S Korea, Portugal, Cape Verde, Cyprus. 10 years ago we ranked 10th in the world. Now we are 29th globally, 17th within Europe. We know why. High tax, high spend, high borrowing, a big but weak state,and a squeezing out of markets from many areas of activity has done the damage.
What needs to be done is in my view obvious. We need a ten year programme to shrink the state by 1pp or more a year to get it back to early Blair era levels, to cut public spending, taxation, and regulation. We need welfare reform. We need serious planning reform. We need to get tariffs down. We need a Royal Commission to tell us how to move away from the productivity-destroying and, to a greater extent than elsewhere in Europe, the patient-killing NHS, and how to move to a European-style insurance system over time. We need to invest in gas and nuclear energy, stop the rollout of renewable, and end the net zero programme, the National Suicide Pact. And overall we need to remove the dead hand of the state from markets, free up prices, stop capping, fixing, and controlling. If we don’t do this, we aren’t going to recover.
But a successful country is about more than just markets. A successful country also has a sense of nation. That has massively eroded in recent years. That isn’t just a cultural but also an economic problem.
As I have said before, I believe that on a historical perspective Europe’s and the West’s economic success is fundamentally related to the emergence of the modern nation state. It is no accident that the great drive to industrialisation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries happened first in the traditional existing nation states, and spread with nationalism across the continent. In short, nation-state formation and industrialisation proceeded to a significant extent in parallel.
That was not coincidence. Free markets require more than contracts and prices. They require a willingness to experiment, to change, to disrupt traditional ways of doing things. They require people to accept churn, uncertainty and unequal outcomes. That will not happen unless people feel they are part of a broadly cohesive community; unless they believe that that community can provide collective protection against the worst risks; and unless they think that community is well governed, so that entrepreneurialism pays off rather than being arbitrarily punished. It also requires them to know that they can adjust course and solve problems as they emerge - that the democratic process genuinely means something and that elections can change things.
What does that mean in our context? It means state reform so that the civil service ceases to operate as an independent power in the land and is properly under ministerial control. It means reform of devolution so that the devolved governments concentrate on their actual job, fulfilling the duties of local government, not endlessly talking about independence and not trying to compete with the government on the international scene. It means controlling the borders, targeting net negative immigration, reversing as far as possible the Boriswave, and getting serious about integration policy. It means proper spending on foreign affairs and above all defence and national resilience here at home. It means abolishing the Equality Act and scrapping the system of group rights, of psychological Bantustans based on protected characteristics, in favour of individual rights. It means ending the clampdown on free speech.
To be able to do any of these things we need to be properly in control of our country. We are not. We don’t set all the laws in Northern Ireland. We have no say on the terms on which nearly 6 million EU citizens live here, policed as they are by the European Commission not national institutions. The ECHR court in Strasbourg sets the terms of who can come to Britain and how long they can stay. And now we are faced with the government’s EU reset which is taking us further away from self-govt, thanks to an establishment which has never really accepted the logic of national independence and treats self-government as a regrettable inconvenience. So we need to undo the EU reset, leave the ECHR, and abrogate the Windsor Framework and the rest of the Withdrawal Agreement so we govern our country ourselves again.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I voted to Leave the EU, and I worked hard to make Brexit happen and to deliver the biggest and broadest ever free trade agreement, because I believe that all things we want to do are best accomplished outside the EU. I am a little concerned that we don’t hear enough about this from the leadership of the parties on the Right. I get that no one wants another round of the Brexit wars. I don’t either. But I do want our leadership to stand up for national independence, for reversing the subordination to foreign institutions where this govt is taking us, for standing up for the principles of a free society and free institutions within a national democracy. We don’t have that at the moment and we aren’t going to get it without another supreme effort.
So what we need to do is clear. It’s almost everything. I don’t believe many on the Right would disagree with me on most of it. The task is how and that is where the political effort needs to go. What is the order of priority? What reforms have to come first to unlock others? Which are going to show the political payoff most quickly? Over the last 20 years we have built a rickety but all encompassing structure of scaffolding around the crumbling structure of the British state. We can’t just take bits out at random first or the whole thing will collapse on us. In short we need a plan. I know Kemi says “we have a plan and the others don’t”. Sadly I don’t believe her. I am not sure either party on the Right has a plan yet. Once these local elections are out of the way, one needs developing, and as a matter of urgency.
For the prize is great. To return to the Aeneid. Aeneas ignores the warnings of the Sybil and goes down to Hades and is shown the mighty destiny of the Rome that he will found, the famous injunction, “Roman be sure to rule the world, to crown peace with justice, to spare the vanquished and crush the proud”, but also that he must return and struggle to found the city and make this happen. That struggle faces us too if we are to recover. To refound our nation without external control, and to make it as I said at the start, “a freer, happier and more prosperous society”, one which attracts admiration not pity and disdain from those looking at us.
It will not be easy. But there is no other way. The task now for politicians is to make what is necessary possible. We must not despair. We can do it. This country has declined and recovered before. Writing in the depths of the last great crisis, in 1940, George Orwell wrote in his great essay the Lion and Unicorn, “We must add to our heritage or lose it. We must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward.”
I do too. Thank you very much.
