UK’s former chief negotiator launches staunch Defence of Brexit on sixth anniversary of EU referendum
Brexit is working and anyone who says it has hit the economy and trade has an axe to grind, the former Brexit negotiator David Frost has said on the sixth anniversary of the UK voting to leave the EU.
Lord Frost stopped short of painting a picture of “sunny uplands” but said official figures used to predict a 4% decline in output caused by Brexit were “zombie” numbers, based on academic studies of former communist countries, and not fact.
“Those studies primarily looked at the effect of opening up badly run ex-communist and ex-authoritarian autarchic economies in which opening up was producing huge improvements to the policy regime more generally, and in which the gains came from these broader improvements not just from trade,” he said.