Government Record on Education, Employment and Welfare

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for securing this debate and for her excellent opening speech. Britain’s economic problems did not begin with this Government. That would be an unjust accusation. I am afraid Governments of all parties have laboured diligently over many years to produce today’s situation.

The fundamentals can be summarised in one simple set of figures. Since 2008, productivity growth has consistently fallen back. The ONS tells us that, before the financial crisis, multi-factor productivity grew at nearly 2% annually. It is now growing at about 0.5% or less and has recently stagnated. In 2025, per capita GDP was lower than in 2022.

No party in government over this period can regard this record with satisfaction. All three—that includes the Liberal Democrats, of course—to varying degrees regulated, taxed, subsidised and drove energy costs up and industry out. Then came Covid, Ukraine and inflation; each inflicted genuine damage but also provided Whitehall with that most renewable of resources: a convenient explanation to hide bad policy.

Now, there is perhaps a glimmer of something better. Maybe artificial intelligence will finally raise output per worker. Indeed, the ONS’s experimental measure on productivity suggests that it has risen by 4.2% since 2019, rather than 2.3% under the old measure. So, perhaps something is going on.

But at precisely this delicate moment, the Government have chosen to test whether a green shoot can survive being repeatedly struck with a Treasury shovel. The tax burden is forecast to rise to 38.5% by the end of this decade—the highest since records began. The Government are planning to spend nearly half of all the money in the country. The reforms to education brought in by the noble Lord, Lord Gove, have been reversed, and we know from Wales and Scotland what the result of that is likely to be. As we have heard, the Employment Rights Act has undone one of this country’s few remaining strengths—our flexible labour market. Unemployment is at its highest level for a decade. Youth unemployment is even worse.

Net zero is compounding the problem, zeroing one industry after another. Denby Pottery, in my own home region of Derbyshire, survived the Napoleonic Wars, two World Wars, the early 1980s recession and the pandemic but could not survive Ed Miliband.

Of the terrors yet in prospect under Andy Burnham, we are currently left to guess, since he refuses to face any parliamentary scrutiny until September. We know, though, because he told that pillar of our constitution, Gary Lineker, a day or two ago, that he is going to

“ask for a little more”.

It may be a wealth tax or maybe a land value tax. Certainly, we will get municipal corporatism on a grand scale.

I am at a loss to know what question to ask the Minister today. After all, she comes to your Lordships’ Chamber without, I suspect, knowing what is going to come next, so that she can tell us anything about it. Yet she has to defend, as a programme for growth, an economic record of higher taxes, higher spending, riskier and more expensive jobs, a return to union-dominated schools and among the most expensive energy in the OECD.

We know that Ministers want prosperity—of course they do—but the problem is they do not know how to get it. Maybe they have got lucky. After nearly 20 years of stagnation, maybe they just might have been handed the first genuine prospect of a positive productivity shock in a generation. But the problem is that their instinct, faced with something that might at last grow of its own accord, is to reach for weedkiller and try to convince us that it is really fertiliser—a persuasive effort that I suggest is most accurately described as a different kind of fertiliser altogether.

Contemporary Cultural Boycotts

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lord, in his great essay The Prevention of Literature, George Orwell wrote:

“imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity”.

I think this is a little commented-on reason why the current repression of free speech and freedom in the arts is such a problem. It affects not only those whose opinions are repressed but everybody. That repression is obviously outrageous in its own terms, with the shocking levels of antisemitism that have been documented and the bias against gender-critical views and even simple views on the right of politics. I congratulate Rosie Kay and Denise Fahmy for drawing attention to it in this excellent report, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, for getting today’s debate.

As we know and as the report documents, the repression of free speech and the spread of antisemitism have had seriously bad effects on those directly affected. We know that. It constrains what they can produce, and it may force them entirely out of the sector. There are some telling quotes to this effect in the report, such as one artist saying:

“I realised how much of myself I had edited out just to survive”,


or:

“You make terrible art when you are cowering”.


This is clear—it is sort of obvious—but my point is that the effect is on not only those affected in this way, but on everybody else. It is on those who somehow get through it.

A politicised art sector produces a lot of bad art, and we have had quite a lot of it recently. On the London stage, from 20 years ago with “My name is Rachel Corrie”, through Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of “Who Killed My Father”, there has been a stream of plays about migration and refugees from one perspective and so on and so forth. Even when art is not politicised, this sort of sector produces an art that prioritises box-ticking and conformism. It produces art that is dull, worthless and often even contemptuous of its audience. It is a very good sign that Wigmore Hall and its director, John Gilhooly, have opted out of the Arts Council system. I cannot help noting that even the noble Baroness, Lady Hodge, in her recent report on the Arts Council, said:

“People felt that ACE was pursuing access to culture in an instrumentalist way and had lowered the priority given to the pursuit of artistic excellence. Art and excellence were sidelined”.


This is the problem. I contend that any artist who is happy to submit to the ruling orthodoxy and prevailing opinions, who finds excuses for squeezing out people who do not agree with him or her or who regards policing ideology as more important than their own creative work will in the end destroy themselves as artists. We can see that at work. As we look around Britain’s artistic scene today and compare it to, say, the efflorescence in the arts of post-war Britain in both visual and written form, we can be confident that, with a few exceptions, the past couple of decades will not be seen as a golden age in British arts. I contend that public conformism, internal bigotry and the driving out of contrary opinions are a big part of the reason why.

I finish by quoting Orwell, this time in Writers and Leviathan. He said:

“To yield subjectively … even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer”.


That is true for any artist. It needs to be stopped, and I would like to know what the Government are going to do about it.

Nature’s Rights Bill [HL]

Lord Frost Excerpts

Friday 3rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for bringing forward this Bill. It is an extremely interesting Bill, well worthy of debate. It is good to have a Bill that raises properly philosophical issues; apart from the recent assisted dying Bill, we do not often get them.

The question of what nature is has preoccupied philosophers and theologians since the ancient Greeks. They have asked whether the natural order is itself divine, merely God’s handiwork, something in between or, more recently, none of those things. In examining this question, one issue very relevant to this Bill recurs—whether, and if so why, it is reasonable to personalise the concept of nature for theological, philosophical or political purposes. This Bill seems to do just that. One is led to speculate whether we are seeing not just the embodiment of the modern Gaia concept but a return to the “Lady Nature” of the early medieval Chartres school of Bernard Silvestris and Alain de Lille. These are not irrelevant or purely intellectual questions. The Bill asks us to believe that nature exists as a specific, recognisable and even self-evident concept, and builds an entire political structure around that. Yet intellectual history tells us that things are a bit more complicated. Get the concept wrong and the politics and the legislation will be wrong too. I fear that that is what is happening.

Despite what I have just said, I have more sympathy with the Bill’s proponent—the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett—in this area than she might perhaps imagine, even if she will not necessarily agree with the route by which I get there. The Bill is very problematic, as we will come on to, but it is trying to recognise something important with which I sympathise. I am rather with Thomas Aquinas in thinking that nature is distinct from the divine creator, but also in some way special. The natural world is not God, but nor is it just stuff; it is special and should be treated accordingly. It bears witness to God in a sacramental way. We should not be casual, therefore, or casually mistreating of our natural environment.

It is one thing to say that and another to turn it into meaningful, practical legislation. I worry that it is not possible to do this in a secular democracy. The reason I have begun with this theological excursus is precisely because I think the Bill is trying to bring in a kind of confessionalism by the backdoor. If we were to take it seriously, it would require every one of us and every organisation to pay obeisance to nature and its rights, as if it were some kind of goddess—someone or something with super-personal rights and superior status, reducing us as humans to beings subordinate to her. That is exactly what we find in Clause 4(2), in which humans and human rights are explicitly made secondary to the rights of “Nature”—with a capital “N”. I contend that this is a sort of religious approach, but not a Christian one. It is more of a pagan vision, which is fundamentally anti-human and antithetical to human flourishing and should therefore be resisted.

The Bill raises not only such philosophical issues but practical and important public policy issues. One is the way that this approach treats “Nature” as a single, unified, rights-bearing subject. But “Nature” is not a single “it”. Indeed, Clause 42 defines “Nature” at some length as

“the interconnected community of living organisms, ecosystems, habitats, species, landscapes”,

et cetera, collapsing an almost limitless heterogeneity of entities into one legal person in what I contend is a rather meaningless fashion.

I think the Bill’s proponent has summarised this by saying that “Nature” is everything there is and that the economy is a complete subset of it. I agree on that, but it is precisely the problem: how can “Nature” be a rights-bearing entity, as Clause 2 describes it, if it is everything that there is? How are we supposed to address all the trade-offs and conflicts that arise within that? The only way of doing it would be to do what we already do: to establish various rights—human, corporate, property, whatever—and adjudicate between them on the basis of agreed criteria. You cannot adjudicate between those rights and the whole system; they are on different levels and are different kinds of things. It simply does not make sense to try to do it. In that sense, the whole Bill is just not workable.

But suppose we try it anyway. The problem then is that nature is full of competing interests: predator versus prey, native versus colonising species, one bioregion’s water needs versus those of another. You could go on endlessly. Any coherent rights of nature framework needs some sort of metric to compare harms and benefits across radically different kinds of entities. The Bill’s definitions of concepts such as “ecological integrity”, “safe ecological limits” and “planetary boundaries”, as set out in Clause 42, all gesture at scientific precision but actually just relabel these same incommensurable variables as things that purport to be legally operative thresholds. They bring scientific contestability directly into binding law. In these circumstances, I contend that the judges, tribunals or members of the sinister-sounding “Nature Guardianship Council” will simply be making their own value judgments dressed up as adjudication. That risks becoming arbitrary government in its purest form.

To conclude, there are many other problems with the Bill. I will just mention a few. Clause 33 creates a sweeping new criminal offence—incredibly, with up to 20 years’ imprisonment as the maximum sentence—for “recklessly” causing “serious harm to Nature”. That is entirely disproportionate. Clause 30 allows proceedings to be brought “in the name of Nature” by charities, community bodies, public interest organisations—a long, long list—combined with a state-funded environmental justice fund. All of this is yet further subsidy to campaign groups to litigate against infrastructure, housing and farming—real activity in the real world—as if that was not problematic enough already.

We are seeing the enshrining of the precautionary principle in a very broad form in Clause 34. Clauses 10 and 11 direct the entire financial and banking sector to reorient lending, investment and pension decisions around ecological criteria. We are seeing the creation of huge regulation-making powers for Secretaries of State with very few limitations and, of course, the creation of a vast additional bureaucracy to support this new activity.

To conclude, I say with a degree of sadness, for the reasons I set out at the start, that I am afraid the Bill is not just philosophically incoherent but probably unworkable. In saying all this, I am doing the Bill the courtesy of taking it seriously. I wonder whether one really should, given that it involves a complete upending of our economic, environmental and legal systems. It is difficult to imagine it could really make progress, given that. But I do think, to conclude, that it is worth identifying and dismantling these ideas now, while they are marginal and merely crankish, rather than risking them acquiring momentum and becoming actively dangerous. We have had enough bad ideas in politics in the last few years. Let us not import another one in this Bill now.

Political Party Finance and the Electoral Commission

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is very good that we are having this discussion today; I want to raise two issues. The first is the role of the Electoral Commission and the second is the composition of the electoral register.

On the first, I cannot entirely agree with the general approval of the direction of travel of the Electoral Commission in recent years. I worry that we are creating another quango, as we have previously in other areas, that in day-to-day practice is relatively unaccountable. We have touched on the reporting arrangements that were originally brought in for the Electoral Commission when it was created. There is not real accountability to the Speaker’s Committee; it is a financial scrutiny loop, really. Of course, the Speaker’s Committee has a government majority on it. That is why the Government that I was briefly a part of changed this in 2022, so that there was at least some attempt to pay due regard to broader strategic priorities in this area. It seems that we are now going to change this back.

The problem is that somebody has to decide how the Electoral Commission acts. If it is not proper accountability from outsiders, then it is the permanent bureaucracy that runs it. The permanent bureaucracy is not, in my view, neutral, and has a very strong worldview in these areas. We saw that on the Electoral Commission during the Brexit period when the commission went after people without properly understanding its own rules, putting individuals through the wringer. We saw it—I say this at the risk of distressing the noble Lord, Lord Wallace—in the highly contentious and political recommendations in some areas of the Rycroft review. We see it in some of the actions of the Electoral Commission even today. I do not think it should be a semi-political actor and I do not think its head should be a political figure, but that is what is beginning to happen. I happen to agree with the comments by the head of the commission a few months back:

“As a matter of principle, we do not think that capacity constraints are a legitimate reason for delaying long planned elections”,


but I do not think it is his job to be rebuking the elected Government in these highly political areas. There are real risks here.

The only thing that would be worse than government direction of the commission would be the commission becoming a player itself. It should be an umpire, not a player. The head of an electoral regulator carries automatic media authority. When he pronounces on contested questions, he lends the weight of officialdom to one side of a live political argument. Public confidence depends on visible restraint by the Electoral Commission. I worry that the powers that we are about to give it will push it in the opposite direction.

On my second point, on the electoral register, we all believe and often say that you must be a British citizen to be able to donate to a political party—Ministers often say this. Actually, it is not true. The condition is that you have to be on the electoral register. As we know, the electoral register includes many qualifying Commonwealth citizens, and indeed Irish citizens, resident here, so the right to bankroll a British political party in fact goes rather further. The real problem is not the donation issue itself, but the absurdity in the first place of having large numbers of non-British citizens on our electoral register. I must say that, when I have written and spoken on this subject, I find that people are incredulous—they literally cannot believe that you do not have to be a British citizen to be on the UK electoral register.

The scale is not marginal; it almost certainly runs to the millions. The Electoral Commission itself holds no record of it, but we can estimate it. In the 2021 census, there were 1 million adults here holding only a Commonwealth passport. That figure has plausibly doubled, at least, since then. The Electoral Commission’s own report in 2023 found that 66% of eligible Commonwealth citizens in Great Britain were registered to vote. This is not even properly policed. Zimbabwe withdrew from the Commonwealth in 2003 yet, more than 20 years on, its nationals can still register to vote because Parliament never amended the relevant schedule to the nationality Act.

This is not a new problem. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, recommended in 2008 that the rules should be changed to establish a clear connection between citizenship and the right to vote and donate. That has never been taken up. This is the real scandal. If we are really worried about foreign influence in our politics, we need to stop foreign citizens voting. If people want to vote in our country, they need to commit to our country and become citizens. This anomaly has lasted too long and it should be ended.

Democratic Institutions: Threats

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for enabling this debate because it gives us an opportunity to puncture the hysteria and moral panic that seem to have overwhelmed most of the British political class in recent years about disinformation, misinformation, foreign interference and all that. The noble Lord said something like, “I hope we all agree we have a problem”. It depends what he means by that. I agree that there is certainly a problem in disdain for politics and politicians. I do not agree that foreign interference, disinformation and all those sort of things are at the root of it. For after all, there has always been disinformation and foreign interference. It is not new; only the panic is new. There have always been people who want to harm us in this country.

Many of your Lordships, like me, lived through at least the end of the Cold War. Have we forgotten that the Soviet Union spent 40 years trying to undermine British politics and British society? Then, there really was a real threat, and it even recruited a few Labour MPs to help it, if I remember correctly, but we did not clamp down on free speech to deal with that. Free speech was much freer then than it is now. We allowed people to advocate all sorts of terrible ideologies because we had confidence in the British people’s ability not to take them seriously. Now, seemingly, all that has changed.

I expect a few noble Lords are familiar with Google Ngram, which allows you to track when words suddenly started to be used in public debate. These words all took off in around the middle of the last decade: misinformation suddenly shoots up from the middle of 2015; disinformation, even though many of us think of it as a Cold War concept, was hardly used, but now it has shot up as a concept and a usage; nobody had heard of “fake news” until it shot up as an idea in the middle of the last decade.

Was there some new external threat in the middle of the last decade—something new and dramatic that we had never faced before? I do not think there was. What we had was the election of President Trump and the Brexit referendum. A tide of hysteria was unleashed on the back of that—a fear of voters and a belief that they could not be trusted to make good decisions. There was endless worrying about malign actors, foreign agents, bot farms, weaponised Facebook and all that sort of thing. Politicians were forced to confront that many people did not agree with them. Rather than deal with that, they decided to blame the voters and take the view that, in the social media world, the ill-informed populace was easy prey to false beliefs, conspiracies, malign state interference and all the rest of it. Too many people, I am afraid, seem to believe that ordinary voters are too stupid to make their minds up about things or to distinguish between the true and the false. They think it is the Government’s job to do it for them instead.

We have a case in point in the absurd and dangerous Rycroft review, referred to earlier, which was written not to identify problems but to justify unnecessary and authoritarian solutions. Mr Rycroft worries about the

“coarsening of the political debate in a toxic online environment”

and that

“even marginal impacts could have a disproportionate bearing on … democratic discourse … confidence in our democracy”

and so on. He then uses this to justify an entirely illiberal clampdown on political party financing. Unfortunately, the Government seem to be taking this seriously. If implemented, this approach will do much more harm to our ability to run a democracy than any number of distasteful posts on X or Bluesky.

The problem with all this is that the worst and most difficult to correct disinformation and misinformation comes not from the general public but from the Government. That is the problem with government-based solutions. The list is long: the 45-minute dossier; the hoax around supposed collusion with Russia; the prediction that an economic crash was inevitable if we left the EU; the Hunter Biden laptop; the refusal to countenance the lab leak theory about Covid; the belief that wearing a flimsy mask could protect you from the disease; the reluctance, for a long time, to drop the belief that the Covid vaccine stopped the transmission of the virus; and, most recently, the reluctance to acknowledge the background of Axel Rudakubana and the fact that he was in possession of an al-Qaeda manual and tried to make ricin.

Governments are not to be trusted on this stuff. They promote contested issues as facts all the time and expect people simply to fall in line. This is why their seeming plans to require social media to promote only trusted sources are so dangerous. The BBC may, for some reason, still be the most trusted news provider in the country, but look at its record—the fabrications on Israel/Gaza, its obsession with trans issues and its fabrications of elements of the famous Trump documentary. No single organisation is to be trusted.

If there is a lack of confidence in our democracy and institutions, and I am sure there is, it is because they do not deserve it. Governments do not listen to voters’ clear messages. They block clear votes. Your Lordships’ House—dare I say it—and many others might have had a role to play during the Brexit era in undermining that confidence. Politicians and Governments have not delivered. The responsibility for the problem rests with politicians and institutions. It will not be made better by concealing things from voters and clamping down on social media.

The only solution to the problem we have is taking people seriously, allowing debate, being honest about things, letting voters make their own minds up and having confidence that they will be able to sift true from false, as they always have done. Freedom, free speech, a free society—those are the tools. Say no to the platonic guardians—it is the only sound basis. Trust the people.

Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on his promotion and thank him for his very clear opening statement. The problem we have today is that we are looking at a Bill that is important in its own right but is only one part of a much bigger problem: can we sustain a steel industry at all in this country and, if so, how? I am not quite such a fan of the Government’s March steel strategy as the Minister is. The problem is that what one thinks of this Bill really depends on what one thinks of this broader strategy and how viable it is.

I sympathise with the Government’s difficulties, even though they are in part self-generated, although not wholly. Even somebody as economically liberal as me recognises that we are hardly operating in a free market environment in this area and that some sort of government steering hand is needed. We all have an interest in maintaining a viable steel industry in Britain, after all. It is the design that is crucial.

I want to set out three contextual problems before talking about how we might find a way forward. The first problem has been alluded to before: the fact that there is no genuine market in steel globally. We know about the huge amount of structural overcapacity worldwide, the Chinese subsidies and the reaction—the wave of tariffs, quotas, anti-dumping measures and so on that has spread across the industrialised world. There is no sign that that is going to change any time soon. In that context I understand the Government resorting to tariffs. I certainly do not like them, but it is unreasonable to exclude them as a weapon. They could be better targeted on particular kinds of steel, stronger rules of origin and perhaps bigger TRQs for reliable suppliers. Maybe the Minister can say whether the Government have considered this or might consider it in the future as a way of reducing the downstream effect on our own producers.

The second problem is the need for resilience and the national security issues that go with that. That means maintaining a necessary sovereign capacity, as other noble Lords have said. The question is, what does that sovereign capacity actually mean? The UK currently consumes about 12 million tonnes of steel a year. It is going up slightly. Domestic production is about 30% of that and the Government say they want it to go up to 50%. It is never going to be 100%. Sovereign capacity does not mean producing everything you consume; it is about defining the capabilities you cannot afford to lose and the supply chains you cannot afford to depend on. Others will have different views, but my assessment is that the main capabilities we should be focusing on are: the defence-grade plate, forgings and specialist alloys that are broadly made in Sheffield, and the Government are committing to that; stockpiling and reliable contracts for the upstream supply chains; and rail and critical infrastructure products currently made at Scunthorpe but unprofitably.

The first of those three categories is largely state guided and in part state owned. As for the second, stockpiling, the Government have said nothing at all about this. On the third, Scunthorpe, the Government have not really been clear about the national security or resilience case for keeping Scunthorpe going. The Minister mentioned that it was about maintaining the ability to produce steel from scratch from raw iron, but an EAF plant with a DRI plant can do that as well, and that may well be the direction of travel. It is not in some particular resilience in the upstream supply chain either. After all, we no longer make coking coal in the UK, so we have to import that anyway to keep Scunthorpe going. As far as I can see, the only real case is transitional: to keep the UK as a main supplier to the rail industry while the new electric arc furnace facilities are built at Scunthorpe. I do not know whether this is the case or what mix of these things is the Government’s thinking on Scunthorpe. Perhaps the Minister can give us a bit more detail on that.

The third problem is this. If we are envisaging a modernised steel industry of some kind in this country and the capacity of specific types for specific purposes, can it be done profitably over the long term? Is it viable? I think our answer to that is yes. We can see it done in the US in the mini-mill industry and elsewhere—Turkey, for example, has a profitable steel industry based on EAF plants. Maybe this points to a UK model that is something like specialist capability for defence in Sheffield, two or three EAF clusters, perhaps including Scunthorpe, and this question of a DRI plant, which is touched on in the Government’s strategy but not brought to a conclusion.

Perhaps we could all agree to this as a viable destination. The problem is, how do we get there? As a destination, it depends on a cost and business environment that currently does not exist. Electricity is super expensive and getting more so. The business environment is poor and getting worse. As a transition, it involves somehow encouraging investment into this poor business environment, or else the Government coming up with the money themselves. This is why we have the problem that this Bill encapsulates. We are heading for a destination, however desirable it may be, that is probably unviable in current conditions without massive government help. This is the problem with rushing to nationalise Scunthorpe without thinking it through properly.

So where does that leave us? In the circumstances, there is clearly a case for the temporary nationalisation of Scunthorpe, on certain conditions. Temporary public ownership may be justified—and we wait to hear from the Minister on this—because closure might remove the UK’s primary iron capability overnight, with no clear succession plan. The problem is, as we know, that nationalisation always sets up terrible perverse incentives and poor management, which is why temporariness is really important. There must be a way out and a viable end point. It is reasonable to ask for something clearer on those conditions if we are going to proceed satisfactorily, and I give notice that I will probably put down some amendments to that effect.

We need three things. First, we need a clear exit strategy for Scunthorpe: the blast furnace run-out date if there is one, an EAF commissioning date if there is one and a target for return to the private sector. Without that, Scunthorpe risks becoming British Leyland—a permanent loss-making ward of the state where all the incentives are just to put in more money and hope that things turn out better, impossible to close but impossible to fix either.

The second condition—unfortunately, this is far from being fulfilled—is electricity and energy prices and a business environment that support a viable industry. We know the problem with electricity prices. It has been said that the British industrial competitiveness scheme exists and will hold down those prices, but that itself is only cross-subsidy. We are supposed to believe, and the Secretary of State for Energy has said, that our great net-zero project is going to bring prices down in the future, so why do we need the cross-subsidy if that is really the case? There is a real problem here with the strategy.

It is not just me saying that; plenty of people are. Dieter Helm, who is a pretty neutral commentator on this subject and has certainly supported net zero in the past, wrote on 3 June that the industrial consequences of the Government’s energy policy

“have been dire. High electricity prices have contributed to the closure of Grangemouth … the Exxon refinery in Scotland, one of the Hull refineries, the closure of most of the steel industry, the closure of the fertiliser and fibreglass industries, and severe problems for pottery and for glass-making. Car manufacturing is back to the 1950s’ levels. There is devastation amongst the SMEs … unfunded welfare spending has increased the cost of capital … Energy policy has reduced economic growth, not increased it”.

That is the problem. We are building a steel industry—we hope—in that environment but it is not clear to me how it is going to survive in those circumstances.

The third thing we need is a proper strategy for the industry as a whole, not just for Scunthorpe but something broader. What is the end point? Is there going to be a DRI plant or not? Do the Government recognise the need for the stockpiling of hard-to-source EAF kit and scrap? Do they recognise the need for strategic stockpiles of defence plate billets, HBI and so on?

The problem we have, to return to where we started, is that the March strategy covers only about half the ground. It commits on Port Talbot funding, on expanding Forgemasters and on one or two other things, but it is unclear on Scunthorpe—the subject before us today—non-committal on DRIs and silent on stockpiling. It says little or nothing about whether the future industry can be expanded further if we need to upgrade our defence effort. Above all, it does not tell us what the hierarchy of objectives is. What is the Government’s choice framework? When national security clashes with profitability, what is most important? When employment clashes with modernisation, do we protect jobs or do we fund the transition? When net zero clashes with the industrial base, do we change the plans or continue the charge of the Light Brigade to industrial suicide? That needs to be clear if it is a strategy. I would like to think the March strategy was interim but I do not know. Perhaps the Minister could say whether any thinking has been done on this broader approach and whether a broader strategy is needed.

Britain is not going to get back to a world of free trade in steel—that is not going to appear any time soon—but it can have a steel industry that is smaller, smarter, sovereign in the things that matter and capable of paying its own way. The problem is that putting so much of this in the hands of a Government relies on a Government who are capable of strategising for industries and running them, but history suggests that Governments are not good at those things. We are right to be sceptical about the approach and to ask for more information. Perhaps in winding up the Minister could start to give us some of that.

Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Lord Frost Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the most reverend Primate for her excellent opening speech in this debate, which admirably set out the issues that I think ought to be concerning us.

AI is undoubtedly going to bring us many good things, but it is a technology different in nature from any we have had before, perhaps even since the invention of writing, or at least printing. It has an affective quality that no technology has ever had before it. We have already stopped noticing the fundamental novelty, and indeed the oddness, of being able to talk to a machine in normal human language and get a reply. We have never been able to do that before, and I worry a bit about the consequences.

I am not personally concerned that all this is happening because AI is in some way genuinely intelligent or even sentient. I do not believe that humans are capable of creating such a thing. Some, of course, do think that, and Chris Olah, a founder of Anthropic, said in front of the Pope last week that

“we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience … We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease”.

The problem with looking at things in this way is that confuses what is intelligible with what is intelligent.

The most reverend Primate the Archbishop mentioned CS Lewis earlier and, in what I am about to say, I draw on his great essay, Transposition, which is, as so often, a remarkable anticipation of current realities. A materialist looks at the human brain and thinks that brain activity and neuroscience can, in principle, explain everything. I look at the same phenomena and see higher realities, consciousness, the divine spark and things we do not fully understand—a fuller reality simply reflected in the lower reality of brain material, and showing up in neuroscience as that activity. If Chris Olah thinks that what he sees in AI mirrors human capacity in some way, it is because he looks at that lower activity in his AI model, notes that there is something similar in humans and assumes that they are the same thing. They are not. We have never shown that neuroscience can create consciousness; I do not believe we ever will. A mind cannot exist in a human-created machine. AI mimics intelligence but it is not, in itself, intelligent, as the Pope set out in Magnifica Humanitas.

My worry is that this leaves us with another kind of problem. That worry is set out in a very interesting recent essay in Nature by Mustafa Suleyman, now chief executive at Microsoft AI. He worries that people are starting to see AI as sentient even when it is not. As he puts it:

“When a system perfectly mimics intentionality and empathy, the human brain projects an inner life into it … We are hurtling into this era largely unprepared for the psychological fallout”.


I must say that I sympathise. I cannot think it good if large numbers of people think that their AI loves them. It is something anti-human, fundamentally “not normal”. It is especially worrying in a world where many people take a utilitarian view of humanity and believe human beings are nothing special and are somehow just computers embedded in a body.

Where I differ from those who have expressed similar concerns today is that I am sceptical about regulation as the way to solve these problems. Some noble Lords seem to have a, frankly, fantastical belief in the powers of the British state to control society, shape AI development and influence what is happening around the world. Even if we could regulate ourselves, I do not know that the Chinese Government, to take just one example, would do the same. There are things, however, that we can do as people. As a society, we should try to show as little social tolerance as we can for this idea of treating AI as a person, a disembodied adviser or some sort of daemon from one of Philip Pullman’s books. For the end of that road is moral and legal rights for machines, which would be a fundamentally destabilising and dangerous development. We cannot control the technology, but we can control our reaction to it.

We are not going to solve the problems presented by AI by seeking refuge in more and more government control; we will do it by maintaining our own confidence as people in the special nature of humanity and our fundamental difference from the technology, and hence our ability to master it and not be pulled in by the mesmerising quality of the machine. I must say that, as I believe myself, the established Abrahamic religions, with their integral concepts of the special divine nature of humanity, seem most likely to provide us with the concepts and moral strength to achieve this.

Fundamentally, to conclude, this is not a problem Governments can solve. It is a problem for society, for individuals and, therefore, for each one of us in what we say, what we believe and how we think.

UK Electricity Prices

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, but also a problem, as he has said almost everything that needs to be said on this subject already, and in a style that few of us can imitate.

In the time available, I want to critique one particular argument that we hear quite a lot nowadays: that we just need energy abundance. The argument runs: “We just need more of everything—nuclear, gas, wind and solar. Let’s just get building—it doesn’t really matter what. Let’s just get on with it”. In a way, it is a good thing that we hear this argument. I think it is put forward precisely because people sense that there is something awry with the arguments for renewables but do not want to follow the logic through to its conclusion. Indeed, the argument sounds superficially logical: let us maximise our ability to use everything—the wind is free, so let us use that when we can, and use other things when we cannot. It is said that building lots of everything makes sure we can do that.

There are two problems with this. The first is the best-known one: intermittency. You cannot control when the wind blows, so you have to have enough capacity to replace all your renewables capacity when there is zero wind and zero sun. The more renewables you have on the system, the more back-up you need and the bigger your problem is. Having more renewables requires even more capacity overall, and that brings more cost.

The second problem is perhaps less intuitively obvious but still crucial. It does not matter that the marginal cost of wind is free; it still needs a system to deliver it. After all, rain is free, but we still pay for our water because we need a system to get it to us. It is the nature of this system, and the cost that goes with it, that is the problem. Renewables are a low-density inefficient system; they require a grid that is fundamentally different in nature to the grid that conventional generation needs. It is much more diffuse, much less efficient and much more difficult to get the power to where it is needed, even when it is being generated.

To illustrate the point briefly, compare Hinkley Point to same electricity generated via wind. Hinkley Point C will generate 7% to 10% of the country’s electricity demand on a site roughly the size of Regent’s Park—reliably, all day and all night. To generate the same amount with renewables requires an area half the size of a county such as Nottinghamshire or Leicestershire. In practice, of course, it is much more spread out and much greedier in terms of land use than that.

Such a diffuse and intermittent system requires extra engineering to provide capacities that come automatically with a conventional grid: inertia, voltage support and system strength. All this comes with cost: grid balancing, vast transmission costs, curtailment and, as the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, said, subsidy and price support. Optimising a grid to do these things is difficult and expensive—that is just the physical reality of these things.

This is why “just build more of everything” is a fallacy. You cannot lower electricity prices by adding more of the very technology that increases the costs. “More of everything” just multiplies the most expensive and complicated part of the overall bill. That is why “build more of everything” is not a strategy; it is a refusal to be intellectually honest and a reluctance to face up to what is necessary if we are to get costs and prices down. What is necessary is not layering renewables on top of gas or nuclear but halting renewables expansion altogether, before any more damage is done.

King’s Speech

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am delighted to speak in today’s debate on the humble Address. As noble Lords will probably expect, I plan to focus on European issues and, in particular, the sadly misnamed European partnership Bill, which would be better called the European subordination Bill, for in reality that is what it will achieve: it will deprive this Parliament of any say in areas where the Government have agreed to accept EU law and dynamic alignment. I look forward to debating the Bill at great length when it reaches your Lordships’ House.

The bigger question behind it, of course, is: why are the Government going down this road at all? Why are they embarking on this reset? There are three reasons. The first is slightly surprising, and we heard about it this week: the apparent belief of the current Prime Minister that we can get Britain to be at “the heart of Europe”—a retro phrase if ever I heard one. It takes me back to John Major in 1990, and a lot has happened since then. There has been a lot of back and forth, but at no point in that period has this country ever been at the heart of Europe, and I doubt very much that it ever will be, for we do not share the goals of those who run and manage the European Union.

Looking back over that period, we spent almost our entire period of EU membership under both parties resisting any kind of European defence agreement. Indeed, last year the Polish Foreign Minister celebrated the fact that we left because Europe could now get on with such an agreement. That is not being at the heart of Europe. Neither party wanted to be part of the justice and home affairs agreement, and neither wanted to join Schengen. Of course, the reason we are not in the euro is thanks to the many efforts of the man who is now apparently an adviser to the current Prime Minister, the former Chancellor Gordon Brown. The truth is that any policy based on trying to put this country at the heart of Europe will be based on an illusion and will lead the policymakers astray. I suggest that that is exactly what is happening. That is the first reason.

I turn to the second reason. Ministers ask us to believe that there has been significant economic damage from leaving the EU. Unfortunately for them, the truth is that our growth pattern has not changed compared with those of our European comparators. However you cut the figures, Brexit does not show up, and the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, has already embarked on this point. Look at the World Bank figures since the 2008 crash. If noble Lords think that 2016 was the inflection point, I note that before 2016 we grew at about the same speed as Germany and faster than France, and after 2016 it was the other way around. If noble Lords think that 2020 was the inflection point, I note that before 2020 we grew a bit slower than Germany and faster than France, and since 2020 we have grown faster than both. If noble Lords think that 2022-24 is the most important period, I note that then we grew faster than France, Germany and the eurozone. There is an alternative world where Ministers might be talking about this morning’s growth figures as reinforcing what the British economy could achieve outside the European Union, for none of the reset measures is actually in force yet. I do not expect to hear that argument from the Front Bench today.

What is going on, then? Why can you not see Brexit in the figures? My view is that there has been some small transitional effect from leaving the single market and the customs union—maybe 1% or 1.5% of GDP. It is hard to tell. I certainly would not put it anything like as high as the OBR does. But of course that is not the only thing that is going on. We have made reforms since 2020. We have, happily, stayed out of the worst of the EU’s legislation. In particular, EU laws on AI have helped make this country the third centre in the world for AI and brought in much investment, which is probably the major reason for the growth figures we have seen. We have reformed some financial services, and we have reduced tariffs to the rest of the world and made food cheaper. Indeed, the Government themselves have just done another wave of that, which makes one think that they must think there is some value in it. We have innovated in food and gene editing, with fewer obsessional bans of pesticides and so on.

Of course I wish we had done more—we should have done much more—but what we have done very plausibly makes up additional growth of perhaps 1% to 1.5%, which is why you cannot see Brexit in the figures. The costs of Brexit, such as they are, are paid, but the benefits are still to come, and there are many more to be had. But, sadly, this Government are doing the best they can to squander them. The real economic risks do not come from Brexit at all; they come from bad policy-making here and in the European Union. Perhaps that is why the latest Deloitte poll of CFOs shows that they are now more worried about

“economic weakness in the euro area, and the possibility of a renewed euro crisis”

than about the effects of Brexit. So, in summing up, instead of repeating the zombie figures of 4%, 6%, 8% or whatever, can the Minister perhaps comment on what the real-world data actually shows us, and therefore explain why it is so important for us to give away our legislative and economic power to deal with a problem that does not exist?

Finally, the third reason is that the Government have messed up the negotiations. They did not know what they were doing. It is clear to see what happened: in opposition, they believed that the EU would simply warm to them, and it would be easy to negotiate something better than the TCA while remaining within the so-called red lines. They believed that some of the outstanding problems from the TCA were outstanding because we had simply chosen not to deal with them for ideological reasons, rather than because the EU was not interested in negotiating collaborative solutions. They thought that a few token offers in the manifesto and lots of warm words would fix things. Well, they did not and they have not, and I imagine our negotiators are a bit more realistic now.

However, instead of drawing the correct conclusion that it would be better to try to make the TCA work and focus on economic reform in this country, they cannot admit the misdiagnosis. They have got sucked into the machine. They realise that what they promised cannot be delivered, so their only option to avoid looking like they got it all wrong is to take whatever the EU is prepared to offer. So now they are in the traditional position of British Governments: colluding with the EU about what is being agreed, with the EU saying, “If you accept our way of doing things, we will help you tell your own people there’s nothing to see here”. That really is the only explanation for why the Government have achieved so little while being dragged so far from its manifesto commitments; they are simply misleading the British people about what is going on.

Let us have a final look at what their manifesto actually said. It promised only four things, actually. On help for touring artists, they have got nothing. On mutual recognition of qualifications, they have got nothing. On the UK-EU security pact, they have got an agreement to attend meetings. On the veterinary agreement, the fourth, they have got that, but they have got a lot else besides: they have been sucked into the EU single market on food. Against that, they have agreed lots of things that were never in the manifesto. Where in the manifesto is the 12-year extension on fishing grounds? Where in the manifesto is the commitment to dynamic alignment and obeying EU laws with no say? Where is the product standards Act, which would allow Ministers to align with the EU by fiat? Where is the commitment to follow EU rules on cars? Where is joining EU carbon pricing? Where is joining the single market for electricity? Where is joining the EU’s customs union rules for carbon-intensive goods? Where is rejoining Erasmus for £1 billion a year? Where is the youth mobility scheme that is apparently going to be more ambitious than ever, according to the PM on Monday. The answer is: nowhere. The dams of the red lines are long since broken and the incoming tide of EU law is once again flowing up the estuaries and rivers of this country’s independence.

Only once we have ended this constant attempt to try to pretend the British people did not take a decision will we get back to a proper relationship, without passive aggressiveness on the EU side and a chip on the shoulder on ours. We know what needs to be done: we need to reverse the reset and we need to remove EU law and foreign courts, and we need to do that in the whole country, in Northern Ireland as well as in GB. Next time, I hope we will finish the job. It needs to be done and it cannot come soon enough.

UK-EU Customs Union

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Offord. As he says farewell to this Chamber, I congratulate him, on behalf of the whole House, on his forthright but reflective valedictory speech. We overlapped only very briefly as Ministers in the last Government, but, as I think we all know, the noble Lord served that Government with an energy and determination that were very much needed at times.

If I may say so, not least because it was a step that my own party stopped from me taking at the last election, I admire the noble Lord for having the courage to relinquish his seat in this House and move properly to elective politics. I have little doubt—and, having heard what we have heard, I am sure that none of us can have any doubt—that he will be an effective and tenacious campaigner in Scotland. I wish him personal fulfilment in this new project and whatever follows it.

I turn to the subject of this debate. Here we are again. This is nth instalment of the long-running box set series of the British establishment’s obsession with being in customs union with the European Union. This has lasted 10 years. We saw it straight after the Brexit referendum, and, as early as January 2017, the noble Baroness, Lady May, in her Lancaster House speech, spoke of a “customs arrangement”, rather than leaving the customs union properly. By 2018, the then Cabinet Secretary, Jeremy Heywood, had invented the Heath Robinson-style dual customs arrangement—a Schrödinger’s customs union that apparently left us both in and out of the customs union at the same time. The 2018 withdrawal agreement would, of course, have kept the whole country in a customs union with the EU and given the exit keys to the European Commission.

Finally, the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and I, did what had to be done. We took Great Britain out of the customs union—Northern Ireland, as we then hoped, was to follow later—giving us freedom of trade and the ability to set our own regulations. Until that point, we had seen nothing but a complete lack of confidence in Britain’s ability to trade with the EU, as we did, and do, successfully with the rest of the world.

However, here it is again; the obsession has returned. Just as everyone has got used to the new situation, with remarkably little difficulty, the same voices return. It seems that the Government increasingly want to wind the clock back. This is simply a grasping after nurse—a search for a refuge from hard decisions in the warm and deadening embrace of the Brussels institutions.

The arguments against doing this are just as strong as they have always been, and we have heard many of them today. First, trade deals under the customs union give third countries preferential access to our market but do not give us preferential access to theirs. Secondly, we get no say in EU negotiating positions and no assurance that our interests will be protected. Thirdly, as we are told, we do not get even proper friction-free participation in the EU’s market unless we join the single market as well. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, for at least being honest in saying that that is also his policy objective. Fourthly, we lose our ability to lower our own tariffs, which we have done for third-country food that we do not produce ourselves. Even the Government reduced some tariffs last year, and they made a point of saying so. Fifthly, we would have to undo our own trade agreements. Is it seriously suggested that, having joined, we should now leave the CPTPP and our trade deal with India to join the EU’s putative deal, which will have been negotiated with none of our interests in mind? It makes no sense.

The Lib Dems know this. They know more. I think that is why they claim to think they can negotiate some sort of special customs arrangement—oddly enough, one that excludes agricultural goods, even though that is the area in which, under the reset, we will be joining the single market. I can tell them that the EU does not do this sort of bespoke agreement, and we should have learned that in the years after the referendum. As for the Government, they are already dipping a toe in the customs union water by agreeing to follow the CBAM rules of the EU. Some Ministers appear to be for, some against, and I hope the Minister will be able to clarify.

This is all displacement activity. Being part of the customs union again makes sense for only one reason: if you want to start going back towards the EU. It is the Monnet method of one thing leading to another. That is why we hear the calls to rejoin the customs union. I urge its proponents to be honest: if they want to rejoin, they should admit it. They should make that case to the British people and see how far they get. Meanwhile, I hope—although not with great expectation, I am afraid—that today will be the last we hear of the nonsense on the customs union.