Brexiteers have been taken aback by decaying relationships with the European Union, David Front has said.
The Brexit minister’s admission comes as the UK has been having increasingly difficult relations with the EU, most recently because of the Northern Ireland “sausage war”.
Frost said Leavers dreamed of a sovereign Britain, but still in good terms with the bloc, according to The Guardian.
He was speaking whilst awaiting a concession from the EU to extend the time in which they can sort out rules on chilled meats checks in Northern Ireland.
“It is absolutely not part of the plan to be bickering with EU and hope it isn’t part of their long term plan either,” Lord Frost told the paper.
Earlier this week, he also told thinktank UK in a Changing Europe: “Until we have settled the Northern Ireland issue and put in place new balances, or the right balance, I think it’s going to be difficult to get relations on to the right footing that we want, but we absolutely do want that.”
Surprised
Frost said those who actively campaigned to leave the European Union did not predict relations with its countries could be affected by Brexit.
He said: “I don’t think those who campaigned five years ago for Brexit drove the analysis, drove the politics of it. I think they are surprised, quite often, to find relations are in the state they’re in.”
And he insisted the government did not underestimate the impact of the protocol on the movements of goods: “I don’t see what is wrong with learning from experience. This is a very unusual agreement and we’ve learned a lot about how economic actors behave … we underestimated the chilling effect.”
Brexit ‘right thing to do’
The Tory minister tried to justify the vote as the UK losing its “will” at what he insisted was a subordination of the country to EU laws.
He said the UK “got used to not devising for ourselves” and “got lost in a mushy multilateralism” instead of “thinking about outcomes”.
Frost is convinced Brexit can be called a success in a decade if there will be a normal relationship with the EU and if the UK ‘succeeds in a number of areas on its own’.
But despite these aspects being yet to be seen, he insisted “nobody is questioning Brexit.” “It was self-evidently the right thing to do,” he concluded.
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