The trade secretary, Liam Fox, has said the UK needs to accept that the “world does not owe us a living” as he sought to explain his controversial comments that British businesses had become fat and lazy.
“As a country, we have become too easy with the idea that the world owes us a living. The world doesn’t owe us a living. And we’ve just now got to probe all the areas where we could be making changes,” Fox told the Spectator.
“Government, the financial sector, culture, all of them will have to play a part. Because one thing’s for sure, we can’t continue with the trajectory we’ve got now, falling behind with exports as a proportion of our GDP.”
He also said the press and public discourse would be poorer if politicians did not make spontaneous remarks.
Fox, who is one of three Eurosceptics running departments strongly involved in the Brexit process, also predicted that the UK will have left the EU by the next election. “If you don’t want to leave, you can always find reasons not to do it,” he said, suggesting that next year’s French and German elections were not a justification to delay triggering article 50.
“The Germans have got a lot more to think about in their election than that,” he said. “I think that the migrant crisis, French economic crisis, potential Italian banking crisis will be much further up their agenda.”
He said that even without Brexit the framework of the EU was “beginning to peel away”, and that the bloc remained at risk of imploding regardless of the UK’s membership. “I guess Germany worries, because we were their main allies in bringing some economic rigour to the system. If I were a German politician I would be worried that, without Britain, Germany has the potential to become the greatest ATM in global history,” he said.
