LORD Frost, the former chief Brexit negotiator, has said Labour’s proposed reset deal is “a step back to being controlled by the European Union”.

He told GB News: “A lot of people seem to think we have no trade agreement with the EU at all. We’ve got this massive one that has been working perfectly well. But, of course, Labour have to say it’s working badly to justify all the concessions that they’re about to make in the next couple of days.

“There were some teething troubles in the first days of this deal, but they’ve settled down, and there’s no evidence of queues. There’s no evidence of problems if, for example, you’re thinking about airports, we already let European travellers through e-gates in UK airports, they don’t allow us through. So if there’s a problem, it’s generated on the EU side, not on ours.

“We didn’t see the need for a defence agreement. We’re perfectly happy to talk about it, but we wanted there to be something that we got in return. The EU didn’t want to offer that, so we didn’t have a defence agreement.

“Now, Labour seems to be willing to offer it up for nothing. I don’t know what we’re getting out of this deal.”

He said: “We had to accept a slightly longer transition period than we wanted in 2020 but that transition is coming to an end in the middle of next year and we get full control of all our fishing grounds. So it’s a particularly bad moment to suddenly decide to give all that up again and allow EU fishing boats to carry on fishing.

“We don’t benefit in any way from it. What the Labour negotiators seem to have done is accept the EU’s view…which is to say we won’t talk about what you want to talk about until you’ve accepted the things that we want. And they put fishing on the table, and Labour have meekly gone along with it.”

Lord Frost added: “They never wanted Britain to be a completely free country. They in 2020 they worked really hard till the very last moment to try and keep us subject to their laws and courts.

“Now they’ve spotted they’ve got a Labour government that really doesn’t mind giving those things away, so they’ve begun a negotiation that’s ended in that.”

On dynamic alignment, he said: “Dynamic alignment is where you just accept the EU’s rules. The EU gets to make them, it gets to say how they should be enforced. If it doesn’t think you’re implementing them right, it can bring in its own court. In the case of disputes, we don’t get any say.

“This is exactly what we were trying to avoid. We worked very hard in 2019, 2020 to avoid this happening. There’s a specific provision in the 2020 agreement that says there is no EU law in this agreement. Now we’re just giving this away.”

He added: “One mustn’t exaggerate. It’s not the end of Brexit, but it is a step back towards being controlled by the European Union in important areas of our national life. And that’s not what people voted for in 2016.”