According to the Guardian, Keir Starmer will tell international business leaders today that:
We've got to look at regulation where it is needlessly holding back the investment, to take our country forward.
Where it is stopping us building the homes, the datacentres, warehouses, grid connectors, roads, train lines, you name it then mark my words – we will get rid of it. We will rip out the bureaucracy that blocks investment and we will make sure that every regulator in this country take growth as seriously as this room does.
To contextualise my concern about this comment, let me also note an FT report that suggests:
Business fears big rise in UK national insurance
Quite what the fears of these businesses are - since they appear to be largely stoked by tax advisers and not by business itself - is not clear, but that's not the reason for my concern.
What troubles me is the massive bias against people in these proposals. Labour has claimed it is on the side of 'working people', and, it seems, no one else other than big business, but that has to be in doubt in the light of these announcements and speculations.
To be precise, tearing up regulations is invariably bad for people and the environment. The threat to the environment is apparent in what Starmer is going to say, but that to people is just as real. Working people only enjoy the rights that they have, to fair pay, paid holidays, protection from being sacked, anti-discrimination rules, and so much more because of hard fought for regulation. Any move to weaken that shifts the balance of power away from working people and towards business and that would be a deeply retrograde step that looks to be on the cards.
Then, there is the move on national insurance. If any of the rumours about increased employer's national insurance are true, this is confirmation of another move determinantal to working people - because in a country with a tax system that massively encourages the replacement of people by machines, as we have - then this move will hurt employment.
There is one message coming out of this: what Starmer and Reeves are proposing is jobless growth. Growth, in other words, that despoils our environment and pays little or no return to people but does seek to enslave them in yet more debt to buy the goods made here for which they will not have the income to pay, whilst increasing inequality and division in society.
In summary, this is not a government that looks to be remotely in favour of working people.
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Surely what we want isnt ‘growth’ its creating jobs that pay a wage that will support a family.
Are people setting up business’s that will do that, yes or no?
Maybe…
“We’ve got to look at regulation where it is needlessly holding back the investment, to take our country forward.”
“… we will make sure that every regulator in this country take growth as seriously as this room does”
As has been discussed, enlessly in this blog – regulators don’t/can’t regulate. Water and energy are the two most egregious examples. The companies regulated have all the knowledge/information and the regulators don’t. Not that I would expect Starmer/McSweeny to even posses this information. Re-nationalisation (de minimis – operations) would address this – but it is not “on the cards”. In the case of electricity, the network operators hide behind outmoded network design rules/assumptions and hinder renewable installations – the regulator lacks to knowledge to prevent this & the politicos would struggle to wire a plug. The reason the network operators drag their feet? Want to be able to spend lots more money on networks – all of which UK serfs/peasants will pay for – @ an IRR of perhaps 10% (or more).
Starmers words/speech are what? gas, wind, something to open the panto season with? The man is a clown.
I think you need to get off the fence, Mike
QUOTE – the politicos would struggle to wire a plug
Yes, but they do know how to fill their pockets and feather their nests.
This sounds like a “bonfire of regulations” and/getting rid of red tape. That is, policies espoused by Tories for decades. These policies are invariably bad; regulations are there to protect people. Which has been discussed on this blog.
The Labour party sounds increasing like the Tory party (that the country voted to be rid of). Does this remind anyone of George Orwell’s Animal Farm?
Pages 332-339 0f Late Soviet Britain is good on this.
In an era of cadre parties competing based on their respective abilities to manage the status quo, we are witnessing parties losing their way when confronted by real choices. NB neither Blair nor Cameron had any idea of what to do on assuming power.
All that is happening is a perpetual re-run of a Thatcherite fable that bell-tightening will restore national greatness. The triumph of plausibility over experience.
In fact the assumption is that restoring the fortunes of the rich is good for everyone.
Only if they invest wisely. They in fact invest in property , US tech companies , and luxury goods. None of which does much good for the masses.
Even if this is just limited to real estate development, do they really propose to abolish rules that protect listed buildings and green spaces, or require consideration of environmental impacts, access to transport and drinking water and sewerage, and schools and hospitals, and instead allow anyone who owns land to develop it according to their selfish interests without regards to their neighbours or the wider community or the public interest?
So they are going to encourage landowners to pave paradise and put up a parking lot?
This sort of blind stupidity is what you get when someone focuses on one specific issue – growth, growth, growth – to the exclusion of everything else.
Agreed
And who did do that song?
(Joni Michell, of course)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ratQlft_G5c
Here she is!
Thanks
Surely there is a one word answer to Starmer’s stupidity. Grenfell.
Cyndy Hodgson: I saw a headline of an Independent (newspaper ) report, that had Starmer using the phrase “bonfire of red tape”. The last PM to use that was David Cameron, and it led to 72 lives lost at Grenfell, and an epidemic of dangerous cladding. My contempt for Starmer is now even deeper.
Give me spots on my apples
And leave me the birds and the bees.
She was way ahead of her time.
Thatcher started the process of deregulating the financial sector that resulted in the Great Financial Crash of 2007-2008.
Subsequent governments have deregulated (it’s called the “free market”), and we’ve ended up with corporations pumping sewage into our rivers and waterways. Deregulation lets companies exploit people and the environment with impunity.
Profits before people.
What Starmer means is one-sided regulation; there’ll be no regulations to protect us but the full force of the law (such as it is, admittedly) to be used against us if we rise up in protest. We can already see this happening.
Agreed.
Especially the ‘greed’ bit – which is what this all is about.
By creating a crisis – purveying chaos – the city will hoover up cheap public assets.
Have we learnt anything?
Jobs are a cost, not a benefit. We should be seeking to improve productivity i.e. doing the same output but with less, whether that is less resources or less jobs.
That frees up people for more value-adding opportunities.
Creating jobs just means creating costs.
So you want to increase inequality in society?
What are you proposing be done with all the people you do not want?
That’s a false conclusion from what I’ve written – are you sure you’re an economist?
I certaonly do
And if you write nonsense, expect me to call it out.
This economist – maybe too old skool for you – thinks that the best value-add people can provide in an economy is having a job and paging taxes & spending money in the economy.
I’m yet to be convinced there’s a better value-add role for the majority to play in an economy.
A millionaire, entrepreneur on Kuenssberg told us a that “we must raise GDP because that is how we will fund the services that are needed”. He also said “Increasing the top rate of income tax by 5p will not even scratch the surface”. I suspect that an increase in GDP could help but will it?
According to Statista the GDP trend rose steadily from 1955 to today. There were two exceptions 2008/9 and 2019/22. Since 2010 services have been subjected to rigid austerity. The Gini coefficient of inequality has risen relentlessly from 1979 when it was 25 peaking in 2008 at 37. Governments of red and blue have held to the fable that the wealthy will be guided by Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible hand’. or that the mirage of ‘trickle down’ will take form and become reality.
An example of past mechanisms intended to achieve that goal might be PFI. The Kings Fund reported in February of this year that “There are some 700 PFI contracts with a capital value of £57bn, and around £160bn still to be paid for their use and maintenance.” The IPPR told us back in 2019 that “for just £13bn of investment, the NHS has been landed with an £80bn bill.”.
Either something has happened to gravity or that is trickle up not down.
Agreed
It’s not even a trickle! It’s gushing upwards economics!
Agreed. “Tearing down regulation” is an interesting concept in the current political climate – utterly neo-liberal and Thatcherite, but where it comes to EU regulation (which give us clean rivers and lakes, higher food standards, pesticides that kill bees banned and products that are safe rather than lead in children’s toys etc etc), the same Thatcherites say “no we don’t want that – we want our sovereignty back”.
The awful UKCA mark should never have been invented or adopted. CE is a recognised global (gold) standard, and just because Frost was ‘sovereignty at all costs’ many products have to be duplicated tested (mostly to the same metrics and standards – having been CE approved already) in the UK for the ‘we have our sovereignty back’ UKCA mark. It’s utter nonsense.
“Tearing down regulation” – in which places?
The boss of Eli Lilly on R4 Today made it very clear – UK is a ‘very small market’ – compared with US or EU , ‘so you have to offer something extra ‘.
The interviews this morning – seemed to reflect the UK as the eager little puppy panting for attention from global corporates.
Thank you, Andrew and Richard and other commentators.
I missed that interview, as I was on the commute, but am not surprised and was wondering about that over the week-end.
I’m struggling to why anyone would invest in a country that has low productivity, an increasingly ill and disaffected workforce, high utility and other costs, crumbling infrastructure, environmental carnage, minimal public services, politicians keen to bash migrants (who may include managers and other employees on secondment for new investment) and no access to the EU market. What’s the attraction? That bonfire of red tape is insufficient or not required.
I hear that LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, godfather to Leo Blair, is coming. Much of LVMH’s production is in France and Italy and hand made. What is LVMH likely to produce here? One wonders if that appearance was a favour to Blair and perhaps a photo op with a royal?
All points that I am sure no one couild rebut
I asked @EuropeanPowell, currently crying wolf! with regard to Freeports in this post-@bakerstherald era, why anyone would want to invest in Britain given power was so expensive here and by way of response he blocked me. This makes me think he doesn’t have answers either. I’m still not comforted though… I can only think Starmer is going to the markets calling some variant of New pence for Old!, promising govt would repay multiples of any £s invested no matter whether productive growth occurred as a consequence of that investment or not. I’d imagine too this neat arrangement would include a fixer’s fee, a nice drink for Starmer, Reeves etc. so the good life begins for them after politics. We know they’re neither of them averse to accepting things, after all. We, on the other hand, will be told there’s no money for nice things for generations to come on the basis all those promises have to be kept, which will of course be nonsense but it’ll still be used to justify endless austerity. Bleak outlook, isn’t it?
If you look at the fiasco of the Grenfell Tower tragedy and the abomination of sewage in rivers and sea, then regulation needs to be tightened rather that abandoned to free market corruption and chaos.
It’s an oxymoron. Labours sloth to change, creates growth so strange.
Too much regulation?
Cameron’s bonfire of red tape gone out?
We have a veritable national collection of chocolate teapots in the UK, comprised of ineffective
/captured regulators, inadequate legislation, under-resourced enforcement, & corrupt management.
A list (off the top of my head, without looking anything up)…
Aberfan
Hillsborough
Grenfell
Banking crash 2008
Privacy/Data breaches by the thousand
Leveson/IPSO/OFCOM
Savile etc
Post Office/Horizon
Sewage/rivers/water quality
Fires caused Whirlpool white goods & faulty battery chargers
Companies House
Gov procurement scandals
Political donations
Scams & Fraud via phone/Internet
Food Hygiene
Trading Standards
I could double the length, and name the chocolate teapots, OFWAT, OFGEM, OFCOM, ICO, IPSO, FCA, HMRC, ActionFraud, a host of impotent Ombuds*****s.
Only an out of control libertarian sold-out incompetent like Keir Starmer could look around at our out-of-control decaying austerity-damaged society and make a diagnosis of too much red tape and bureaucracy.
Someone, please brief the PM on the evidence Sir Martin Donnelly gave to the Horizon Inquiry (the largest miscarriage of justice in UK history remember) concerning the effect of austerity on the Business & Trade Department, as the crisis developed. https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/witn11250100-sir-martin-donnelly-witness-statement
Or try the Covid Inquiry, or the Grenfell Inquiry. Real events, real failures, real disasters, real wrecked/lost human lives.
I’ve always known Starmer was a dishonest “Manchurian candidate”, since about 2016, but this is the worst yet, my opinion of him has never been lower than it is now after reading his words here.
Kyrie Eleison!
Sorry, lost my temper there… Need to go & look at some sunflowers now.
Well said
I should have added that Reeves recent trip to the US was fruitless.
Completely agree with this post.
As if to confirm it, a government spokesperson on the R4 Today programme this a.m. was bragging about Amazon Web Services coming to build data centres. A paradigm case of environmental destruction, rising emissions, (and for this company) exploitative labour practices and tax avoidance. But apparently they are putting food on the tables of the UK population!
Remember, capital invests to reap a profit. Foreign capital invests to repatriate the profit.
Agreed
There is an interesting article by Joel Reland on the UK in a Changing Europe website, 10 October about the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill currently before Parliament.
Joel says the bill could ” be a powerful piece of law which would allow the UK to unilaterally align with EU regulation related to the environmental impact of products”.
But when the main stream media wake up to the bill expect a storm of ” the UK is surrendering to the EU” etc.
Otherwise Starmer seems have to “forgotten” about why Grenfell happened.
In his speech to the summit Starmer mentioned Grenfell in passing “some regulation is life saving”; but then (as if he had smoothly delivered a logical deduction), he goes on “the key test for me on regulation is, of course growth”. There we have the problem with our politics. Difficult problems are solved by sophistry and dissimulation. Starmer has no idea how to ensure regulators focused above all on growth will ensure life saving is sufficiently addressed;. in criticising the Conservatives for their handling of regulation, did not even directly address Grenfell (or the far wider, and still unsolved problem of thousands of fire hazard dwellings); because he couldn’t, because it isn’t even fixed, and without that he has fixed nothing.
This speech was a political soap opera. More froth disguised as leadership. Britain today in a nutshell.
That is enough to have created some expeltives from my wife
But as she adds, failed regialtion is good for GDP. Healthiness is very bad for growth. Illth promotes growth.
Starmer’s speech was so badly drafted that it could not make up its mind whether he was addressing the international business leaders in the room, or the British public outside, collective nose pressed up against the window.
This reflects his political insecurity, given his botched start in government. We are adrift; after fourteen years of …….. being adrift. We are simply going round in ever decreasing circles.
This reminds me; now we’re no longer a coal nation, I wonder who’s responsible for ensuring the safety of all those slag heaps still littering Wales? We don’t want another Aberfan (nor did we want the first one obvs) but I can see a similar tragedy happening if all involved parties start pointing at each other as being responsible instead of actually doing anything.
From The Guardian, December 26th, 2023:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/26/wales-fears-another-aberfan-as-westminster-refuses-to-clean-up-tips
“Wales fears another Aberfan as Westminster refuses to clean up tips
—Map shows 350 coal tips close to communities as UK government unwilling to take on costs”…“The cost of remediation is estimated at around £50m a year for 10 to 15 years. To the Welsh government, that is enormous, but it is not a huge amount for a UK government. The cost of failing to act doesn’t bear thinking about.”
Thanks
Looky here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3e9yk24w3eo
“Starmer pledges to scrap red tape to boost UK investment
14 October 2024, 07:43 BST
The prime minister will promise to scrap regulation that “needlessly holds back investment” in the UK when he hosts a major summit in London.
Sir Keir Starmer will tell business leaders he wants to “rip out” bureaucracy, and will ask the UK’s competition watchdog to prioritise growth. “
It’s worth a read , not something I usually say about most of our mainstream Propoganda Purveyors, because it identifies not only the blatant , broad daylight, in our faces robbery of what remains of British sovereignty and control over our own resources and public services – but who the old global robber gangsters of the ‘City’ really are.
Look at the names that will be turning up and WHERE this grand Vampires Ball is happening. The Guildhall – how very… historic!
All the top bosses of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Blackrock, L&GAviva,Eli Lilly etc.
Including rogue ferry company P&O owner DP World – which had Transport secretary Haigh slapped down by their wormtongue SurKeeve investing in the only Freeport they ever wanted, London Gateway.
Also the villains who made my water supplier Thames such a basket case :
“Australian firm Macquarie, which has been blamed for saddling Thames Water with unsustainable debts when it was its biggest shareholder, is promising to invest £20bn in the UK over the next five years, including an electric car charging network.”
As if we need to be ripped off more with the rent seeking services that the government should supply as a public service. If it was actually serious about encouraging people to move to electric vehicles – which it isn’t as is obvious by restricting the cheapest most efficient ev vehicles made in China market access.
That is also happening in the EU – which confirms BrexShit had nothing to do with the regulations of the now holed below the water line great Union and everything to do with letting the above mentioned mighty do what they are planning to at their ancient Guildhall, in THEIR ancient City HQ.
Ultimately this is the old masters of the unipolar gathering to make their war plans against the inevitable defeat to the now unstoppable multipolar – ahead of the BRICS+ declarations in Kazan – the new ‘Bretton Woods’.
MacQuarrie now own Southern Water (crypto sporidium to go + sewage pollution a speciality). MacQuarrie also own the UK national gas network. Kerching! + what could possibly go wrong.
It’s pure neocon vocabulary.
In the Netherlands we’re seeing certain kickbacks towards data centres since they are a huge drain on local water supplies. These behemoths are being planned nearer and nearer to where people live en masse and simply suck up water intended for habitation.
But no, Mr Green Starmer wants these things in the UK.
Let’s accept that we want investment and growth.
That still leaves the questions – in what and for whom.
Surely by dangling the carrot of weak regulation we are going to attract those who seek profit over good jobs and a thriving natural world. And to add insult to injury that profit will leave these shores.
What is wrong with attracting private investment by the government itself leading the way – investing in education, training, infrastructure, health, housing etc thus showing a belief in the value of its people and natural environment.
I sense most people are crying out to be shown respect and given hope that growth will be focussed on improving their and their environment’s well-being, rather than being focussed on letting them be exploited as widgets for the benefit of global corporations.
Lovely example already of untrammelled growth in housing, before Starmer deregulating greenbelt, is Lichfield. Thousands upon thousands of new houses on various former farmlands are being built or proposed. The infrastructure is already overstretched, transport and commuting in a mess, lack of NHS services etc etc. It is a nightmare for locals. where I live, just outside Lichfield, development has been brownfield, with greenbelt refused – up till now. The major landowners are gagging for it, to become instant millionaires. We have already lost substantial amounts of wildlife and green space.
To gauge the wit of the housebuilding firms, recent floods almost cut of one portion of a 750 house estate. You’d think they’d avoid somewhere historically called ‘Watery Lane’.
Thank you, John.
Nearly forty years ago, houses were build on marshes north of Aylesbury called Watermead. During the civil war, a battle was fought there. The royalist cavalry got bogged down in the marshes and were picked off by parliamentarian infantry. Streets are named after the officers involved. The farmer who bought the land off an Oxford college was keen to sell. What you relay from Lichfield happens regularly. One sees more and more around Buckinghamshire. Having lived there all my life and owning antique maps that detail marshes, it’s grimly amusing to watch.
Masses of this in East Anglia
You are right.
Because of the ‘cutting of red tape’ all that happens is that profit is put before anything else, so that any risks are actually transferred onto the house buyer/end user.
‘Caveat emptor’ used to be something that only seemed to apply to the secondhand markets; now it applies to anything – even brand new homes that might have been built where they shouldn’t, to standards that only exist on paper but quite often not in reality.
The more you think about this, the more shocking it actually becomes.
Agreed
There are legitimate questions to be raised about the complexity of regulation in many areas and how to take one example they result in extraordinary delays and costs in the construction of infrastructure projects. Britain Remade has done some interesting research on this. https://www.britainremade.co.uk/
However I’ve long observed that sectors that complain the most have dubious records, finance being the extreme case. The less ethical a sector is, the more regulation gets laid on in a futile attempt to change behaviour. It just leads to games playing, evasion, and big lawyers bills. And banks have lots of big lawyers.
Plus whenever I hear ‘bonfires of red tape’ it too often means lowering health and safety, pollution, environmental standards and the rest. I can see a case for simpler regulations but alongside far tougher penalties, ideally hitting directors personally, with fully resourced regulators that are able monitor performance rigorously and take on the lawyers. As a for instance, I gather that the chance of company being caught paying below minimum wage is minimal.
Regulation will never be the whole answer to organisations, public as well as private, that choose to behave unethically or dishonestly.
I listened to the reports of what Starmer said with growing incredulity and annoyance. It seems there is no place in Labour’s plans for thought about the environment and climate change. It’s as if there were no issues at all anywhere over the human race’s use of too many resources and the consequent pollution. It seems 5 more years will pass before there is a chance of real change; that is unless there are cataclysmic events from nature. All they (politicians) can think of is growth, growth and yet more growth, but the earth is a finite system and growth must sometime cease.
At some point all of us will need to accept that our current way of life will need to be different from that which we have had for the last 80 years.
I recall that Michael Heseltine had been tasked by Margaret Thatcher to liaise with leading business types, to identify the very unnecessary “red tape” that so prevented them from investing in Britain. He later told a TV interviewer that he hardly had any response. Yet, years later, we still hear naturally unimaginative conservatives warbling on about the need to “cut red tape” as if they are brave innovators casting off the shackles of the “bureaucrats”. As Heseltine himself was unable to elicit which of these regulations were so irksome to the investors, it seems reasonable to deduce that the lack of investment in Britain is caused by other factors . Only those in awe of dead ideas would still regurgitate them years after they were discredited.
Agreed
This is the first in a four party series on data centres. They are terrible for the environment, use massive amounts of electricity and water, and expect significant tax breaks. They are not something to encourage, and that’s apart from all this AI stuff! https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/tech-wont-save-us/id1507621076?i=1000672024900