Britain should be feared by the cult of deregulation

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It is hoped that after a few weeks, looking at Elon Musk’s hit, walking through the US Federal Bureaucracy, people could twist that its “efficiency” is not quite advertised.

But, instead of Trump’s administration, it is considered a cautious fairy tale, the worship of de -deregulation, as a good thing, has acquired an alarming number of world followers. If France suddenly pushes the EU “Massive normative pause” You know that everything is not normal. But this is in the UK, where the usual implementation of the United States is preserved, despite wildly different political crops and administrative systems where you can find true believers.

This week Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, bizarre said that the so -called Moscow Government Efficiency Department (DOGE) Did not go far enough. At the end of Trump’s first week Simon Kiece, former head of the UK State Service, wrote an exciting About the “extraordinary transparency” of the American aspiration and stated that it could provide a global model to rethink the government. Given the damage to Musk during the day, this argument is already growing badly.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is much less extreme and fortunately did not name Trump, though he did Remove the deregulation During his first call with the US president. But his government still showed some disturbing trends in this direction. Goes beyond the long -standing and commendable commitment to the facilitating the construction and planning of infrastructure, ministers’ speech and scriptures Now usually shimmer with common calls against excessive rules.

You can view it all as a standard empty business rhetoric, but it seems dangerous during such a deregulation devastation to give the iconic space to capture. You can be sure it wasn’t Manifesto Election Laborwho other than the planning issue quickly retreating.

If the government is apparently desperate to change the political story, it will escape from any idea marked as deregulation, it can cause serious damage. When in opposition, Chancellor Rachel Rivz did not come last month to find the economic model. Then the government expelled The chairman of the competition and markets (CMA) is not enough to approve the merger.

CMA has long been criticized by large businesses, especially in technology, for blocking absorptions and making too much time to make decisions. You can now discuss the work of the UK competition both in the process and as a result. But it is worried that the government seems to determine the interests of large companies as the same with the promotion of growth.

Unlike product standards or green rules, competition policy is not just a matter of protection of consumers and environmental interests compared to companies. An unregulated monopoly brings great profits to monopolists, but traditionally does not produce growth and innovation.

If the technology economy means that the compromise between the restriction of the market domination and the growth is now obsolete, we must hear the reasons why. If your US economic history is profitable to look for a few weeks deregulation of the corpse, ignoring more than a century of antitrust regulation, you do it wrong.

Of course, there is a huge irony for the UK. The rules affecting the enterprises are not written solely by the whim of malignant regulators. Many promote growth and are created, and sometimes by the companies themselves. For example, the use of 20-foot delivery, which revolutionized the world trade in goods, has expanded significantly after official size standards were officially adopted.

As it happens, the UK has launched an experiment in radical deregulation over the last five years, abandoning the official rules system mainly developed in connection with business. The system was the sole market and the EU Customs Union, and the experiment was called Brexit. It was based on open products about EU rules about bent bananas and the like, and it won’t succeed cost possibly 5 percent of GDP. If the government wants growth models, irony of fate, return to the normative ugly EU, and I still need to see any convincing argument that staying along the EU normative base will overcome the benefits. The government’s refusal to discuss the issue correctly indicates that it is not serious enough to grow.

There is a measuring, unchanged discussion about good and poor regulation. Taking inspiration in a Moscow whose method of ordering To a large extent literally “Ctrl-F (a thing I don’t like) -select-delete” is not. Do everything you tell you that big businesses aren’t it. Invalid Crusades Against Regulation- the use of fun obsolete metaphors, such as “tugay” and “plan”- this is always a warning signal- can eventually create great damage, as well as make or not do rules seeking to comply with the political imperative, ‘ is a confident fire to be mistaken.

alan.beattie@ft.com