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The Tories' seemingly innocuous, populist tilt at bureaucracy is a red-meat onslaught on essential, hard-won legislation
How short our memories are. Twelve months ago the country turfed Labour out of office for a tangled mix of reasons. Among the large swath of non-tribal public opinion without which Labour can never govern, however, one of the most confidence-sapping causes of their defeat was beyond question the party's compulsive law- and rule-making. It generated a degree of middle-ground demoralisation and anger with the workings of the state that Gordon Brown, of all people, was powerless to reverse.
In the left caricature, New Labour is dismissed as a catastrophically hands-off and laissez-faire project. This is nonsense. Labour is hands on. Many who drifted away certainly did so because of Iraq. Lots of others, though, did so because of things like the absurdity of a UK tax regulatory code which, though now 11,500 pages in length and doubled in size since 1997, had proved hopelessly ineffectual in preventing avoidance and evasion. Some lost patience with a government that had created more than 4,300 new criminal offences in 13 years. Others had just had it with the intrusive rules and bureaucracy.
Accusations about the big brother state, the nanny state and the jobsworth, form-filling, tick-box, health-and-safety culture gone mad undoubtedly became overdone cliches at times. But in important ways they were true. They struck a genuine chord, far beyond the ranks of crazy rightwing libertarians or the petit bourgeoisie. Far too much about the modern state that Labour nurtured is an insult to a society of free people.
All these things need to be said and remembered. If they are not, any attempt to mount a well-directed assault on the coalition government's efforts to deal with what Labour left behind will lack perspective and credibility. Yet such an assault urgently needs to be made. Unless it is, Britain may be on the cusp of swinging from one extreme to the other. In place of too much regulation the coalition is poised to usher in an era of too little. In the name of balance, rather than in the name of indefensible bureaucracy, the coalition's effort now needs to be seriously curtailed.
The government's deregulation programme is gathering speed now. Last month the Cabinet Office launched its Red Tape Challenge, little noticed at the time but potentially huge in scope and effect. This week the scale of the Whitehall argument over climate change deregulation became clear, with a cross-coalition divide pitting Chris Huhne at energy and William Hague at the Foreign Office against Vince Cable at business and George Osborne at the Treasury. And on Wednesday, Osborne lifted a corner of the rug on the review of employment law in a speech to the Institute of Directors.
And that's just the start. The Red Tape Challenge, which began by inviting public consultation on the regulatory framework in the retail economy, has moved on to the hospitality, food and drink sectors. Later this month comes roads policy, followed by fishing, manufacturing, health and social care, media and creative, utilities and energy, rail and shipping and, come September, mining and quarrying. And then there are the two areas on which the Tory party's sights have long been trained — health and safety on the one hand, and equality on the other. By the autumn the consultation exercise will have trawled through the regulatory legacy covering practically every form of economic activity you can think of.
It can all sound relatively innocuous, especially against the background of some of the inheritance from Labour. What could be wrong with having a thorough look at the overgrown regulatory forest and hacking back a few trees? But increasing numbers of observers in many sectors are becoming alarmed. And if you look carefully at its website it does not take long to see why such a range of civil society is now beginning to see red about the Red Tape Challenge.
In the past, even Conservative governments have tended to see most regulatory frameworks as an accumulation of rules and sectoral improvements in which an occasional winnowing is necessary. This government turns that on its head. Its explicit default presumption is that regulations will go unless they can be justified. "If ministers want to keep them, they have to make a very good case for them to stay," says the site.
But as the row over climate change makes clear, even the minister making the case is no guarantee that the regulations will remain. The truth is that everything is up for grabs.
The more so because, as David Cameron has made clear, it isn't just about regulations, codes and rules. It's primary legislation too. The aim, he said in April, is "to massively reduce the number of rules, laws and regulations that, frankly, treat all of you like idiots." The key word there is laws. And sure enough, the Cabinet Office has put statutes as large as the Health and Safety at Work Act, the Sale of Goods Act, the Climate Change Act and the Wildlife and Countryside Act on the table. So too is the Equality Act. This isn't red tape. It is major legislation. Small wonder it isn't just the usual suspects like the TUC who are alarmed by what's afoot.
It is the government's own fault that a deregulatory process that could still be sensitive and sensible and helpful to competition is increasingly being seen in lurid terms, with the vaunted bonfire of red tape providing a populist mask for a sustained and much more serious deregulatory charge that aims at rolling back decades – even centuries in some cases – of hard-won, well-constructed and socially essential law and regulation. Cameron has tried to deny this. "Where regulation is well-designed and proportionate, it should stay," he said in April. "Of course we need proper standards."
And of course we do need them. But the problem is that a very great deal of the Red Tape Challenge material encourages the opposite view. The stated logic of the process is potentially far more destructive and anti-competitive than the soft rhetoric in which it is expressed.
Unless a serious restraining hand is applied, the government is heading towards a far more radical and much more divisive clearout of good, balanced and tested law than it admits. Neither the Liberal Democrats nor the modern Conservative party has a political interest in being seen as parties that wilfully pulled down laws and regulations with broad bases of support on subjects like the countryside, climate change and the workplace. This is red meat, not red tape. If they have any sense it is time for another breathing space.