Better Regulation - an Oxymoron

An excellent article by Ruth Lea, Director of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) on the subject of “better regulation”, which she calls an oxymoron is recomened reading for all business people, particularly members of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB)

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Ms Lea announced about seven or eight months ago that she no longer believed there was any possibility of reforming the European Union and the only possible solution was for the UK to pull out and create new links with other European and, indeed, non-European countries. A view that is not supported, amazingly, by the policy makers of the FSB but is as we have detailed previously much supported by the Federation's rank and file members.

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Recently Lord Blackwell, the Chairman of CPS, has also effectively made it clear that he, too, is in favour of Britain pulling out of the EU.

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Thus we have an interesting situation of the premier Conservative think-tank moving on in the European debate, while the Conservative Party itself moving backwards to a John Major-type position and the FSB now working in ''co-operation and partnership'' with the EU.

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Ms Lea whips through the various ramifications of the nonsence trying to create “better regulation” since 1997, listing various bits of legislation; various differing and ever-multiplying task-forces, units and executives; and the inevitable action plans, initiatives and other ideas the emanate from the Chancellor’s fertile brain.

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Ms Lea makes it very clear that there is nothing we can do about EU regulations. Usefully, her list of events to do with “better regulation” makes it clear that the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which caused a great deal of excitement in the media and on some blogs, was only the most recent and, possibly, the worst (so far) piece of legislation that gave power to ministers in the name of “simplifying” regulation or making it “easier” to do so.

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The truth is that many people who lobby for British businesses do not really understand what, in actuality, the real barriers to business growth are.

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Many people who represent the business community genuinely believe that the way the world, its politics and economy, its social and legal structures, can function is by regulation. There can, they belive be no other way. The trick is, they argue, is to find “better” regulation.

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This is why these poor misguided souls prefer managerial governance to political governance. It is also why they are so greatly in favour of transnational organizations made up of bureaucrats and lawyers to the alternative messiness of genuinely democratic politics and the free market which is the most efficient economic structure. It is the one however that frightens those who like to have everything in nice neat boxes.

Indeed !