This week’s International Investment Summit was meant to be a showcase for Labour’s pro-growth economic policies. However, it’s been overshadowed by a series of unfortunate events — including the P&O controversy, a national blackout warning, and a row over Elon Musk’s non-invitation to the summit itself.

That last one was especially unfortunate against the backdrop of the spectacular SpaceX reusable rocket test. As Yuan Yi Zhu notes, it doesn’t help that Britain is the only country in the world to have developed and abandoned an independent orbital launch capability.

Keir Starmer did launch something this week — an industrial strategy green paper. On closer inspection, though, it’s mostly a rehash of the 2017 industrial strategy developed under Theresa May and later scrapped by Rishi Sunak.

The British economy needs a second chance too, because it’s never fully recovered from the global financial crisis of 2008. Our so-called “productivity puzzle” might not strike most people as a top priority, but what it means is 16 years of stagnant wages, falling living standards and national decline. The return of industrial strategy will help, but we need something more to rekindle growth, which explains Starmer’s startling promise to “rip out the bureaucracy that blocks investment”.

In specific cases, deregulation can indeed make a difference. As the Prime Minister says, it shouldn’t take 4,000 separate documents to build a wind farm. But, more generally, the battle cry against excessive regulation means one of two things: either a bureaucratic review by the bureaucracy itself, which leads to lasting change with the same reliability that turkeys vote for Christmas, or the gung-ho libertarian version in which cutting red tape means lowering standards. This also rarely happens, because faced with the consequences — for instance, Third-World mortality rates on building sites — we don’t have the stomach for it.

Yet there is a better way: to uphold every standard worth keeping but to also target the unnecessary, and therefore parasitic, bureaucracy that grows around it. At the highest level, this means an end to vanity regulation. Look at the way the EU celebrated its Artificial Intelligence Act — as if that compensated for the puny size of its tech sector. Regulation should exist to punish clear breaches of essential standards, not to conjure someone’s idea of a perfect world into being. Anti-discrimination laws are an example of the former; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) frameworks an example of the latter.

Free of the EU, the UK has the chance to champion high standards with minimal bureaucracy. But what about situations in which complexity is inevitable because of the number of stakeholders — for instance, major construction projects such as new power stations, reservoirs or garden cities? We should be able to lessen the bureaucratic obstacles there. Instead of starting with the development proposal and then lining up the various stakeholders to make their objections, we could switch to a positive model. We should involve stakeholders at the masterplanning stage — and then auction off the development rights with planning permission already granted.

We could, if we wished, re-orientate planning policy around enabling the best developments, instead of institutionalised obstructionism. But that, of course, would require a system-wide change of philosophy, which only happens when our political leaders lead. That’s not as fun as “ripping things out”, but ultimately it could make a much bigger difference.

---

Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

peterfranklin_

---