Just why did Michael Gove campaign for Brexit? I thought he was selling us a future with a more entrepreneurial attitude and less meddlesome regulations. This week we are going to find out just how committed he is to lighter regulations when he announces legislation to force owners of holiday lets to obtain planning permission and to enter their properties on a local register. In other words, he has given in to the Nimbys who don’t like having holidaymakers staying in their street and the hoteliers who find self-catering accommodation inconvenient competition to their own business model.
Why trash the tourist industry, one of the few burgeoning export industries we have? What Gove is pushing is yet one more way in which wealth is being transferred from people who provide a useful service, which people want to pay for, to the parasitic wing of the economy: the bit that regulates us under pain of fines and fees.
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