You know you’ve been in politics too long when you’re onto your tenth ‘Red Tape Challenge’. I remember Neil Hamilton as Deregulation Minister in the Major Government in ’92 promising to slash the jungle of red tape. Every time I cheered. Every time the flood of Regulations and Directives kept pouring out of the Whitehall and Brussels machine.
But hardened Red Tape Analysts of all stripes will notice something a bit different about yesterday’s news of the Prime Minister’s commitment to implement the deregulatory proposals of the Business Task Force. He has explicitly linked it to the historic Renegotiation and Referendum strategy launched in his Bloomberg speech. So this time we’ll actually have a chance not just to stem the flood of regs, but to turn off the stopcock.
And this time it really matters. There are huge global opportunities the UK risks missing if we allow ourselves to be beholden to the EU model.
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