Every British prime minister since Margaret Thatcher has promised to liberate business from red tape. The phrase, popularised by historian Thomas Carlyle and weaponised by neoliberal economics, has become a bipartisan reflex — a rhetorical tic that substitutes for structural thinking. Andy Burnham's government, despite pledging to end 40 years of neoliberalism, is now reaching for the same playbook: chancellor John Healey's upcoming budget will include measures to "slash the red tape choking firms." The historical record is damning. Thatcher's Big Bang deregulation of the City produced the conditions for serial financial crises. Gordon Brown celebrated light-touch regulation of the banking sector until the Treasury had to bail out the banks in 2008. Boris Johnson promised liberation from Brussels bureaucracy, only for business groups to say they preferred complying with longstanding EU standards to adopting an entirely new UK regime. Bananas remain exactly as bendy as before. The deeper irony, as Labour MP Yuan Yang argued in a lecture for the journal Renewal, is that neoliberalism itself generated the regulatory thicket it now complains about. When the state retreated from direct service provision, it had to erect arm's-length watchdog agencies to oversee the private operators. Water privatisation in 1989 spawned Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate, the Environment Agency, and the Consumer Council for Water — yet none is responsible for a coherent plan for the sector as a whole. The result: polluted rivers and crumbling infrastructure. Mat Lawrence of the thinktank Common Wealth calls this "the regulatory state" — regulation filling the vacuum left by functions the state once performed directly. Affordable housing targets imposed on private developers are another example: rules doing the work that public housebuilding once did. Cutting these rules without restoring the underlying state capacity simply removes the constraint without solving the problem. Labour's own policy mix makes the deregulation posture incoherent. The Employment Rights Act represents the most significant increase in workers' rights in a generation, deliberately adding rules firms must follow to protect low-paid employees in insecure work. Simultaneously promising a bonfire of red tape undermines the case for the regulation you just enacted. Mike Clancy, general secretary of the Prospect union representing regulator staff, has urged the government to stop scapegoating often modestly paid workers doing essential safety and environmental work with stretched resources. Prospect opposes the government's promise to cut the administrative burden of regulation by 25% by parliament's end, calling it arbitrary and potentially counterproductive. The article's most pointed observation concerns tech regulation: firms are "insouciantly" conceding that their AI agents have been breaking through safety controls and may begin spawning spontaneously. Embracing the tired language of red tape as a chokehold on business is precisely the wrong framing for a moment that demands more stringent oversight, not less. The ritual bonfire burns the wrong things.
