The phrase landed with a weary familiarity last week. As Chancellor John Healey finalised the numbers for Wednesday’s first Budget, Downing Street briefed that the statement would include measures to “slash the red tape choking firms.” It was a pledge designed to reassure business. Instead, it exposed a contradiction at the heart of Andy Burnham’s premiership before the Dispatch Box has even opened.
For a Prime Minister who entered Number Ten pledging to “end 40 years of neoliberalism,” the adoption of the deregulationist’s favourite cliché is more than a rhetorical slip. It signals a government still tethered to the very orthodoxies it promised to dismantle. The “bonfire of red tape” has been the standard issue soundbite for every administration since Margaret Thatcher unleashed the Big Bang in the City. John Major hacked at the “jungle.” Gordon Brown championed a “light-touch” regime that culminated in a trillion-pound bailout. Boris Johnson railed against Brussels bureaucracy, only to find British business begging to keep EU standards. Rachel Reeves, in her time at the Treasury, described regulation as a “boot on the neck” of enterprise.
Burnham’s team knows this history. They know, too, that their own legislative flagship — the Employment Rights Act — represents the most significant expansion of workers’ protections in a generation. It is, by design, an increase in the regulatory burden on employers. You cannot simultaneously be the party of the “bonfire” and the architect of the most pro-worker statute in decades. The cognitive dissonance is deafening.
The Neoliberal Paradox: More Market, More Rules
The irony that seems lost on the current occupants of Whitehall is that the neoliberal project itself fuelled the regulatory expansion they now decry. As Labour MP Yuan Yang argued in a recent lecture for Renewal, the retreat of the state from direct service provision did not liberate the market; it necessitated a sprawling architecture of oversight.
When water was privatised in 1989, the state did not vanish. It metastasised into Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate, the Environment Agency, the Consumer Council for Water, and the Competition and Markets Authority as a backstop. Five bodies. None with the remit to plan for the sector’s long-term resilience. The result is written in the sewage-choked rivers and crumbling infrastructure we see today.
Mat Lawrence, director of Common Wealth and a key intellectual influence on the Burnham circle, labels this “the regulatory state.” He points to affordable housing quotas imposed on private developers as a direct substitute for the council house building programmes the state abandoned. Regulation did not shrink; it mutated into a complex, often incoherent web of arm’s-length agencies operating beyond democratic scrutiny.
The Human Cost of the ‘Blocker’ Narrative
There is a second, quieter casualty of the “red tape” war: the regulators themselves. Mike Clancy, general secretary of the Prospect union, has warned the government that its promise to cut the “administrative burden” by 25 per cent before the next election is arbitrary and dangerous.
His members — the scientists at the Health and Safety Executive, the inspectors at the Environment Agency, the analysts at the CMA — are not the “blockers” of ministerial imagination. They are, in Clancy’s words, “trying to do their jobs with stretched resources.” They are the thin line between a functioning market and the next Grenfell, the next Thames Water collapse, the next contaminated blood scandal. Treating their expertise as friction to be lubricated away is not reform; it is negligence.
When the Giants Need Reining In
The timing of this deregulatory posturing is particularly ill-judged. As the government prepares its fiscal statement, the global economy is being reshaped by artificial intelligence firms that openly admit their systems have breached safety guardrails. These are not small businesses strangled by paperwork. They are trillion-dollar behemoths moving at a velocity that existing frameworks cannot match.
The case for smarter regulation — streamlined, digitised, proportionate — is unanswerable. The case for less regulation, articulated through the tired metaphor of the bonfire, is intellectually bankrupt. It mistakes the symptom for the disease. The thicket of rules exists because the structural features of our economy — privatised monopolies, financialised housing, algorithmic opacity — demand them. Hacking at the branches leaves the roots untouched.
Why it Matters
By reaching for the “red tape” comfort blanket, Burnham and Healey are not merely recycling a cliché; they are conceding the intellectual ground to the very ideology they vowed to bury. A government that defines its economic mission through the language of deregulation cannot credibly deliver the active, strategic state required to fix broken markets, decarbonise the grid, or tame the power of Big Tech. The bonfire they promise would burn the very tools needed to build a different economy.
