Who fancies a festive game of Labour or Liz?
The rules are quite simple – I’ll set out some quotes and you guess whether they came from a member of the current tax-raising and workers’ rights improving Labour administration or from the right-wing scourge of the anti-growth coalition and former prime minister Liz Truss.
So put down your turkey sandwiches, off we go:
1. “We are rolling up our sleeves and removing red tape”
2. “A red tape bonfire will encourage business investment and boost growth”
3. “[Regulation of financial services] has gone too far”
4. “Where [regulation] is stopping us building… then mark my words – we will get rid of it”
5. “We needed to stop drifting in the direction of… more regulation, which was causing sluggish growth”
That’s your lot. Think you’ve got them all? Well, here are the answers.
Numbers 1, 3 and 4 are Labour, while 2 and 5 are Liz Truss.
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Okay, Trivial Pursuit this may not be. But there’s a not-so-subtle point I’m attempting to sketch out here.
Many of the noises the current government is making on growth and regulation are not so different to the ones that emanated from our shortest ever serving prime minister – a politician most in the Labour Party view as the antithesis of everything this administration stands for.
We see it again in Sir Keir Starmer‘s Christmas Eve letter to regulators setting a mid-January deadline for them to put forward ideas for removing “barriers to growth”.
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None of this should come as much of a surprise.
Changing the rules to encourage a more pro-business environment is one of the few levers the prime minister can pull to try and boost the UK’s sluggish growth rate.
But one person’s “barrier to growth” can be someone else’s “essential safeguard”.
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For example, campaign groups have already called for the “Growth Duty” in the mandate of the water regulator to be replaced with something focused more on the environment.
That’s on top of existing criticism OFWAT has faced for taking too soft an approach to the management of private water companies.
There’s concern over in the financial services sector too.
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Earlier this month, 50 economists and policy experts wrote to the chancellor warning about her plans for deregulation.
Businesses will likely give all this all a warmer reception though.
But even that will be set against wider concern over the financial strain being put on firms by the huge tax rises in the budget.
The timescales associated with regulatory reform means it will likely take years before we can take a reliable reading of whether any measures announced by Labour are actually boosting growth.
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For Sir Keir Starmer, the danger is that he’s unable to reconcile the political and economic contradictions in his wider policy platform.
Can you be pro-growth while raising taxes? Can you cut regulation but still protect workers and the environment? Or put more simply, can you be both Labour and Liz?
