UK Neolib Deregulation: Tearing apart what remains of the living world (Monbiot)

[Ghost Dog]

The less you care, the better you will do. This has long been the promise of conservative politics on both sides of the Atlantic. People who couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the consequences of their actions are elevated to the highest levels of government. Their role is to trash what lesser mortals value.

This describes the position of almost everyone in Donald Trump’s cabinet. In the UK, I feel it applies, among others, to Jeremy Hunt at the Department of Health, Boris Johnson at the Foreign Office, Priti Patel at international development and now Michael Gove at the environment department: the worst possible candidates are given the most sensitive portfolios.

Gove has attacked the two main pillars of protection for wildlife and ecosystems in this country, the European habitats and birds directives. As education secretary, he sought to erase climate change from the geography curriculum. Now, at a time of great environmental hazard, as the Brexit talks commence, he has been granted an opportunity to make his dream – and our nightmare – of destroying public protections come true...

... In 2011 David Cameron launched a “one-in, one-out” rule: any new regulation could be introduced only if an existing measure, with equal costs to business, was revoked. In 2013 it was escalated to one-in, two-out. This was the doctrine cited in 2014 by the then Conservative housing minister to justify his refusal to insist that sprinkler systems be fitted to new buildings to prevent fires from spreading. In 2015 the government ramped up the ratio to one-in, three-out, and locked it into law through the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act. As Christine Berry of the New Economics Foundation points out, this more or less bans new regulations. It ensures that business costs are transferred to society, where they remain, under this formula, uncounted...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/21/new-disease-devastate-wildlife-tories-do-nothing-michael-gove

[Denzil_DC]

1. "In 2011 David Cameron launched a one-in, one-out rule"

Thanks for the reminder, Ghost Dog. That's where Trump got that idea from!

[lapfog_1]

2. We probably won't bother with the "outer space seed vault"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running

[Ghost Dog]

3. Deadlier than terrorism the rights fatal obsession with red tape

Last edited Wed Jun 21, 2017, 11:40 AM - Edit history (1)

... No regulatory regime is perfect. Regulations can grow into a thickety network of ad-hoc rules, of which periodic pruning and rationalisation is a good idea. Also, Davies points out, “the processes of the regulators” can be onerous even if the rules are beneficial. Some regulations themselves, too, can look like “random pointless hobby-horses of the regulators”. (Davies cites the ban on selling Swedish chewing tobacco outside that country while cigarettes remain available everywhere.) Others are “basically disguised restraints of trade”, such as those that protected incumbents in the trucking and aviation industries in the 1970s, and which became targets for the modern wave of “deregulation” (or, as some prefer to term it, re-regulation in lobbyists’ interests) promoted and expanded by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

“In the early days, it looked like there were some big economic wins from getting rid of them,” Davies says. And in order to get political backing for continued deregulation, it seemed useful to “massively exaggerate the just silly or obviously anticompetitive”.

This generates its own momentum. “Once you have built up the political movement and got deregulation and red tape ingrained as a vote winner,” Davies adds, “you need to keep doing it.” But the obvious candidates for removal quickly run out. So then it is tempting to start attacking those that actually protect the public, whether physically or financially. The latter are aimed at “stopping businesses from chucking part of their costs on to the public or the taxpayer”. Removing such regulations was a big win for banking in the 1980s and 90s. “The financial sector was huge in this,” Davies says. “The basic rhetorical form was to assert that highly paid and high-calibre banks knew how to run their own businesses better than speccy civil servants, thank you very much, and that all these capital requirements and conduct rules were just things that had been dreamed up in a backroom somewhere by someone with no real understanding of the business.”

That basic rhetorical form led, eventually, to the global crash. And what is less visible than outbreaks of poisoning or accidents, but just as real, is the fact that such rhetoric can be fatal. The crisis that resulted from deregulated casino banking led to at least 10,000 “economic suicides” in the years that followed, according to a 2014 paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Add to the death toll of the financial crisis and those who die in unsafe buildings the scores of thousands who die yearly from pollution and extreme weather events attributed to global warming, owing to the under-regulation of energy industries, and one thing becomes very clear. An ideological commitment to destroying regulation kills many more people than terrorism, around the world and all the time...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/20/deadlier-than-terrorism-right-fatal-obsession-red-tape-deregulation-grenfell-tower