Is there any area of economic life in which this Government or its “arms-length” bodies will not interfere?
Just this week the Culture Secretary has announced English football will have an independent regulator in place by the next general election.
Meanwhile, the new Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance, in seeking to clarify the law on single-sex spaces, has underscored the complexity government has created by prescribing how myriad characteristics must be treated by every business and service provider in the country.
The regulatory drift indicates that Johnsonian Conservatism is in keeping not with the Conservative tradition of the Thatcher era, but rather the 1950s and 1960s, when huge swathes of the economy were controlled by Whitehall.
It was Ronald Reagan who quipped that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. Today, we have a government that tries to “throw its arms” around all of us.
To gauge the extent to which state overreach will pervade our lives and the economy by the time of the next general election, consider a typical day in 2024, by which point we can expect proposed legislation, like football’s new regulator, to be law.
You awake to a regulated radio programme. Buy one, get one free deals on cereal, jam, yogurts and a range of other breakfast foods no rational person would view as “junk” have been banned.
Nor will producers be able to pedal their wares online, at any time of day, thanks to Boris’s new anti-obesity regulations. These will, by the Government’s own estimates, reduce our food consumption by merely 2.8 calories a day.
Then you drop the children to nursery, where they’ll be looked after in a highly regulated setting, or school, where they’ll be taught the national curriculum by regulated teachers.
If you surf the web on your commute, what you see will be controlled by hundreds of rules – such as GDPR and the Investigatory Powers Act – while your social media comments risk being censored as part of the new Online Safety Bill.
At the workplace, your employer will be buckling under the weight of labour market regulations, ranging from gender pay gap reporting measures to newer rules around “flexible” working.
Many of these costs will be passed on in the form of lower wages. At lunch, no plastic straws – and perhaps no condiment sachets either.
Back home there might be a newly installed, state-subsidised heat pump – but no conservatory if you live in a new build and the Government presses ahead with its planned ban from June.
If you watch live TV, you’ll be paying a licence fee regardless of whether you avail yourself of BBC services. And if football is on, new legislation will have ushered in major changes to the way the game is run.
Britain is turning into a paternalist’s paradise. Just consider how little opposition the recommendations of the 2021 fan-led review of football governance have attracted.
But even the rationale behind the review itself – that it was the result of “three points of crisis in our national game” – is weak. All three have been easily dealt with by the existing model. What “problem” is Government trying to fix?
Under the proposed regulatory model, clubs will be forced to submit a raft of financial and other information – including detailed business models and equality, diversity and inclusion plans.
These will have to be approved before a yearly licence is granted. Monitoring and collating this material will require new staff, with the costs of compliance potentially running into the hundreds of thousands for larger clubs.
