The Tories want to liberate British businesses and Reform wants to create “a stable pro-enterprise environment”. Both froth a lot about “too much red tape” disincentivising wealth creators. That should make us very afraid for what they plan to do, once more, to this country.
On Monday, the new Employments came into force, extending workers’ rights including sick pay for those earning less than £125 per week. Until now they got nothing. Most low-paid workers are female, many lone mums. Under the Tories, if they got sick, they fell deeper into poverty. Keir Starmer and his Cabinet deserve credit for courageously pushing through laws that reflect Labour values. Now sit back and witness the hysteria about Labour betraying business.
Entrepreneurs, investors and profiteers loathe measures to make them behave responsibly or to make society fairer. They think of themselves as Brahmins in Britain’s caste system. The Dalits are exploited workers and workless benefits claimants. Of course the elite business class and its political allies detest any oversight of their own activities.
They say for the UK to be the power it once was, it must become more like the hideously Darwinian USA. They have their perfect champions in our hard-right and right-wing parties.
Kemi Badenoch is one of those fanatical believers. In last weekend’s Sunday Times, she wrote: “Britain is a place where dreams come true… But big government is choking that dream… Britain did not become great because government sat in the centre of everything. It became great because free people were trusted to think, build, trade, discover and organise.”
Yes, ma’am. Like the highly lucrative slave trade and the killing mills of the North which used and abused child workers.
Badenoch’s party has form. Margaret Thatcher was, arguably, the first champion of this so called “freedom”. David Cameron’s bonfire of regulations surpassed the Iron Lady’s backing for modern capitalist cowboys. Boris Johnson et al openly favoured greedy profit seekers. These were the decades of “light touch” supervision, gentlemen’s agreements and unrestrained enterprise.
Reform and the Conservatives want to bring back those shady ways with a bang.
In my view, deregulation, an ideological obsession, was and is a crime against the people. Some of those who push that credo often inadvertently reveal their lack of humanity. Recently Simon Dudley, former chair of Homes England and Reform’s housing chief, was sacked after he attacked post-Grenfell safety rules. Grenfell was “a tragedy”, he said, “but everyone dies in the end’ The real evil in this view is planning permission. Without that nuisance so much more building could happen. Dudley’s comments are all the more repulsive because there are still dwellings in the UK with dangerous cladding. Another Grenfell could happen again.
The nightmare effects of the right’s deregulation are everywhere around us. The story of sewage pollution in our waterways by private water companies was dramatized by Channel 4 recently. Watching Dirty Business first made me sick, then furious. Ours is the only country in the world which has privatised water. James Bevan, CEO of the Environment Agency from 2015 until March 2023, was apparently a lax overseer. During Bevan’s tenure at the agency “raw sewage spills became an everyday occurrence, our rivers slid into ecological distress, and water companies continued to reward investors handsomely while failing to invest in basic infrastructure”. Bevan is now a knight. And this is still going on. The companies all borrow heavily, fail to deliver and pay big dividends to investors.
It’s a game to these people. Hedge funds and private equity companies are big players. We know little about them. They are secret tribes maintaining their ways in our capitalist jungles.
These companies are also sweeping up nurseries, care homes and supermarkets. The Morrisons I shop at is one of them. One lift out of two hasn’t worked for two years. The escalator sometimes stops. They are asset stripping. No one regulates any of this properly. And still the right wants to exacerbate these very problems in the name of its twisted ideology.
One more example of ineffectual regulation: in 1979, a fire broke out in Woolworths in Manchester. A sofa had burst into flames. Ten people died. In 1988, tough fireproof tests were legally enforced. Certain chemicals had to be incorporated into the furnishings in order to pass the tests. But the story started to go wrong again.
Over the years, scientists and consumer campaigners expressed concern about the effects of these chemicals on humans and the environment. Though they were used in Britain, these chemicals were never used in Europe. In 2013, the US stopped mandating their use. Here, an official review was the answer. It too often is. On 31 March, our Government announced plans to bring UK fire tests in line with the rest of the world. Why did it take so long? Were vested interests involved? How many babies, children and adults were harmed by the delay in making things right?
Tight and trusted regulatory systems would provide us with answers and hold companies to account. The anti-regulation Conservative and Reform brigade not only hates transparency, they are out to dismantle Britain’s extraordinary post-war transformation and to turn the country into a heartless, lawless bushland. Under them, we, the little people, will be unsafe, unheard and unseen. Is that what you want?
Published 8th April 2026 The I newspaper