Thursday 27 July 2017

Brexitwatch: the government should have....done nothing

Oh, the perils of failing to follow my advice. There would have been no referendum. Today we would still be happily in the EU not looking over the abyss of an economic collapse, we would not have had a spike in xenophobia and hate crime, and David Cameron would still have been prime minister with a workable majority.

If only he had taken note of what I wrote on 3 April 2015:

FRIDAY, 3 APRIL 2015

UK election: the next government should.....do nothing



One of the more bizarre criticisms of the UK’s coalition government was that in its latter stages, it entered a ‘zombie’ phase. In other words, for once, MPs were failing to carry out their supposed duty of rushing through poorly drafted new laws which they have not read properly, and which have disastrous unforeseen consequences.

It is the kind of mentality that saw Labour inventing 3,600 crimes in 11 years, and we wonder why the prisons are overflowing. Or that had the Tory-dominated coalition mounting yet another complete reorganisation of the NHS – something David Cameron had specifically promised not to do.

What we seem to get more and more is government by vanity project. After all, how is a politician meant to get into the history books by making sure the health service or public transport ran efficiently? No, they want to be the man or woman who shook up the NHS, or built HS2.

How many times have you heard governments promising to ‘cut red tape’? But power is so delightful, and the temptation to boss other people around just too great to resist. Back in the nineteenth century when a colleague demanded that Prime Minister Lord Palmerston should pass a new piece of legislation, he replied: ‘There are too many laws already.’

Somebody once said the trouble with elections is that whoever you vote for, the government always gets in. Whichever government wins this time, expect a flood of new laws and regulations.

More on this from Simon Jenkins -

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/02/government-ministers-public-servants-change-reform

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