Why we ban the small scams but not the big ones

This week’s In Common column for The National focuses on the government’s latest plan to ban the resale of concert tickets and how it leaves the structural exploitation still very much intact.

There’s a particular ritual in British politics I’ve come to recognise.

A crisis appears, public anger rises, ministers panic – and instead of tackling the source of the problem, they sprint toward the bit that looks easiest to fix. The bit that makes a good headline. The bit that lets them avoid upsetting anyone who actually has power.

And so here we are again, with the UK Government announcing plans to ban ticket resale – a long-overdue attempt, we’re told, to crack down on price gouging and protect ordinary fans. In principle, fine. No one enjoys competing with an army of bots or watching some anonymous reseller flog Taylor Swift tickets for the cost of a month’s rent. I have no objection to the idea that the cultural economy shouldn’t be a free-for-all for speculative traders.

But let’s be honest: banning ticket resale is a wonderfully convenient way of appearing tough on exploitation without touching any of the systems that enable it. It is the political equivalent of slapping a plaster on a leaking dam and declaring the problem solved.

Because the real issue isn’t some guy on Facebook Marketplace selling two Oasis tickets for £500.

The real issue is that the modern live-events industry is built on monopolies, artificial scarcity, and corporate capture – none of which this reform even glances at.

In Britain, the ticketing market is effectively dominated by one giant: Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation. They control venues. They control promotions. They control allocations. They control the platforms that control the market. When people complain about the chaos of trying to buy a ticket at 10am on a Thursday, they’re not really complaining about the resellers. They’re complaining about a system designed to squeeze fans until they rattle.

Dynamic pricing inflates ticket costs before resellers ever touch them. ‘Platinum’ tickets – which are often just ordinary seats dressed up as luxury goods – can change price by the minute. Artists are quietly encouraged to embrace ‘market-based pricing,’ which is corporate-speak for: “Charge as much as you can get away with.” And then we act shocked when tickets appear on resale sites for absurd sums, as though the entire upstream ecosystem isn’t engineered to maximise extraction.

So yes, reselling is a problem – but it is a symptom of a diseased market, not the disease itself.

And here’s the other thing that no one in government wants to say out loud:

Banning resale doesn’t make the problem disappear. It makes it go underground. 

Countries that have tried this have seen: black-market ticket sales boom; fraud increase; zero improvement in affordability; fans pushed toward unregulated sellers; and prices influenced more by scarcity than actual economic logic.

When you shut down a flawed market without fixing the incentives behind it, you don’t create fairness. You create shadows. And shadows are where the worst actors thrive.

But again, the government isn’t really trying to fix the system.

It’s trying to fix the optics. It is simply a bid to fulfil their general election manifesto of cracking down on ‘pernicious’ touts.

“When you shut down a flawed market without fixing the incentives behind it, you don’t create fairness. You create shadows. And shadows are where the worst actors thrive. ”

Because regulating resellers is easy.

Regulating monopolies is hard.

Regulating land banking, supermarket giants, energy cartels, or corporate landlords?

Politically suicidal, apparently.

We have an entire political class trained to treat the word ‘market’ like a sacred relic – unless, of course, the target is small enough, powerless enough, and visible enough to regulate without consequence. That’s why we get tough talk on resellers and silence on companies that buy up half the high street. It’s why surge pricing, predatory rent extraction, and corporate price-setting escape scrutiny. It’s why fans are lectured on ‘personal responsibility,’ while Ticketmaster quietly entrenches itself into every corner of the live-events economy.

This isn’t economic philosophy.

It’s political convenience.

And it raises the obvious question: if we’re now willing to intervene in markets to stop unfair pricing, why stop at tickets?

Why not regulate surge pricing by tech companies? Supermarket profiteering? Land banking that inflates housing costs? Monopolies that crush local businesses? Corporate giants that deliberately undercut independents to eliminate competition?

If the principle is fairness, why is fairness only ever applied at the smallest scale?

The truth is that Britain’s economic landscape is shaped far more by corporate power than by the behaviour of individual consumers. But governments prefer to police the margins because the margins can’t fight back.

So yes – crack down on resellers.

Fine.

But don’t pretend it will fix the structural problem.

Don’t pretend this is economic justice.

And don’t pretend fans will suddenly be able to afford tickets to the things they love.