A regulated economy is one that works for all of us
The “Red Tape” of regulations binds us for a reason. Cutting it too often just makes it easier for some to benefit from the cuts by making us pay for their failures.
It was a sombre weekend for me last week. The fire at Union Street in Glasgow hit me hard. I know it was by far not the worst disaster happening even at that moment – as Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal war spread burning oil rains over Tehran in a manner that would surely be an example of a prosecutable offence under the proposed Scottish Ecocide Bill on top of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But still, that corner of Union Street was Common Weal’s office for several years and I realised that I’m the only member of the team remaining who worked in it on a daily basis (Robin had always habitually worked from home even before the Covid pandemic pushed the rest of us to do it too) and so the pang of personal connection was particularly strong.
As one of our Daily Briefings said this week, there are a lot of questions to be asked about the cause of the fire and many that may never be answered. If early reports are accurate though, it may well be that the vape shop where it started was not properly following business regulations and, simultaneously, the regulations around shops that sell highly addictive and highly flammable substances like vapes is nowhere near strong enough given the risks that the devices pose.
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There are going to be questions in the coming weeks, months and possibly as part of the upcoming Scottish Parliamentary elections about how to better regulate these shops specifically. Even the Reform Party is calling for a review of regulations and they have usually been a party ideologically wedded to the idea that “cutting red tape” is the way to boost the economy.
And this is perhaps the core of the issue. The call for more or fewer regulations in anything from businesses, through banking, to regulations over cross-border food imports and exports, or even the regulation of government itself, appears to run like a swinging pendulum. When things are going fine, people think that the regulations are holding them back and call for the red tape to be cut. We become complacent and perhaps forget that the problems the regulations prevent ever even existed - almost like living in a world where people call for cuts to the fire service because it’s been years since they saw a building burn down.
When things crash (as they so, so often do) people wonder why the regulations didn’t save them and want more to prevent the causes of the previous crash happening again. This works until a different crash blindsides everyone who wasn’t listening to the folk who were warning about it, or folk start to feel safe and start talking about cutting red tape again.
There’s another aspect of regulation that sits underneath that broad cycle of tying up and cutting the red tape and that’s our willingness to enforce the regulations that do exist. This, too, could run from vape shops not being checked to make sure they are registered out to ensuring that the food being imported into the country are actually being checked to make sure they are meeting agreed standards rather than just being ‘waved through’ because there just aren’t the resources there to properly secure the border.
A regulation that isn’t enforced is even worse than one that doesn’t exist because it’s often not never enforced but instead merely enforced selectively. Which means enforced for us, but not those with the money or the power or the “too big to fail” scale to avoid having to play by trivialities like “the rules”.
“We can no longer allow the failure to regulate to simply be priced into the cost of doing business.”
Common Weal has been working on a broad group of policies around the topic of governance – mostly focus at Government itself but this all applies everywhere too. One of the foundational principles is that “no-one should govern themselves”. This means that government isn’t allowed to vote against transparency measures under the excuse that the mandatory rules merely replicate voluntary rules that they’re not following.
It means that the boards that are supposed to govern our regulatory bodies can’t be solely conscripted from the ranks of the bodies they are supposed to be regulating. It means that conflicts of interest must be rooted out and it means that lobbyists who advocate for changes to or immunity from regulations must do so in plain site of our democracy – we now argue that the Lobbying Register is insufficient and that ALL lobbying meetings with the Government (even ours) should be recorded and posted for public scrutiny.
And when it comes to regulation of the private sector, we can no longer allow the failure to regulate to simply be priced into the cost of doing business. There needs to be adequate deterrent and punishment for those responsible for failure that doesn’t just take the form of a fine that is smaller than the cleanup costs. That way lies the principle of CATNAP – Cheapest Available Technology, Narrowly Avoiding Prosecution – where companies don’t even just barely meet what regulations there are but happily sell us illegal products from unsafe vapes to unsafe houses knowing that no-one is about to stop them from doing so.
It’s said that “every rule is written in blood” and this is very much true when it comes to regulatory practices and especially with health and safety. Those who break out the scissors must be able to articulate why those rules came about and what they were designed to protect us from before being allowed to start cutting or even to just stop enforcing what we have – especially in the name of profit.
Otherwise, when the pendulum swings again, the blood that the next set of rules will be written in might well be our own.
