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Your guide on what the US elections of 2024 mean for Washington and Le Monde
You hope that after a few weeks to watch Elon Musk’s successful squads are unleashed through the American federal bureaucracy, people could have shone that his motivation “of efficiency” is not entirely as announced.
However, rather than the Trump administration being considered a edifying story, the cult of worshiping deregulation as a good thing has necessarily acquired a disturbing number of world disciples. When France suddenly pushes the EU “A massive regulatory break” You know things are not normal. But it is in the United Kingdom, where the usual verification towards the United States persisted despite extremely different political cultures and administrative systems, where real believers are found.
Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, said oddly this week that the so-called Ministry of Effectiveness of the Musk Government (DOGE) had not gone far enough. At the end of the first week of Trump, Simon Case, the former head of the British public service, Writing with admiration The “extreme transparency” of the American efficiency campaign and said that it could provide a world model to reinvent the government. Since the damage that musk wakes up day by day, this argument is already extremely aging.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is much less extreme and fortunately did not quote Trump as an inspiration, although he did deregulate During his first call with the American president. But his government has still displayed worrying trends in this direction. Go beyond the long-standing and commendable hand writings are now regularly dotted with general invocations against excessive rules.
You can consider all this as a standard pro-enterprise rhetoric, but it seems dangerous at a time of such deregular destructiveness to give the cult space to grasp. You can be sure it was not Labor elections manifestoWho outside the planning issue had waves words about the coordination of regulations and the drafting of new rules on artificial intelligence, a commitment from which it quickly retires.
If an apparently desperate government to change the political account will grasp any idea qualified as deregulation, it could make serious damage. Throwing to find the economic model that the work had apparently not known when it is in opposition, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves last month called the regulators of the United Kingdom and asked them for their ideas on growth. The government then expelled the president of the competition and the authority markets (CMA) to be insufficiently eager to approve the mergers.
The CMA has long been criticized by large companies, especially in technology, to block dungeons and take too much time to make decisions. Now you can debate the exploitation of the British competition policy, both in progress and in result. But it is worrying that the government seems to identify the interests of large companies as identical to the promotion of growth.
Unlike product standards or green regulations, competition policy is not simply a question of protecting the interests of consumers or the environment in relation to those of companies. The unregulated monopoly produces large benefits for monopolists, but it does not traditionally produce growth or innovation.
If the economy of technological industry means that the compromise between the restriction of market domination and growth is now obsolete, we should hear the reasons. If your point of view of American economic history is to look favorably a few weeks of Trumpian deregulation while ignoring more than a century of antitrust, you are wrong.
There is of course a huge irony here for the United Kingdom. The rules affecting businesses are not only written to the whims of malignant regulators. Many facilitate growth and are created with and sometimes by companies themselves. For example, the use of the 20 -foot shipping container which revolutionized the world trade in goods has spread enormously after the official adoption of global standards.
In this case, the United Kingdom has launched a radical deregulation experience in the past five years, denying a system of official rules mainly developed in association with companies. The system was the EU and the customs union and the experience and experience was called Brexit. It was based on pure and simple manufacturing on EU regulations on courted bananas and others and it fails, cost of cost maybe 5% of GDP. If the government wants a growth model, ironically, ironically, the rejoicing of the EU regulatory superstate is there, and I have not yet seen an argument convincing that being outside the regulatory framework of ‘EU will prevail over the advantages. The government’s refusal to discuss properly the problem shows that it is insufficiently serious about growth.
There is a measured and convincing debate to have good and bad regulations. Inspired by Musk, whose rationalization method is almost literally “CTRL-F [thing I don’t like]-Select-delete ”, is not categorically that. Doing everything that tells you about large companies is not either. Reflected crusades against regulations – the use of hilarious metaphors exceeded as “papercrass -paper” and “plan” is always a warning signal – can end up creating massive damage, and making rules or non -and rules of the rules In a rush to a political imperative is sure – fire the way of being mistaken.
alan.beattie@ft.com
