New Labour Leaders Want to Go Back to Blair’s Policies that Blew Up the UK
By William K. Black
Quito: May 13, 2015
Given the media effort and the push by the Red Tories to lionize former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair I thought it was a good idea to explain just how destructive his war on financial regulation, supervision, enforcement, and prosecutions was. Blair most famously made public his war on regulation and his embrace of “winning” the regulatory race to the bottom in his May 26, 2005 speech on “Risk and the State.” In a classic example of “be careful what you ask for; for you may receive it,” he called on his Nation to embrace greater risk. He claimed that the public’s excessive aversion to risk produced a regulatory nightmare: “The result is a plethora of rules, guidelines, responses to ‘scandals’ of one nature or another that ends up having utterly perverse consequences.” Blair endorsed the Chicago School (and Tory) analysis of the folly of regulation – claiming that it characteristically produces “utterly perverse consequences.”
Blair then admitted at the beginning of his speech that the existing regulatory system had produced exceptional benefits for the public rather than “utterly perverse consequences.” He admitted that absent regulation the harm to the public would have been extreme.
Workplace fatalities have fallen by around two-thirds since the 1970s. Higher environmental standards have helped deliver cleaner air and water. Since 1990 sulphur dioxide emissions have fallen by 75% and water pollution fell by 65% in the 5 years to 2001.
Sulfur dioxide is a great killer of most forms of life. Absent environmental regulation, Blair is implicitly admitting, the UK would have been a terrible place to live by the time Blair was first elected.
in full: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2015/05/new-labour-leaders-want-to-go-back-to-blairs-policies-that-blew-up-the-uk.html
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