Making our own rules

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A lot of people are being very unkind to Michael Gove following his admission that almost all imports and exports to and from the EU will be subject to border checks from next year, after he and other Brexiteers have spent years arguing that trade will be frictionless.  The critics are missing the point – this is all about taking back control.  From 1^st January next year, we will no longer have to follow all those horrid and bureaucratic EU rules which arbitrarily imposed free trade between the UK and the EU.  Instead, we will be entirely free to set our own rules to limit and complicate trade with the EU by putting it on the same footing as trade with non-EU countries.  It may look like bureaucracy and regulation, but it’s British bureaucracy and regulation.  That’s exactly what people voted for, isn’t it?

Changing the culture, not just the policy

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I noted yesterday that the current and previous incumbents at the Home Office (Amber Rudd and Theresa May) are those who should first and foremost be held responsible for the way in which members of the Windrush generation have been treated.  They, after all, set the rules and oversaw their implementation.  Creating a “hostile environment” in which the starting point was that individuals had to go through an onerous process to prove their right of residence, with little or no help from the state, was a deliberate act of policy. 

The state presumably has access to the tax and national insurance records of those who have lived and worked here all their lives, but instead of seeing those as evidence of legitimate and continuous residency, the Home Office chose to withdraw people’s right to work at all if they could not independently prove their residence rights.  And it wasn’t only their right to work that was withdrawn – it was also their right to hold a driving licence, their right to proper healthcare, and even their right to liberty, with some being held in detention centres.

Attempts by the ministers concerned trying to shift the blame onto officials and civil servants rather than accepting the responsibility themselves are as shameful as the Prime Minister’s mealy-mouthed apology for the effects, but not for the policy.  Having said that, we cannot, and should not, overlook the actions of the officials either.  I touched on that yesterday, referring to the fact that ‘simply following orders’ is not an adequate defence.  Should we not expect better from officials tasked with implementing a policy which, it must have been obvious to them, was trampling on the rights of people who’ve lived in the UK for all, or nearly all, their lives?

I find the inflexibility and obvious lack of empathy of the officials who were ‘processing’ the affected individuals more than a little chilling.  There they were, demanding that people produce reams of documentation which either never existed or else had long since been destroyed, and ordering the detention and/or deportation of those who failed to comply.  There seems to have been no intelligent thought or consideration given to the individuals impacted by their decisions, just a mechanistic implementation of rules and procedures.

We know from history how easy it is for a mindless bureaucracy to become inured to the impact on people of what they do, and to embark on a spiral in which they increasingly block out any idea that the subjects of their processes are people with lives and aspirations rather than simply numbers and files.  It’s the road to an unpleasant type of authoritarianism.  A government and bureaucracy which can reduce one group of people to numbers and statistics can do the same with other groups as well.  The "hostile environment" already did that in the case of illegal immigrants; what the Windrush issue has shown is that it has been extended to a group of citizens who never fell into that category at all. 

What I’m not seeing in the government’s belated attempt to respond to a situation which has been developing over some time is any sense of a need to change that culture and approach.  Instead, it seems to be about attempting to define and distinguish more clearly between different groups of people.  What history tells us is that the time to stand up against this is when they come for the first group, not the last.  There is a dehumanising culture at work at the UK level, and we need to resist that.

Scrapping EU red tape?

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One of the great claims made by those supporting Brexit was that it would enable the UK to get rid of all those regulations made by those dreaded unelected Eurocrats in Brussels, and free UK businesses from what is always described as ‘red tape’.  There are at least two obvious problems with this.  The first is that the regulations aren’t made by those unelected Eurocrats in isolation; they’re made with the agreement and input of the representatives of the elected governments of the 28 member states.  Not every state always gets exactly what it wants, but it’s democracy, not the lack of it, which ends up following the wishes of the majority – or perhaps more accurately, getting to a conclusion which a majority can support.

Leaving that aside, the second obvious problem is their apparent inability to point to many concrete examples of regulations which can in future be disregarded.  There were two stories last week which brought this to mind.

The first was a story about the possibility of giving priority to electric vehicles in a number of English cities.  This is, it seems, part of a response to a Supreme Court ruling, ordering the UK Government to comply with European limits on air pollution.  Would this, I wonder, be one of those horribly European bits of red tape which we should be tearing up post-Brexit in order to free up UK enterprises to make more money by paying less attention to environmental issues?  I mean, outside of Brussels, who really cares about having clean air to breathe?

The second was rather more local; it was about the decision to give protected status to Carmarthen Ham.  This ‘protected status’ is another of those horrid European regulations, and it’s clearly a barrier to other businesses who want to muscle in to this market and exercise their right to sell their product as they wish.  So is this one of the pieces of red tape doomed to be abolished, I wonder?

Perhaps these might look like silly examples, but that would also apply to almost any other example that I picked; and the second isn’t so far away from the one concrete example that the Prime Minister gave us in her speech to her party’s conference, when she talked about “how we label our food”.  This ‘plucky island nation’ (I should probably attribute the copyright of that phrase to someone or other) standing against the foreign foe for the right to put whatever labels we like on our food sounds like the sort of thing that might go down well in a Tory conference – but how sensible is it?

For any food producer wanting to sell its produce only in the UK, it might have some advantages, particularly if it means that they can get away with more (although I’m not sure why so many of those who will be consuming the products appear to think that’s such a good idea).  But any food producers wishing to sell into the single market (paying whatever tariffs are necessary for the privilege) will still have to comply with the rules of the EU.  But in this case, that would be in addition to complying with UK rules.  This is just one example of many where having separate UK rules will not necessarily mean less regulation and red tape – they could actually mean more.

And that’s the point about most of the EU regulations that people are raging against – they exist because having one set of rules to follow is better than having 28 with which exporting businesses need to comply.  It's actually a way of reducing the overall regulatory burden on companies trading within the market bloc.  This is far from being the first or the only example of what sounds like a good sound bite actually coming back to place a real bite on the posterior.  But then, as long as we have control of our borders…

Red tape holding us back?

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‘Red Tape’ is one of everybody’s favourite bêtes noirs.  It’s something which prevents people doing whatever it is that they want to do and think that they should be allowed to do; ties up resources in unnecessary activity; and is generally a ‘bad thing’. 

Businesses in particular hate the stuff.  Apparently it stops them hiring people because they can’t simply sack them when they want to, stops them from keeping their employees at work for however many hours they need them to work, and forces them to abide by all sorts of rules and regulations, such as health and safety and environmental protection, without which they could get on with making their profits.

And that’s the rub.  Whilst it’s easy to agree with the general (unnecessary regulation is a bad thing), it’s a lot harder to agree on the specifics (which regulation is really unnecessary).  Tuesday’s Western Mail contained an article about economic activity in the Haven, and the headline was that experts and businesses were complaining that the future of the area was being put under threat by too much red tape.

It was a lengthy article, quoting various people complaining about the extent to which their activity is regulated; but it was remarkably short when it came down to detailing which regulations were causing the concern and why.  The closest that it came was in talking about "the increasing burden of environmental regulation, regulatory pressure and issues surrounding the planning procedures for new developments”.

Now I don’t doubt for a moment that relaxing controls on environmental pollution and doing away with planning controls would make it easier for some organisations to make money.  It might even lead to more material prosperity for a larger number of people.  But at what cost?

There is always scope for debate about whether particular rules and regulations are entirely necessary or can be amended or tweaked with no detrimental impact.  But, and not for the first time, I‘m left with a feeling that an attack on red tape is really a backdoor request to be allowed to do greater damage to the physical environment in pursuit of private profit.

Ring fences and Bureaucracy

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Consistency and Lib Dems are not words often found together in a single sentence – at least, not in any sentence that I’m likely to write.  But sometimes they really should try at least a little bit harder.

This week, one of their AMs launched a strong attack on the cost of ring-fencing monies passed to local government by the Welsh Government.  Administering separate grants costs £35 million in administration, they proclaimed.  I cannot but agree that it sounds like a great deal of money being diverted away from front line services just to ensure that local councils spend it as instructed; it’s another form of creeping centralisation.

So the Lib Dems want to abolish ring-fencing, and give local councils a single sum which they are then free to spend as they wish?  Not exactly, it appears.  Local democracy and abolition of ring-fencing apply only to those initiatives proposed by other people, or with which the Lib Dems disagree.  They have some other ring-fencing proposals of their own.

Just a week or so earlier, their Assembly Group Leader called for the implementation of a pupil-premium in Welsh schools – a specific addition to school budgets targeted at particular pupils in particular schools.  The idea is not without its merits, but there’s no way that I can see of implementing it which does not effectively ring-fence monies passed by the Assembly Government to local councils – and then further ring-fence monies passed by local councils to schools.

There are good arguments for reviewing which decisions are taken centrally and which are taken locally - the current situation is something of a mish-mash.  The problem is that, rather than taking the bull by the horns and carrying out a thorough review of the issue, successive governments have imposed central direction by increasingly detailed control of local budgets.  There is a difference between challenging that as a process, and merely disagreeing about which elements should be decided centrally.  The Lib Dems are doing the latter - they should really not pretend that they're doing the former.

Red Tape

Tweet Red tape is a little bit like sin – everyone's against it in the abstract, but not necessarily so certain when it comes to the specifics. For politicians, it's far too easy to make a glib commitment to abolishing red tape (and, yes, I know that some of my lot have done it as well), but I'm not sure it's always a terribly meaningful statement.

As a fresh young systems analyst, I was designing a new computer system and having enormous difficulty duplicating one of the reports being produced by a clerk in the engineering department. I sat down with her and looked on in some awe at the processes involved in producing the report, taking a full two days every month.

So I asked what happened to the report then, and was shown the drawer in the filing cabinet where it was stored every month. But who looks at it, I wanted to know. The answer was that nobody looked at it, but about three years previously, the director had asked for the information and it wasn't available, so they had continued to prepare it every month, just in case he ever asked for it again.

Unnecessary and irrelevant clerical activity – that's one of the things which most people think of when they talk about red tape. And I'm sure that lots of organisations have examples of something similar to that I described above. The other favourite is 'unnecessary rules and regulations'. But how much of what is so readily dismissed as 'red tape' really falls into those sorts of categories?

I'd hazard a guess that the answer is 'not as much as people think'. Far more often, one person's red tape is another person's protection.

I've heard some employers, particularly, complaining about the burden of red tape on their businesses. Things like European Directives about Environmental Protection, or Working Hours. Things like Maternity Pay, and discrimination legislation. Of course it would be so much easier for companies to compete with the rest of the world if they didn't have to worry about treating their staff fairly or safeguarding the environment around them.

But that isn't what I'd call red tape.

Jack Straw got into trouble recently for suggesting that some police officers would prefer to sit at desks doing paperwork than getting out and solving crimes. He made his point in an unfortunate and cack-handed fashion. The Tories love to talk about freeing police from red tape, and seized on Straw's remarks. Of course, life would be easier for the police if they didn't have to record details of the people they stop and search for instance. But it would be a lot harder to deal with suggestions of bias or prejudice in the way that the individuals being stopped are selected, or about heavy-handed policing.

That isn't what I'd call red tape either.

So, like everyone else, I'm against sin. But before I try and abolish it, I'd like to make sure that it really is sinful.