Red faces not red tape
As I may have mentioned before, I am old enough to remember Lord Heseltine’s bonfire of red tape. In fact I made the effort 6 months after the speech to find out what red tape had been burnt. It was, if I. remember correctly, 7 pieces of legislation, 6 of which were trading with the enemy Acts from the first days of World War Two.
Burning red tape is difficult because most of it is there for a purpose.
Things will be even harder this time for several reasons.
Most of the hated EU red tape just replaces national red tape, as a way of helping the Single Market. You can cut it all you like but you will just replace it with home grown tape.
Secondly Brexit has added miles of red tape, so the UK is far worse off than it was a few years ago. The new border regulations add £7 billion of pointless red tape a year for ever. New testing to meet UK not EU standards, which is also completely pointless, adds billions more. Testing food and agricultural goods even more.
The government will have to burn billions of pounds worth of red tape just to get back where it was before Brexit and if it cuts too much UK goods will be unsellable in the EU, because they won’t meet EU standards.
Good luck.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.