THE kindest thing we can say about Rachel Reeves’s claim that deregulation will unleash economic growth is that we’ve heard it all before.

It’s 11 years since David Cameron vowed to ignite a “bonfire of regulations.” Eighty thousand pages of building guidelines and environmental protections would be shredded, the Tory PM bragged. Among his stated motives was an acknowledged housing crisis and the need to get Britain building. It is evident that he did not deliver.

Deregulation has been government policy for decades, as documented by the Fire Brigades Union in exposés of successive governments’ dismantling of regulatory standards that led to the Grenfell Tower fire. 

The “mark your own homework” approach that allowed Grenfell suppliers to lie to get their dangerous products approved, with fatal consequences for 72 people, has had a less tragic but pervasive influence throughout the building sector. 

Combined with the concentration of housebuilding among a handful of giant companies whose control of the market means they needn’t worry about quality, it has driven a decline in building standards even as housing supply is restricted to keep prices high. More than half the population agree older houses are built to a higher standard and a third describe new-builds as “poor quality.” The reasons include a lack of proper inspection regimes and industry indifference to apprenticeships and training.

Deregulation has not just negatively affected construction: it is responsible for all manner of corporate crimes, including the dilapidated state of the water network and the resulting pollution of waterways through sewage discharges. 

Reeves, however, makes clear that ecological considerations don’t weigh with this government, repeating her sneer at people who care about “bats and newts,” presumably because it went down well with the global corporate elite last week at Davos.

As Unite leader Sharon Graham points out, “unleashing corporate greed” is not some novel solution to the country’s ills, but more of the same. “They claim that if we tear up safeguards on markets, while keeping labour regulations among the tightest in the world, then somehow property developers, tech billionaires, and the City will deliver a growth miracle. That approach hasn’t worked in the last 45 years, and there’s no reason it will in the next five,” she warns.

Starmer is open about following in the footsteps of Thatcher, whose “Big Bang” deregulation of the City of London he cites as an example. 

It is a myth that this ever delivered growth: British growth rates were higher in the 30 years prior to 1980 — the period of the social-democratic consensus — than they have been in the neoliberal period since. 

Thatcherism drove inequality, not growth, and outsized rewards for the richest accompanied falling employment and an ever-lower share of GDP paid in wages rather than taken in profits and rents. Addressing inequality is the key to improving working-class living standards: the obscene wealth of the few should be tapped to rehabilitate our public services and fund publicly directed investment in the modernised infrastructure our country needs.

So we must reassert the understanding Labour had between 2015 and 2020 that it is not just the last Tory government’s austerity that needs reversing, but the entire project of privatisation and deregulation dating back to the 1980s. 

But we should go further. The Corbyn project failed not because it was too ambitious, but too timid: from 2017 especially, it hid from the logical consequences of its critique of the status quo, seeking to appease the City (pledging to maintain the anti-democratic “independence” of the Bank of England, for example) and markets (through defence of EU membership) rather than channelling a full-throated cry of rage against the rich.

There is no shortage of that rage today. Rebuilding a movement for socialist transformation of this country, capable of turning it on the corporate crooks picking our pockets and poisoning our planet, is essential.