"Two years after leaving the EU Britain has made almost none of the promised progress towards economic liberalisation. While Brussels hasn’t been helpful, libertarian ministers in the Tory government have been both conquered by the bureaucracy of the civil service and even turned into high-spending statists. There has been no attempt to reduce the state’s suffocating dominance over the economy.
"On current policies, the private sector is set to continue its long-term decline, with higher taxes and ever-increasing regulation. But it needn’t be so...."
~ Max Rangeley, from his post 'The UK and its Lost Opportunities'
Wednesday 9 February 2022
"Two years after leaving the EU Britain has made almost none of the promised progress towards economic liberalisation...."
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Early days. Though he made a great speech of 3rd February 2020 (see below) and had liberalising instincts, he never routed out the grey ones from the Tory Party machine. We'd always known BoJo would let us down, only we didn't know how.
"And today in Geneva as our ambassador Julian Braithwaite moves seats in the WTO and takes back control of our tariff schedules, an event in itself that deserves itself to be immortalised in oil - this country is leaving its chrysalis.
We are re-emerging after decades of hibernation as a campaigner for global free trade.
And frankly it is not a moment too soon because the argument for this fundamental liberty is now not being made.
We in the global community are in danger of forgetting the key insight of those great Scottish thinkers, the invisible hand of Adam Smith, and of course David Ricardo’s more subtle but indispensable principle of comparative advantage, which teaches that if countries learn to specialise and exchange then overall wealth will increase and productivity will increase, leading Cobden to conclude that free trade is God’s diplomacy – the only certain way of uniting people in the bonds of peace since the more freely goods cross borders the less likely it is that troops will ever cross borders.
And since these notions were born here in this country, it has been free trade that has done more than any other single economic idea to raise billions out of poverty and incredibly fast."
Great speech. If only Covid hadn't struck the West later that month.
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020
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