Douglas Carswell's Blog

The Great Repeal Squib?

Remember how there was going to be a Great Repeal Bill?  A law to cut all that red tape in one swoop, scrapping reams of regulation etc.

The idea - first written up in The Plan - was one of a number of shiny, new ideas picked up by the ad men and the magpies.  Yet, just as with open primaries, or recall, or localism, the magpies have not always got their heads round the detail. 

Perhaps, when it comes to making policy, the urgent keeps on squeezing out the important? 

Despite warnings that the Great Repeal Bill needed to be run as a genuine wiki if it was to work, it has been run as another online government consultation.  With predictable results.

As Philip Johnston points out it today's Telegraph, the husk of the idea that remains is a rump of a Bill.  It repeals little and is hardly great. 

Back in the early 1970s, another centre right party came to office. Yet their radical ideas to decentralise economic power (remember Selsdon?) stumbled on the implementation - and they ended up achieving the opposite.  Today, the government needs to make sure its radical ideas to decentralise control over politics and public services actually happen. 

For all the talk of boldness, on the deficit, on education and health, on deregulation, real reform has yet to match the rhetoric.

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