Likewise, Amazon has made next day delivery of just about anything you can think of completely standard, creating vast wealth in the process. It might be worth pausing to consider what the entrepreneurs behind those successes had got right, but instead Labour’s allies just want to destroy them.
Finally, while we may not always commercialise it as well as we should, the UK has always been very good at nurturing new technologies. It looks like we won’t have to worry about that happening with artificial intelligence (AI), however. The Government is planning an AI bill that appears likely to mimic the heavy-handed regulations recently implemented in the European Union.
In fact, there is little need to regulate AI separately, since most of what it might do is already covered by existing laws (if a chatbot finds an insurance policy for you, for example, that is already covered by financial regulators). All it will do is smother a new industry in red tape, preventing entrepreneurial firms from emerging, and ensure that the winners in the industries that intelligent software will open up are all in the United States or China.
Like our neighbours across the Channel, heavy-handed regulation will turn our economy into nothing more than an open-air museum, while the real wealth is created elsewhere. It might keep Sir Keir’s old legal colleagues busy but the rest of the country will end up far poorer.
That is just a small sample. The King’s Speech is also expected to see legislation put in place to create GB Energy, a confused attempt to set up a nationalised energy company. Oddly it will neither generate power, nor sell it, but instead appears designed to pass on to the taxpayer projects that the private sector has already decided are not viable.
More broadly, with 35 bills unveiled for the new parliamentary session, the Speech will set the tone for a hyper-regulating government determined to increase red tape. An economy that is already creaking under the weight of all the rules and obligations that have been loaded on to business will be confronted with a government busily adding even more.
Sure, stability counts for something and with a big majority the Starmer administration will at least be able to govern without the constant threat of internal rebellions and revolts. But this will be the stability of the graveyard.
The UK economy had a certain resilience and, for all its weaknesses, retained a few residual strengths. It had some great family businesses, the labour market was flexible and innovation was, if not exactly encouraged, at least tolerated. This Labour government is, piece by piece, about to crush all that – and we will all be worse off as a result.
