I am increasingly coming round to the view that regulation is probably the biggest obstacle to business growth. In this regard, I want to congratulate Bernard Ginns for his perceptive and thoughtful comments in Tuesday’s Yorkshire Post. He makes the point that if you want people to behave like adults, you have to treat them as such and quotes Sir Nigel Knowles of DLA Piper as saying that “regulation is what you must do, Best practice is what you should do. You can’t regulate trust into existence and you can’t legislate to make people trustworthy.”
The problem is that rules are often no more than an invitation to find a way round them. The more complex the rules, the more work there is for clever consultants. The classic example is tax: The higher the tax rate, the lower the tax yield. It is not a coincidence that the fastest-growing economies are those with the least amount of regulation – including employment legislation.
Obviously, no-one in their right mind wants the world of trade and industry to degenerate into some anarchic free-for-all where the winners are those who are most ruthless. Nor should we revert to a Dickensian system where employees are callously exploited.
I fear it is probably too late, but it would be wonderful if we could recreate an environment where peer pressure was sufficient to ensure that business was conducted fairly and honestly. National organisations such as the CBI and Institute of Directors and local ones such as chambers of commerce or the Cutlers Company should perhaps be looking for ways to develop a culture of integrity. Just think of the millions of pounds that could be saved by scrapping all the regulatory bodies.

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first send mad. So predicted some ancient Roman sage, who obviously understood the mentality of the rulers of the Roman Emprire and its successor, the European Union.

I’m sorry to bang on about the Eurozone, but the extraordinary efforts of the member countries to bail out Greece in order to protect their precious project beggar belief. Full marks to those Slovak politicians who last night dared to point to the emperor’s lack of clothes, but it still seems likely that their victory will be overturned by the end of the week in a new vote.

Let’s just look at the facts: Greece is bust and the team from the IMF and European Central Bank auditing Athens’ progress in implementing the conditions of the last bail-out deal agree that not enough has been done. So what happens? the powers that be decide to let them have a few more million euros anyway.

In the real world, you don’t solve your debts problem by borrowing more money. So why should we think that this works for governments? We now have a totally bonkers situation where the rich northern European countries are pouring umpteen billions of taxpayers’ euros into a bottomless pit to maintain the illusion that the Eurozone works.

All these shenanigans might be quite entertaining if their ramifications were not so serious. The costs of sticking bandaids over the gaping fizzures in the grandiose European edifice are likely to tip the whole continent back into recession. Money spent bailing out banks or bankrupt economies cannot be spent on financing businesses. And recession in the EU, which is the UK’s biggest market, will inevitably adversely affect British companies.

So I’m afraid it’s going to be a while longer before we see what Norman Lamont used to call the green shoots of recovery.