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Government Regulation

No, I certainly do not accept the latter part of the right hon. Gentleman’s question. I accept that there are lessons that this country should learn from other systems and regulatory approaches. Of course, we are willing to learn, but I want to come to the wider point because, fundamentally, his speech served a useful purpose in highlighting our different approaches to this issue. I want to explore those differences in a second, if I can get on to them. The right hon. Gentleman’s central argument related to the health of the British economy and its international competitiveness under this Labour Government. Anyone listening to his remarks would have been left with the impression that our economy was in recession, that Britain was an unattractive place to set up a new business and that a vast army of bureaucrats—to use an expression used by the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark)—were out and about strangling enterprise and innovation. But this is 2005, not the 1980s, when millions of people lost their jobs because of Tory boom-and-bust policies. It is not the early 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes because of yet another Tory-inspired recession. Of course, the right hon. Gentleman was a key architect of all those failed policies.