DEREGULATION is as much a watchword for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves as it was for the Tories.

Successive governments’ adherence to the same discredited policies in pursuit of “growth” can seem mystifying.

If Labour rightly points to 14 years of Tory austerity as responsible for deteriorating public services without delivering economic growth, why echo the Tory claim that tightening belts and driving down debt is the way to recovery?

If allowing big corporations to mark their own homework on safety led to atrocities like Grenfell, why does Labour say excessive regulation is the key problem in the building industry?

All becomes clear only when we recognise the class war being waged.

Blindness to conflicting class interest allows Reeves to fawn on asset-management empires like Blackstone and claim she is seeking expert advice on “growth.” Who knows more about wealth creation than the wealthy?

Put class back in and the absurdity of asking Blackstone how to fix the economy becomes clear: why should those doing obscenely well out of the current mess have an interest in sorting it out?

The State of Regulatory Enforcement in the UK report by Good Jobs First is essential reading because it shatters the self-serving myth that Britain is held back by over-regulation.

Rather, recent governments have combined significant relaxation of the rules with systematic underfunding of supervising agencies: the Health & Safety Executive has lost 45 per cent of its budget since 2010, the Environment Agency 50 per cent.

The result is corporate impunity. Companies that break the rules — whether on safety, workers’ rights, pollution or anything else — are unlikely to be caught.

When they are — and the privatised water sector is one of the few where fines have risen in 2024-25 — the nature of corporate investment incentivises continued rule-breaking. This year we’ve seen international creditors threaten to collapse Thames Water if their money is used to pay fines it received for breaking the law.

Good Jobs First has exposed how prevalent non-enforcement of the rules is across the entire economy.

Government hostility to regulation also deters updating it to reflect a changing society: figures on workplace deaths do not include road deaths, though delivery riders are being killed in collisions and assaults; the Care Quality Commission’s report on social care doesn’t mention the impact of private-sector profiteering, though “the largest UK care companies were using financial engineering techniques such as high interest payments and rents paid to related companies, indicative of hidden profit extraction and tax avoidance,” the Centre for Health and Public Interest found. The result? Locking in “high costs for service users and local authorities.”

With a handful of exceptions — the Welsh government is praised for banning profiteering from children’s care — this corporate free-for-all is not being addressed.

Indeed Starmer and Reeves are making it worse, instructing regulators themselves to explain how they will encourage “economic growth,” muddying the remit of the very bodies supposed to police rule-breaking.

We cannot shift the balance of power back towards workers and citizens, rather than bosses and corporations, if the arms of state tasked with enforcing the rules are atrophied to the point of impotence (a sharp contrast to the ever-greater repressive powers granted the police over protest rights).

Starmer’s time in Downing Street may be short: would-be PMs from the Labour benches are already setting up their campaign teams.

Any hoping for labour movement support should denounce the trickle-down myth that allowing the rich maximum freedom to enrich themselves will deliver “growth,” or indeed any societal benefits at all.

Unrestricted corporate profiteering is making Britain an ever dirtier, more dangerous and more expensive place to live.

Significant expansion of public ownership and investment in regulatory agencies to give them the means to punish bad actors is the only solution: it requires a radical change of direction from the next PM.