Angela Rayner would ruin our nightlife

Mani Basharzad has an entertaining and topical CAPX piece on how ludicrous government intervention can be. In this case it's Angela Rayner being typically ludicrous, but the wider problem has become ever more absurd over recent decades.


Angela Rayner would ruin our nightlife once and for all

• Appointing a 'night-time economy minister' will do nothing to stimulate Britain's nightclubs
• The night-time economy was built by entrepreneurs who saw opportunity, not by bureaucrats
• British nightlife is not declining because there's too little government; it's declining because there's too much

A couple of years ago, the Free Market Road Show was touring European capitals, with prominent classical liberal economists making the case for free enterprise. Deirdre McCloskey was one of them. In Vienna, after a speech on the role of the entrepreneur, an enthusiastic journalist told her: ‘I loved your talks, and love the idea of entrepreneurs having the liberty to have a go. But… in Austria you have to understand that we have a problem. There is no government program for training entrepreneurs.’ As McCloskey notes about herself and the other economists on stage, ‘we merely sank back into our seats in despair’. I suspect she would react much the same way to Angela Rayner’s latest proposal to revive Britain’s nightlife.

The whole piece is well worth reading, as it describes a core problem with dimwit political ideas applied to an already failing government machine. Unfortunately, the dimwit vote is not shrinking.  


This way of thinking is not limited to nightlife. It reflects a broader habit in British politics: when faced with a problem, create a new ministry, a new minister, or a new quango, often to manage difficulties generated by the state in the first place. Why not a Ministry of Capital Flight, a Minister for Declining Growth or a Department for Graduate Underemployment? The answer is obvious: the existing machinery of government already has the ability and the tools to address such issues. The creation of new bodies is less about administrative necessity and more about political theatre: the image of an activist government that is constantly intervening. But you do not solve problems created by an overextended state by extending it further.