Labour’s narrative on regulation is confused - it’s time to bulldoze their deregulatory rhetoric
Labour is once again under fire for their failure to set out a clear vision for Britain, and their muddled rhetoric on regulation won’t be helping
February has been an uncomfortable month for Labour. Once again, accusations of anti-semitism plague the Party, threatening to derail their by-election hopes last Thursday. Hopes which already seemed fragile after the party announced the final nail in the coffin of their £28bn green pledge.
Labour did, of course, manage to weather the storm with two by-election victories, but the decision to water down their flagship policy has invited a barrage of criticism. With accusations raging against the Party’s supposed inability to commit to a clear vision for Britain, we decided to take a closer look at Labour’s messaging on regulation to see just how joined up their thinking is.
We looked at sixteen of Labour’s key speeches and policy documents over the last eight months, bookended by two keynote speeches from senior Labour figures. We started with Rachel Reeves’ ‘Securonomics’ address in May 2023 and finished with Keir Starmer’s speech at Labour’s Business Conference at the start of this month.
Using these documents we created a corpus of 76,000 words that represent the main policy positions and messaging agenda Labour is looking to campaign on. The material was then analysed with the help of Claude.AI - an AI tool that helped us determine how often certain words were being used as well as the sentiments behind their use. As suspected, our analysis confirmed an inherent tension in Labour's rhetoric on regulation.
A mixed narrative on regulation
We found that Labour had used the terms ‘regulation’,’regulators’ or ‘regulatory’ a total of 158 times. We then discovered that 'protections’ was mentioned 35 times, ‘security’ 52 times, ‘enforcement’ 21 times, ‘level the playing field’ 7 times, and ‘certainty’ 12 times. It was in areas like anti-corruption, workers rights and environmental policy that these sentiments were most commonly expressed, with Labour setting out unambiguous support for greater oversight.
"We need to set ambitious targets to cut sewage outflows and clean up our rivers, streams, and seas. [We need to] ensure regulators can take on these new roles and tackle polluters."
National Policy Forum (October 2023)
“Evidence suggests the UK’s market-based everyday economy is less productive than our international peers [...]The UK’s weak labour market regulation and enforcement has contributed to this.”
Labour’s Industrial Strategy (September 2023)
But in areas such as planning and business innovation, the language being used was often plainly deregulatory. Members of the shadow cabinet were found to have repeatedly employed negative tropes such as ‘red tape’ (mentioned 9 times) and ‘burden’ (8 times), and had called for sweeping reforms to industry by ‘removing barriers’ (6 times).
"Whether it’s regulatory backlogs or red tape in the funding system, under the Tories our businesses and innovators face dither and delay."
Peter Kyle MP, Shadow Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary (October 2023)
"Only Labour will bulldoze through planning red tape and get Britain building."
Sir Keir Starmer, Leader of the Opposition (January 2024)
It is clear that Labour’s thinking on regulation and the language they are using is confused at best, and in many cases is fairly problematic. With the general election drawing nearer, a problem looms.
In their bid to sound muscular, decisive and electable, the Labour Party may well continue to talk about ‘slashing regulations’ and ‘bulldozing through red tape’. Rachel Reeves has made it patently clear that in light of the country’s poor public finances, she intends to stick to a tight set of fiscal rules. In this context, stripping back key protections may continue to be offered up as a cost effective means of jumpstarting the economy at a time when Labour is looking to minimise big public spending commitments.
But this would be a mistake. Because despite all the efforts of Liz Truss’ PopCons to brand Britain as a nation of loony libertarians, the public is not convinced. After nearly a decade and a half of slashed budgets, threadbare public services and seemingly unending national crises, the public is fundamentally not interested in a stand aside state. As Rafael Behr recently put it, ‘in times of crisis and insecurity, the state is a reassuring presence, not a sinister intrusion’, and at present, this holds truer than ever for voters.
Labour will undoubtedly have been aware of this when crafting their ‘Securonomics’ framework. They know that voters are yearning for a government that has their back and is willing to intervene to fix social and environmental crises - not a party pulling pages from the Trussite playbook. Securonomics has not yet found its way onto the scrap heap, but somewhere along the line Labour has been seduced by tired old deregulatory tropes, forgetting that any election campaign that puts strong protections at its heart would be a political asset.
A politics of protection is not only electorally popular though, it's economically pragmatic. Prevention is always better than cure, and empowering our regulators to clamp down on harm would be far more cost effective for a cash strapped government than shelling out the billions needed to fix crises once they’ve materialised.
We’re beginning to see this logic play out in Westminster. Sunak’s smoking ban and Labour’s Child Health Action Plan, which would prevent junk food from being advertised before 9pm, are both testament to a willingness to offer radical interventions to manage public health. But it seems that Labour needs reminding that this approach can and must be applied elsewhere.
Articulating a shared narrative
Labour’s mixed messaging on regulations is further confirmation that we face a major challenge as a movement to set out an alternative to the deregulation narrative. The advocates of deregulation, whether that’s politicians, think tanks or journalists, are enviably consistent in framing regulation as something unnecessary, burdensome and bureaucratic. Their message is persistent and the effect on our political discourse is as widespread as it is pernicious.
Pushing back against this means articulating a counter-narrative that is equally clear, consistent and joined up. We need to be talking about regulations with a shared voice, as a network of social and environmental protections that need to be bolstered, not something that should be chipped away at in the coming years.
We’re working on a messaging guide that will help pro-protections advocates talk about regulation with more of a collective voice. Keep your eye out for future updates where we’ll be talking more about the resource and how we can use it in the run up to the election.
And come and join our supporter event on the 19th of March where we’ll be discussing how we can make our case most effectively, and where the greatest opportunities for impact lie in the run up to the election.