Bill Black: New Labour Leaders Want to Go Back to Blair’s Policies That Blew Up the UK

From Naked Capitalism:

Yves here. Get yourself a cup of coffee. This is a meaty, meaning lengthy but rewarding post. Black focuses on a seminal Tony Blair speech to show how Labor sold radical deregulation, with its now all too well known disastrous results. But Black’s close reading of that speech is also instructive in showing the rhetorical sleight of hand Blair used to legitimate bad policy. That type of dissimulation is why these failed prescriptions keep being revived successfully, with little to no change in substance and messaging.
Given the media effort and the push by the Red Tories to lionize former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair I thought it was a good idea to explain just how destructive his war on financial regulation, supervision, enforcement, and prosecutions was. Blair most famously made public his war on regulation and his embrace of “winning” the regulatory race to the bottom in his May 26, 2005 speech on “Risk and the State.” In a classic example of “be careful what you ask for; for you may receive it,” he called on his Nation to embrace greater risk. He claimed that the public’s excessive aversion to risk produced a regulatory nightmare: “The result is a plethora of rules, guidelines, responses to ‘scandals’ of one nature or another that ends up having utterly perverse consequences.” Blair endorsed the Chicago School (and Tory) analysis of the folly of regulation – claiming that it characteristically produces “utterly perverse consequences.”
Blair then admitted at the beginning of his speech that the existing regulatory system had produced exceptional benefits for the public rather than “utterly perverse consequences.” He admitted that absent regulation the harm to the public would have been extreme.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/bill-black-new-labour-leaders-want-to-go-back-to-blairs-policies-that-blew-up-the-uk.html