PM vows to channel Margaret Thatcher with key moves
Keir Starmer has vowed to “clear out the regulatory weeds” to encourage growth – with Rachel Reeves saying Britain has been “held back” and “accepted stagnation” in a major economic speech.
The Chancellor is due to set out policies to encourage economic growth, and hail the region around Oxford and Cambridge as having “the potential to be Europe’s Silicon Valley”.
Writing in The Times, the PM lashed out at the “morass of regulation that effectively bans billions of pounds” of investment, describing “thickets of red tape” that have “spread through the British economy like Japanese knotweed”.
He said ministers will “kick down the barriers to building, clear out the regulatory weeds and allow a new era of British growth to bloom”.
The Prime Minister later added: “A change in the economic weather can only ever come from a supply-side expansion of the nation’s productive power.
“In the 1980s, the Thatcher government deregulated finance capital. In the New Labour era, globalisation increased the opportunities for trade. This is our equivalent.”