Politics & Power Quote by John Hutton

The line is engineered to make deregulation sound like housekeeping, not ideology. Hutton wraps a politically charged move - rolling back parts of the regulatory state - in the soothing language of measurement, targets, and expert recommendation. "Better Regulation" does a lot of PR work: it implies the problem isn’t regulation itself, just sloppy regulation, as if the state is merely tightening screws rather than shifting power.

The key rhetorical maneuver is the double definition: "administrative costs - the red tape costs -". By translating bureaucracy into a familiar annoyance, he recruits business owners and the public into an emotional consensus: nobody likes forms, delays, or compliance checklists. That framing quietly narrows what counts as a "cost". The time a company spends documenting safety practices becomes waste; the time workers spend injured because oversight was weakened is not named as a cost at all.

"Accept the recommendations" offloads responsibility onto a task force, a classic technocratic shield. If outcomes disappoint, blame the metrics or the advisors, not the minister. The phrase "targeted reductions" reassures moderates that this isn’t a bonfire of protections, while still signaling to industry that the direction of travel is relief.

Context matters: mid-2000s UK politics was steeped in "modernization" and competitiveness talk, with New Labour eager to look pro-business without admitting to Thatcherite instincts. This sentence is that balancing act in miniature: managerial tone on the surface, distributional consequences underneath.