Daily Inspiration Quote by John Hutton

“Road testing” is doing a lot of political work here. John Hutton borrows the language of engineers and car ads to smuggle in a demand for humility: policies should be treated like prototypes, not proclamations. In EU speak, regulation is often framed as a moral instrument (protect consumers, tame markets, standardize rights). Hutton drags it back to the shop floor and the balance sheet. If you wouldn’t ship a vehicle without stress tests, why would you ship rules without proving they won’t stall growth, choke competition, or drown smaller firms in compliance?

The intent is technocratic but pointed. He’s not arguing against regulation; he’s arguing against regulation-by-instinct. “Must become second nature” is the tell: impact assessment shouldn’t be an occasional concession to business lobbies, but a reflex embedded in EU machinery. The subtext is a critique of Brussels’ tendency to prize harmonization and precaution even when implementation is uneven across member states and industries. It’s also a shot across the bow at symbolic lawmaking: rules that look decisive on paper but create perverse incentives or offload costs onto the least resilient companies.

Contextually, this line sits comfortably in the post-2008, post-Brexit era of regulatory anxiety, when “red tape” became shorthand for democratic distance and economic sluggishness. For an educator, the phrasing is telling: it’s a pedagogy of governance. Test, gather evidence, iterate. The message isn’t “deregulate,” it’s “learn faster than your policy errors.”