RED TAPE CHALLENGE TO ENVIRONMENT - AND EQUALITY

In today's edition of The Guardian, George Monbiot writes about the impact and implications of the Coalition placing environmental legislation on its Red Tape Challenge website. I've mentioned the Red Tape Challenge before in this blog - the shock of finding the Equality Act 2010 there, the barely controlled panic I heard in the voice of practitioners who thought that the government was wasting no time in disposing of what had been so hard won. What struck me about the section of Monbiot's article that I've reproduced below is how "environment" can fairly be replaced by "equality" and the piece not only still makes sense, but still works, for another discipline. Here's an extract from George Monbiot's piece:

But this is just the beginning of the coalition's assault on the environment. The government's Red Tape Challenge presents, on paper at last, the widest-ranging threat to environmental protection since the enclosure acts. suddenly it is asking whether environmental legislation - yes, all of it - should be "scrapped altogether". Listed as negotiable are [...] all the regulations, grand and petty, that protect us from other people's greed and selfishness.

It's a breathtaking, astonishing initiative, and the little protest it has generated testifies how punchdrunk this country has become as the government pummels every protection our forebears worked so hard to win, everything that defends us from a feral, unregulated market.

The point of the Red Tape challenge is not to scrap all this legislation but to shake the bolts looser. The government is in the process of resetting the political boundaries so that the outrageous propositions it makes in future seem unexceptional.