What if Nanny doesn’t know best?

It’s not the nineteenth century any more, Matthew

A few years ago I was on the panel at the Battle of Ideas in London. I can’t remember what the topic was exactly, but it was something like the sugar tax or e-cigarette regulation. Rather than deal with the merits of these policies directly, I noticed that my opponents talked in general terms about the good that government can do, referencing the abolition of slavery and the ban on children going up chimneys.

Given all the regulation of recent decades, I found it telling that they had to go back 200 years to find laws that everyone can agree were jolly good. If I had been presenting the case for anarchism, their arguments might have landed, but since I was making the more modest case that perhaps there might be one or two laws in existence that are unnecessary and illiberal, their approach looked more like a diversionary tactic.

Matthew Parris did the same thing in last week’s Spectator. Thanks to the Royal Mail strike, it only landed on my doormat today, but you can read it here. It is titled ‘Maybe Nanny does know best’. Confusingly, Parris does not use the term ‘nanny state’ in the conventional sense meaning lifestyle paternalism, but as a catch-all term for any government regulation whatsoever.

His target is Liz Truss whom Parris dislikes even more than he disliked Brexit and Boris Johnson. Unless Rory Stewart or Nick Clegg somehow become Prime Minister, I suspect that Parris will be demanding the head of whoever is in charge of the government until his dying day. He is not impressed by Truss’s ‘dash for growth’.

Parris’s argument is that Big Government is the friend of economic growth, not its foe. He confesses that he, like Truss, once held the view that the ‘dead hand of the state’ stifled growth and led to inefficiencies but that he has grown out of all that stuff now and, with two gin-scented tears trickling down the sides of his nose, he welcomes his bureaucratic overlords.

Why? Because, a hundred years ago, the government gave women the vote and allowed them to work.

There was a time not so long ago when a certain group – half our potential workforce – were all but disqualified from contributing to Britain’s GDP. This group were called ‘women’. Women were generally unable to own property, or to play much more than a menial role in business (let alone politics, where they could not vote). So who helped unleash women’s potential, gave them rights in the workplace, stopped employers throttling their potential by restricting them to mindless occupations? Was it free trade? Was it big business? Was it competition? Was it Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’? No. Step forward Nanny. Nanny it was – legislation, the House of Commons, the first world war, the state – who commanded these things, driven in part by the forces of democracy.

The idea that women only started ‘contributing to Britain’s GDP’ - i.e. working for pay - after the First World War is historically illiterate. It may have been true of the upper class and some of the middle classes, but for all other households it was a financial necessity for women to work, whether in agriculture, textiles, domestic service, pubs or whatever. It is true that more men were employed than women, but women were pregnant a lot of the time and had an enormous amount of unpaid work to do. They were certainly never ‘all but disqualified’ from working, except in a few sectors such as the police force.

And who was it who banned women from owning property and voting in the first place? It wasn’t Adam Smith. It was the government, or, as Parris, would have it, the ‘nanny state’. So which nanny state are we supposed to be thankful for - the one that gave women the vote for a hundred years or the one that denied them the vote for hundreds of years?

Nanny had been busy since the 18th century, when in the Papists Act of 1778 she decreed that Catholics should not be excluded from key parts of the economy. She was still busy in the 20th century, starting with the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, and later the 1944 Education Act outlawing the barring of married women from teaching.

Again, who excluded Catholics from key parts of the economy in the first place? Who barred married women from teaching? That’s right, it’s our old friend Big Government, the arsonist that Parris treats like a fireman.

You may have noticed that all of these examples involve people being given more freedom, not less. They barely count as regulations at all. They were liberations. They also took place many years ago, as does his other case study of the benevolent nanny state.

There was a time when instead of investing in technology, machinery and enlightened design, employers took the easy way out to clean Britain’s millions of chimneys. They sent children up them, for niggardly wages because they were children. Many died, most were disabled, damaged or invalided by the experience. Even by the narrowest of economic reckoning, once the human costs were taken into account it was not efficient to use children for this work. As with the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802 and a succession of Factories Acts throughout the 19th century, Nanny had to take the lead.

Very well, but Liz Truss isn’t going to put kids back up the chimneys and the Chimney Sweeps Act was passed in 1834, nearly 200 years ago. How much stolen valour can today’s advocates of greater regulation take from laws passed before Queen Victoria was on the throne?

None of the reforms Parris mentions in his article took place in the second half of the 20th century, let alone in the 21st century, and most of them were liberalising, not prohibitive.

Parris’s whole argument is a pointless strawman. It is beneath a man of his intelligence. It is only a notch above saying ‘I suppose you’d prefer living in Somalia, hur, hur’ to someone who questions whether banning children from playing conkers at school is strictly necessary.

It is extremely unlikely that the nature and quantity of legislation currently in force in Britain is perfectly optimal. There is either too much of it or too little of it. Even if every law serves some useful purpose - also highly unlikely - there remains a trade-off between its intended purpose and other objectives, such as economic growth.

The question of whether deregulation in a particular area would lead to greater economic growth is not answered by the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802 being a nice piece of legislation. The fact that the authors of the Chimney Sweeps Act were on the right side of history does not help us decide whether legal restrictions on the ratio between children and adults in modern nurseries are ideal. The abolition of slavery does not inform our view of whether the Town and Country Planning Act is too restrictive. Legalising abortion has nothing to do with banning two for one pizza deals.

There is a huge range of policy areas where regulation could be improved and where well-meaning legislation has led to unintended consequences. We could have a serious discussion about which regulations are holding the country back but Parris prefers to hark back to the England of Charles Dickens when the government did some good things - mostly by reversing bad things done by the government - and treats it as a mic-dropping argument-winner against anyone who thinks that maybe the government itself might sometimes be the problem.