A couple of years ago, the Free Market Road Show was touring European capitals, with prominent classical liberal economists making the case for free enterprise. Deirdre McCloskey was one of them. In Vienna, after a speech on the role of the entrepreneur, an enthusiastic journalist told her: ‘I loved your talks, and love the idea of entrepreneurs having the liberty to have a go. But… in Austria you have to understand that we have a problem. There is no government program for training entrepreneurs.’ As McCloskey notes about herself and the other economists on stage, ‘we merely sank back into our seats in despair’. I suspect she would react much the same way to Angela Rayner’s latest proposal to revive Britain’s nightlife.
The former deputy prime minister has suggested to Keir Starmer to appoint a ‘night-time economy minister’ to support the industry and recognise its value. What would this entail? She describes it as creating a new ministerial role ‘with responsibility for the night-time economy to champion the sector inside Government and ensure that the voices of small and medium businesses are heard loud and clear’.
The difficulty with establishing a new government body to ‘save’ nightlife is that it misdiagnoses the problem. Nightlife in Britain is not declining because there is too little government; it is declining because there is too much. Another ministry would not remove the burdens weighing on the sector, it would add to them.
This way of thinking is not limited to nightlife. It reflects a broader habit in British politics: when faced with a problem, create a new ministry, a new minister, or a new quango, often to manage difficulties generated by the state in the first place. Why not a Ministry of Capital Flight, a Minister for Declining Growth or a Department for Graduate Underemployment? The answer is obvious: the existing machinery of government already has the ability and the tools to address such issues. The creation of new bodies is less about administrative necessity and more about political theatre: the image of an activist government that is constantly intervening. But you do not solve problems created by an overextended state by extending it further.
Britain’s nightlife is under strain because of rising business rates, high VAT, increases in the minimum wage and layers of regulation and licensing requirements. These pressures are not the result of government inaction; they are the result of government hyperactivity.
That may sound counterintuitive, but the economic logic is straightforward. Consider the United Nations and its sprawling list of development goals. Some of their development plans have more than 50 objectives. When there are dozens of objectives, responsibility becomes diffuse. If target 17 or 45 is missed, who is accountable? When authority is everywhere, it is nowhere. The same principle applies to the state: the more the state attempts to micromanage every corner of economic life, the more responsibility evaporates. Small government should not be confused with weak government, nor big government with strong government. Often the reverse is true.
If we want to revive nightlife, history offers a better guide than bureaucracy. The flourishing of London’s nightlife in the early 20th century was not a state-led initiative. We owe much of it to Kate Meyrick, the so-called ‘Night Club Queen’. An Irish entrepreneur, she entered the business to pay for her daughters’ education and went on to build a clubland empire. Beginning with a venue in Leicester Square and expanding into Soho, her establishments became synonymous with the glamour and energy of post-war London in the 1920s.
The Home Secretary at the time, William Joynson-Hicks, was hostile to the nightclub scene. He ordered raids on dozens of venues and shut many down for licensing breaches. Meyrick’s clubs survived for a time – thanks to bribes paid to members of the Soho vice squad – but when this came to light, she was sentenced to 15 months’ hard labour.
The night-time economy was built by entrepreneurs who saw opportunity, not by bureaucrats. They were not waiting for a government champion; they were responding to demand, experimenting and taking risks, as entrepreneurs do without watching a government course on entrepreneurship.
If they had needed guidance, they might have echoed the words of Marquis d’Argenson: ‘Laissez-faire et laissez-passer, le monde va de lui même!’ ‘Let it be and let goods pass; the world goes by itself.’
The instinct to design from the top down where ‘the world goes’ takes different forms in different eras. Once it was restrictive alcohol licensing; today it is the creation of a new ministerial post. But the underlying mindset is the same. If Britain wants a vibrant nightlife again, it does not need a new minister. It needs the confidence to let entrepreneurs get on with it.
