As the country fell silent yesterday for the Grenfell Tower victims, David Davis was opening negotiations to take the UK out of the EU. How did it come to this great kamikaze mission? What fired up a small and eccentric group of rightwing extremists to hammer away over the decades until they dragged us away from our closest neighbours?

With Grenfell Tower, we’ve seen what ‘ripping up red tape’ really looks like | George Monbiot Read more

One word captures their intent – and it concerns the Grenfell residents: “deregulation”. These Brexiteers are driven by a kind of fever to tear down restrictions, regulations, laws and constraints on business to let free enterprise run wild. That’s what they mean by “take back control”, though it’s not how they explained their shrink-the-state passion to referendum voters.

We don’t yet know if building regulations were weakened or disregarded at Grenfell Tower, or if rules were obeyed but wholly inadequate. We do know that coroners and experts calling for tougher safeguards were simply ignored by those who should have listened. With residents of another 4,000 tower blocks needing urgent reassurance, whatever national appetite for deregulation and risk there might have been has gone.

The Brexiteers’ ogre is the monstrous regiment of EU regulations and the abominable army of homegrown health-and-safety guardians whose red tape is deemed to hold back our buccaneering business spirit. “Elf’n’safety” officers (with a sneer) became the butt of Tory dinner party jokes about the nanny state, and a staple of Tory press myths about the EU. No, conkers and hanging baskets were never banned. Boris Johnson was minced before the Treasury select committee for his fictitious ban on recycled tea bags, children blowing up balloons or the correct weight of coffins.

The Thatcherites began it, but Labour, craving business respectability, had its own Better Regulation Taskforce, though it was David Cameron who pledged to “kill off the safety culture for good” with another “bonfire of red tape”. Since 2010 a third of environmental health officers have gone, so food outlets are checked far less often, air quality stations are closed down, landfill sites are less protected. The health and safety inspectorate is taking a 46% cut and has been banned, on principle, from “proactive” inspections in most workplaces: staff have to wait for a complaint – when it may be too late. Inspectors are down by 25%, the number of workplace inspections cut back by 70%.

In the construction industry inspection rates are falling fast. Just in the year 2015/16, in the south-east where the skyline is thick with cranes, inspections fell by 26%. A Battersea action group managed to get new safety legislation after the 2006 collapse of a tower crane killed the operator and a member of the public. Good result? That was abolished in Cameron’s deregulation law, where the impact of a regulation is judged only by its cost to business, not to people.

When the Daily Telegraph launched its Cut EU Red Tape campaign on the day Theresa May triggered article 50, Johnson promised that Brexit would “get rid of some of the burdensome regulation that has accreted over the last 44 years”. Iain Duncan Smith pledged to “whittle away” the regulation “burden” with its “intrusions into daily life of citizens”. Lord Lawson called for a “massive” regulatory cull: “We must lose no time.” Jacob Rees-Mogg said regulations that are “good enough for India” would be good enough for us, once EU regulations were gone.

May’s promise to protect EU working rights post-Brexit looks feeble as the full complexity of passporting over legislation becomes apparent: it will inevitably allow for amendment, and the deregulation fanatics are lying in wait. This is a prime goal: Johnson called for the scrapping of the social chapter because “employment regulation is now back-breaking”. Priti Patel, the international development secretary, told the Institute of Directors: “If we could just halve the EU social and employment legislation we could deliver a £4.3bn boost to the economy.” One example she offered was cutting working-time protection for self-employed lorry drivers: how safe is letting them work over 48 hours? The government has already manoeuvred the self-employed out of EU working regulations, including those in the construction industry: that includes the battalions in bogus self-employment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Much must change in the aftermath of the Grenfell disaster. Let the mania for deregulation be part of that.’ Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

Our government instigated the one-in-two-out mantra, the nonsensical rule that every new regulation must be met with the abolition of two others, randomly. The history of our EU membership has been to act as a drag anchor on working rights, safety and environmental protection. The EU27 will progress without us. But if we have any hope of access to EU trade, they will demand a level playing field where we abide by their new regulations – though this time with no say. (They may progress faster without our baleful influence.)

Government is made of red tape. It is the very stuff of civilisation. Literally, it is the ribbon that binds the legal documents drawn up by our democratically elected representatives. Red tape is what binds us together too, stops some abusing others, stops employers maltreating employees or polluting the environment, prevents rogue business undercutting good business, keeps us safe, guarantees the food we eat, the medicines we take and the professional standards of lawyers, doctors or engineers that we rely on for life itself. An inadequate safety net of red tape killed the Grenfell victims.

As in all aspects of the working of the state, it takes eternal vigilance to stop officious or inept regulation: human devices are prone to human fallibility. But red tape is the history of progress, from factory acts keeping children out of mills, mines and chimneys, to the limiting of working hours, and the granting of holidays, sick pay and parental leave. Once Brexit is done, the Brexiteers will put social chapter rights – and all our protections – under intense fire

Those pied pipers who set out to seduce the country out of the EU are libertarian anarchists, for whom “freedom” and “taking back control” mean shrinking the state to a skeleton. They want risk privatised: caveat emptor, you will be on your own in a dog-eats-dog world where “personal responsibility” replaces collective safeguarding. That’s not the society many voted for in the referendum – but it’s the one these Brexit extremists mean to take us to. Much must change in the aftermath of the Grenfell disaster. Let the mania for deregulation be part of that.