Eight years. In the time it takes for a moderately intelligent species to colonize a lunar outpost or for a particularly stubborn case of gout to clear, the British government has managed to achieve the legislative equivalent of a wet fart regarding the Carillion disaster. For those of you with the attention spans of a goldfish on amphetamines, Carillion was that 2018 corporate implosion that reminded the world that 'auditing' is not just a cure for insomnia, but actually the only thing preventing the global economy from being three children in a trench coat pretending to be a bank. It was a systemic failure of such colossal proportions that even the most jaded observers thought, 'Surely, even these clowns will fix this.' We were, as usual, wrong.

The 'long-awaited' audit reform bill is finally here, and by 'here,' I mean it has been tossed into the incinerator in favor of a much more comfortable posture of limp-wristed deregulation. The government’s retreat from reforming the audit market is not merely a policy shift; it is a masterclass in the art of the cynical climbdown. Ministers have abandoned their promises with the grace of a disgraced CEO fleeing a burning boardroom. Why? Because of 'growth.' That magical, incantatory word that politicians use when they want to explain why they are allowing massive corporations to continue cooking the books with the impunity of a bored teenager playing SimCity.

Blair McDougall, the Minister for Small Business—a title that suggests he spends his days helping artisanal jam makers but actually involves acting as a human shield for the FTSE 100—formally informed the business select committee that these reforms are simply too expensive. Apparently, the cost of ensuring that a billion-pound company isn’t secretly a hollowed-out husk is a burden our poor, struggling corporate overlords just cannot bear. He had the audacity to suggest that the 'need for major reform is less pressing than it was.' Truly, the logic of a man who stops fixing the hole in his roof because it hasn’t rained for twenty minutes. The memory of Carillion’s collapse—the lost pensions, the stalled hospital constructions, the thousands of jobs vaporized—has been conveniently filed under 'Things We No Longer Care About Because It Interferes With Our Quarterly Projections.'

This is the quintessential British political cycle: a catastrophe occurs, everyone expresses 'grave concern,' a series of expensive reports are commissioned to state the bleeding obvious, and then everyone waits for the public to get distracted by the latest culture war or a royal baby so they can quietly bury the solutions. The 'pro-growth' refrain is the ultimate intellectual shortcut. It suggests that any regulation designed to prevent fraud is somehow an anchor on the economy, rather than the very thing that keeps the ship from hitting an iceberg. If your 'growth' is predicated on the ability to hide liabilities and inflate assets, you aren't growing an economy; you’re growing a tumor.

Let’s look at the players in this tragicomedy. On the Right, we have the ideological zealots who believe that if you just let the Big Four accounting firms—those high-priced cartels of ledger-fudging—police themselves, everything will be fine. It’s the classic fox-guarding-the-henhouse strategy, except the fox is wearing a bespoke suit and charging the chickens a consulting fee. On the Left, we see the usual performative outrage, a chorus of tut-tutting from people who, if given the chance, would likely drown the reforms in a different kind of bureaucratic red tape that benefits their own flavor of cronyism. Neither side has the spine to actually challenge the audit monopoly because they all hope to land a lucrative non-exec directorship at one of these very firms once they’re booted out of office by an exhausted electorate.

McDougall’s claim that there is 'not enough parliamentary time' is the most insulting part of this charade. There is always time for the trivial, the symbolic, and the self-serving. There is time to debate the aesthetics of passports or to launch another redundant inquiry into why the public hates them, but there isn't time to ensure the financial integrity of the nation’s largest employers? It is a pathetic excuse from a government that has clearly decided that the risk of another Carillion-style meltdown is a price they are willing to let you pay.

We are now back to the status quo, which is to say, we are waiting for the next inevitable collapse. When it happens—and it will—the same ministers will stand at the same dispatch boxes with the same expressions of practiced shock, promising once again that they will 'learn the lessons.' They won’t. They’ve already shown us that the only lesson they’ve learned is that if you wait long enough, the screams of the victims fade into a manageable background hum. This isn’t a retreat from reform; it’s a surrender to the inevitable decay of a system that is too lazy to save itself. Enjoy the 'growth' while it lasts; just don’t bother looking at the numbers. They’re probably made up anyway.