Shadow Chancellor Vows To Abolish Red Tape Itself, Including The Colour Red And All Known Tape

The Conservative Party has unveiled what it describes as the most ambitious deregulation project in a generation, a plan so sweeping that by Sunday evening it had accidentally abolished Tuesday.

Speaking on day two of conference in Birmingham, shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith told delegates that Britain had become a nation unable to build anything, and that the fault lay with rules, forms, and in his words "the general national habit of asking first". A party official later confirmed that under the new approach, planning permission would be granted retrospectively, by vibe, and in some cases by a man walking past and nodding.

The centrepiece is the removal of red tape, which Griffith's team has interpreted with unusual literalism. Conference staff spent Sunday afternoon removing all tape from the venue, including the tape holding up the lectern, which collapsed twice during the announcement to warm applause from the hall, who assumed it was a visual metaphor and were correct.

"We looked at the barriers to growth and we found that most of them were, technically, barriers," said a shadow Treasury adviser, speaking on the fringe beside a table of lukewarm pastries. "Bollards. Cones. Those little plastic chains outside car parks. All of it gone. If a bollard wants to be in this country it can apply like everybody else."

The party says the reforms could cut the cost of a new home by a figure it described as "up to and including a number", a saving it attributes to no longer requiring houses to have walls on every side. Officials stressed that three-walled homes remain entirely optional and that the fourth wall will be available on the open market, where competition will drive prices down.

Asked how the savings had been calculated, a spokesman said the modelling had been carried out by somebody very good at spreadsheets who has since gone to lunch. Pressed on when he would return, the spokesman said deregulation had removed the requirement for lunch to end.

On infrastructure, Griffith pledged to get fully behind a third runway at Heathrow, a fourth runway, and what he called "a reservoir, somewhere, soon, you'll know it when you see it". He added that Britain used to be a country that built things, citing the Industrial Revolution, the railways, and a shed his uncle put up in 1987 without telling anyone.

The escalation came shortly after six, when Griffith announced that the deregulatory agenda would be extended to the weather, which he described as "an unelected body making decisions about British lives with no accountability whatsoever". Under the plan, rain would be required to submit a business case, and fog would be subject to a single consolidated levy.

Opponents were unimpressed. One Westminster figure described the package as fantasy economics, while another suggested the Conservatives were simply reading out somebody else's leaflet in a louder voice. A third said the numbers did not add up, which the party confirmed was deliberate, since arithmetic is itself a form of regulation and will be reviewed in the first hundred days.

The Herald understands that by Sunday night conference organisers had quietly reinstated some of the tape, on the grounds that the lectern had begun to list alarmingly and nobody wanted to be the person who deregulated the shadow chancellor onto the floor. Asked about this, an official said the tape had not returned, it had merely been invited back as a stakeholder.