John Redwood has been giving some serious thought to which laws might be swept away by our new government.

His list is long – and well worth consideration.

I just fear that until somehow a new government can get to grips with the precautionary principle and the related idea of Worst-Case Thinking, even throwing out this pile of bureaucratic awfulness may make little real difference to the way government operates – and expands its physical and psychological reach.

It’s all part of a greater drama. The scene is set in Europe as in the USA for the Mother of All Culture Wars: Free Enterprise v Government Control.

Which, perhaps, is all about how best to deal with complexity:

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis. Which is why, despite all the populist backlash and all the promises from Washington, this isn’t the end of the “too big to fail” era. It’s the beginning.

Does the new UK government’s first modest steps towards reducing state-imposed complexity offer the planet a smidgeon of hope?