Many Tory Types are suspicious of government action regardless of which party is in power- They don't all vote Tory to put a Cameron or May in power many are satisfied just to keep Labour out. When I voted leave I thought that Parliament being tied up with Brexit for a decade or so and thus leaving other stuff well alone was a feature not a bug, and I haven't seen anything to change that opinion.

There are bosses and there are bosses. On the one hand there are the sort of rent seeking parasites that infest the management of large companies and public sector at the top levels, people who play with other peoples money and expect to be treated like entrepreneurs, often providing little or no value and recieving huge rewards for things that are outside of their control. From my own point of view as the boss/owner of a long running SME if the company goes bust my employees would obviously lose there jobs, hopefully, (being a very skilled and useful lot) they would be able to get new ones without too much trouble. They would obviously walk way from the firm without the debts of the firm following them. I'm not trying to trivialise how difficult unemployment is and can be (I've been there myself) but the risks for an owner are often as high or higher. I would not get redundancy and even if I was able to get another job immediately would still likely go bankrupt and lose my house, savings and everything I have worked for for 20 plus years. I appreciate that's not the same for everyone but it certainly sharpens the wits when it comes to taking risks with the future of the firm.

This seems a bit confusing, on the one hand you suggest that "the question of whether private sector firms are well or badly managed cannot be left to the market," which would seem to suggest that you require more regulation of firms in order to correct this. Surely however this leads to both an increase in "common failures" as firms homogenise their approach to deal with the regualtory framework and an increase in "market blockage" as regualtion tends to be one of the largest barriers to entry to new entrants?

I'd agree that the only way to avoid crony capitilism is to avoid regulation, but would also suggest that it could be a matter of degree, the less scope there is for regulation in a society the less scope there is for corruption/cronyism- if free people are free to trade and interact with each other on their own terms, without the need for permission from the state or a regulator then there is no scope for corruption as their is no one to bribe. As P J O Rouke said "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." If as seems to be the case in this country at the moment the regulator/politicians have all the say as to how a firm can do buisiness or even whether or not a firm can operate in a given market, then the best way to maximise profits is often to run the firm to please the regulator or try to "buy" the politician to ensure that your firm has a competative advantage/increase barriers of entry into your industry to avoid competition from upstart new companies. Regulation does not tend to be anti established companies it's biggest affects are on new entrants to a market place. If there were less regulation it's likley that the incnentive would still be to maximise profits, but the best means of doing this would be to please the customer not the regulator.