The Cabinet is, finally, getting around to dealing with the Retail Business Bill but this will now go off to the Council of State for further scrutiny – which will mean another six months of delay. What is going on?
The bill itself is shamelessly populist in the worst way – it aims to prevent the spread of the large retail multiples in a world in which it is impossible to buck the globalizing market – that is after all why sad little Surayud had to give up military rule and his hard-earned salaries – it is just too complicated for a soldier of little brain to manage. When the bill was conceived, it was (so far as I can tell) aimed at raising some quasi-nationalist pro-mom and pop style retail shops across the Kingdom. It betrays the longstanding anti-business bias of the Thai right and establishment (which would take a long time to detail – perhaps another time).
Subsequently, the government has found itself having to do something with a bill that has already served its principal purpose as a form of pints-scoring propaganda and which will prove almost impossible to put into practice because of the response of international retailers (who are now substantial employers of Thai workers). As a result, the government has dragged its feet as much as possible and will find ways to neutralize what little effectiveness the bill might have had – presumably there will need, sometime, to deal with it as a piece of legislation but that has, as ever, been postponed for the future with, presumably, the vague hope that something will turn up (there might, after all, well be a new government in place by that time and so it will be an SEP*).
* Someone else’s problem.
