by Labor called its manifesto “Change”. He campaigned for “change”. But there was no change of direction in the King’s Speech. Quite the opposite. As far as his plan for anything, he was going to continue to transform Britain into a big government, low growth and low energy corporate state.
That direction of travel has been set since at least the Gordon Brown years. Fourteen years of Tory-led government and Brexit may have given us the powers to go down a different path, but they have not been implemented. Instead, we have moved further towards more collectivism and more government control, and nothing we heard from the King or Sir Keir Starmer yesterday changes that.
Indeed, as if to emphasize it, our new Government has adopted several Bills “changed” from its Conservative predecessor, and all bad ones: banning smoking (flagship “Conservative” proposal, remember ); create a football controller; destroying property rights and further destroying the rental market; and implementing “Martyn’s law”, which will force every public space in the country to waste time and money on pointless counter-terrorism risk assessments.
To the extent that we can identify a common thread in the remaining plans, it is about more regulation and more control.
Labor will control your speech, if you have conservative religious views, or even reality-based views, with the ban on conversion therapy. The Employment Rights Bill will roll back union reform and give workers more rights from day one. Fine, unless you are an employer who has the time and money to find all these things. It will lead to fewer jobs.
The Race Equality Bill will impose even greater costs on business and give further scope to those who are forever wronged. Then there are all the new incorporated bodies: the Council for Industrial Strategy; English Skills; the new OBR with its stronger legal status and even stronger powers to put a dead hand on any attempt to create economic dynamism through free markets.
And there is more devolution, giving local “leaders” an incentive to compete with each other as they demand more money from the centre, and encourage each other through new talking points such as the Council of Nations and Regions with their “growth plans local”. Someone has to pay for all of this – and ultimately it’s going to be you.
In other areas, Old Labor peeks through. Louise Haigh, perhaps the most recent Labor minister, wants to nationalize the railways without a clue what to do next, and it will only bring the new Government closer together still by the transport unions.
The school system is also under threat – unsurprisingly given Labour’s dependence on the teaching unions. There will be an expert review of the national curriculum (we know where that will lead) and the Child Wellbeing Bill – an impatient title if ever I heard one – will require all schools to teach it. Right away, one of the huge benefits of academy and free school status will be removed. Labor is re-nationalising the school system assiduously.
And of course we see the desperation to go ahead with the maniacal approach to net zero, led by Ed Miliband, perhaps Labour’s strongest minister. We will find Great British Energy, a company whose function no one can describe convincingly, but which certainly does not include producing any energy.
And we have the so-called National Wealth Fund, a plan to borrow money and spend it on questionable projects that no one else will fund – sorry, I mean “transformational investments”. We can all play that game. Remortgage your home, spend the money on a vacation, and hey presto!, you’ve created your own sovereign wealth fund.
Given this background, I think we should be grateful for the proposals for a win sign that doesn’t actually do anything. There is the Crime and Policing Bill which will make assaulting a shop worker a crime (isn’t it already?) and stealing goods under £200 illegal (or … ditto). Or there is the Border Security and Asylum Bill which shuffles the bureaucratic deck of cards, which talks tough about punishments even though people traffickers are already in prison for life, and does so while illegal migrants in the English Channel have reached an all-time high .
The only possible exception to this is the Planning Bill. As I wrote last week, we badly need to build more houses when people want them. But the target is unambitious – 300,000 homes a year, the same as the last government, which is actually far too low, especially as Labor has no intention of reducing immigration. Much depends on the details.
After all, we had mandatory housing targets until 2022, so bringing them back is a big help if you don’t destroy all the grounds to block the building too, barring legal challenges and reviews judicial, a tactic that Labor has welcomed in horror every time. the last government tried it. I am concerned that the effect of this Bill is to allow the Government to push forward more unfocused wind and solar projects, which in fact are actively damaging, while making little difference to the housing problem. Let’s see.
Starmer asked us to be “patient”. It is wise to do so, as most of these measures are unlikely to do the British economy any good any time soon. Meanwhile, Blair’s nonsensical rhetoric will hide the true direction of travel, which is less dynamism, more corporatism, and even more government.
“This King’s Speech returns politics to serious government, returns government to service, and returns service to the benefit of working people,” says Starmer. Does anyone have any idea what that actually means?
So this must be opposed. I can do this in good conscience myself because I have also always criticized the collective direction of travel of the last government.
It is not so easy for the Conservative Party. He will have to discard his approach of recent years, move forward with those responsible, and rediscover his conservative principles. Opposition is only about complaining. It is also about explanation. The next Tory leader must find the courage to explain why the path we are on is wrong, and then set out a better one. If the Conservative Party cannot do that, it will be irrelevant, and deservedly so.
