The first Queen’s speech of the second term should be golden. All trouble and strife is behind. Ahead lie the sunny uplands of a Commons majority. Apologies have been made, lessons learned and hope restored. For a party leader the second term is the moment of opportunity, when courage can be allowed its head. This is especially true for Prime Minister David Cameron, who has stipulated this term as his last. He has nothing to lose but reputation.
Cameron’s second-term predecessors, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, all felt they had wasted their second terms. Lord Ridley called Thatcher’s “the years the locusts ate”. Blair retreated into war-mongering. Cameron’s speech did not augur well. It read like the ramblings of a man the morning after a dreadful one-night stand with the electorate, wondering what on earth he promised during the passion.
Did he really pledge a “statutory” ban on higher taxes? (Why not leave just a breakable promise?) Did he really offer to sell off housing association homes cheap to their tenants? (Did she really ask me that?) Did he really give 30 hours a week of free child care? (Did the passion get that far?). And why did he give away three million apprenticeships, high-speed trains without limit and unconditional powers for Scotland? It was the hangover of a meretricious general election.
After the give-aways there was little new. Cameron is continuing with his creeping centralism. Housing charities and council estates will in effect come under a central land bank, with Whitehall dictating disposals, subsidies and revenue transfers. The failed attempt in the last parliament to balance affordable sales with newbuilds has led Cameron to seize control of public housing finance in every corner of the land. This is megalomania.
The European Union (EU) in-out referendum threatens to be for Cameron what Iraq was for Blair — the defining event of his last years.
The government is now seeking to complete the covert project to nationalise all schools. New primaries and secondaries, together with those defined by Whitehall as “failing or coasting”, are to be brought under regional tzars. Some schools will be called “free”, but that makes no difference. The nationalisation of Britain’s schools, a project sought by Lord Lawson in the 1980s, may at last be achieved, ending a long tradition of local responsibility for education.
As for the National Health Service (NHS), it must do its bit, ordered by Cameron to supply seven-day general practice everywhere, whatever it costs. A five-year plan will also bring local social service in line with the NHS, presumably removing local accountability from all social services in the end.
The speech did have a localist flourish, with a mention of elected mayors, but it was not clear what is to put devolutionary bite into the rhetoric of the “northern powerhouse”. The reality is that Britain will soon be unique in the free world in having its entire welfare state — schools, hospitals, doctors’ surgeries, child care, care of the elderly and public housing — owned or controlled by its central government, either directly or through social or private subcontractors.
The remainder of the speech looked back to the constitutional upheavals of Cameron’s first term in office, notably on Europe and devolution. The EU in-out referendum threatens to be for Cameron what Iraq was for Blair, the defining event of his last years. Britain can be commended as the only member state prepared to challenge Germany’s continental dominance, based on the Eurozone’s current path to uncompetitiveness and personal misery of millions. Cameron wants a reformed Europe, but Europe seems likely to call his bluff.
Before the election, Cameron sloppily conceded more devolution to Edinburgh with no commensurate fiscal responsibility. When it was mooted to the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) Nicola Sturgeon last month that Scotland win full budgetary independence — with no London subvention — she understandably blanched. Now surely is the time for Cameron to put her on the spot. Does Scotland want real independence, or not really?
The Queen’s speech was an exercise in political expediency. It opened with numbing platitudes about “legislating for all the people” and ended with pious hopes about ridding the world of terror. There was nothing in between to suggest the stamp of an original mind or a collective political philosophy. There was just a litany of the lobbies to which Cameron has come to be increasingly in thrall: the publicists for the crazy HS2 and other vanity projects such as the Manchester science centre, the Swansea barrage and the continuing Olympics “legacy”.
The government will go on pouring subsidies into the middle-class interests. There is always money for pensions tax relief, first-time buyers and inherited property. There is no mention of new property taxes. As for Cameron’s pledge to free businesses from red tape, this was surreal. Has he not been briefed on the deluge of new pensions and building regulations that he has just imposed on small businesses the length of the land? There has been no such deregulation.
The left can dismiss any Tory leader as bound by tribal instinct to oppress the poor and line the pockets of the top 1 per cent. That is not Cameron. He may be a victim of an incorrigible cronyism and his overdue attempt to reform Britain’s welfare state has left many rough edges, some of them inexcusable. But he is a politician sincere in wanting to avoid the disciplines of a growing economy falling too heavily on those in genuine need. He is just not good at saying so.
Perhaps the PM should take lessons on Edmund Burke from his backbench colleague, Jesse Norman. Cameron is a traditional Tory. He is no radical. He does not believe in a smaller state or in radical redistribution of wealth. He is a city-dweller, a Whitehall centralist, a natural meddler, an interventionist at home and abroad. The countryside, natural beauty or the arts do not feature in his make-up — or in the Queen’s speech. Such localism as he professes has been forced on him by Europe’s new wave of centrifugal politics. Cameron is no Thatcher, indeed the worrying thing is his professed admiration for Blair.
To his own surprise, Cameron last month snatched victory from the jaws of predicted defeat. He can laugh in the face of those who accused him of lacking stomach for a fight. He is a confident gambler. But as he embarks on his European venture, one of the greatest gambles a PM has taken in recent times, he leaves his stall in the political market place curiously empty. He leaves a country wanting more.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
