The King’s Speech setting out the Government’s legislative programme for the new parliamentary session is debated over five days beginning last Wednesday and finishing next Tuesday (19th May). That’s quite an investment of time considering that we are often told that a number of matters cannot be debated because of the ‘shortage of parliamentary time’.
I acknowledge that the debate is an important one, and in normal circumstances deserves the time allocated to it.
But these are not normal times. As the Labour Party abandons what used to be its unique selling point: Stability’, after the instability brought about by six changes of Prime Minister in eight years (2016-24). Now we are in the extraordinary situation of debating a programme for government which, in very short order, may no longer turn out to be this government’s programme any longer!
The potential candidates, declared and, as yet, undeclared are on record as having expressed very different priorities to those that have been set out by the Prime Minister and which were put before voters in the 2024 manifesto.
The Prime Minister was quite right in his warning to his party last week, that setting off a leadership election would cause chaos and damage. It is already doing so: the markets which fund our gargantuan, and ever-growing borrowing requirement, have indicated their alarm at the prospect of our being governed by any of the potential prime ministers so far identified. Consequently, they are us charging premium risk rates, more so than the Truss premiership, which Labour constantly prays in aid for having ‘trashed the economy’, more so even than the risk premium demanded of Greece.
I am no fan of the Prime Minister but I urge the members of the Labour Party and the good people of Makerfield – who will have a disproportionate impact on the future of this King’s speech- to heed the warning in Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, (when poor Jim ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion)
“…Always keep a hold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse.”
The King told us “My Ministers will introduce legislation to take advantage of new trading opportunities, including a Bill to strengthen ties with the European Union.”
What precisely does that mean?
The Prime Minister’s red lines were ‘no return to the single market or freedom of movement’. Is that still the case given the PM’s own speech last Monday, let alone the vaunted European ambition of those who now want his job?
The Labour Manifesto commitment was to “make Brexit work”. But now they blame Brexit for the lack-lustre performance of the economy. Ministers have been involved in a serious game of ‘cakeism’: on the one hand claiming to have stabilised the economy, delivering interest rate reductions, and the fastest growth in the G7, whist at the same time inferring that the EU is doing so much better.
It Isn’t.
What is certainly true is that we would be doing so much had it not been for the contents of the preceding King’s speech which has placed so many new burdens on enterprise and new taxes on employment.
The best King’s Speech would have been the shortest: containing but one measure: A statute of repeal, to restore the status quo ante July 2024..