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The most worrying element of the Queen’s speech is the absence of anything that addresses our biggest problem: economic growth. It’s madness, in a recession, to consider a law which takes hundreds of pounds from each taxpayer’s pocket and gives it to an overseas charity of a minister’s choice. The aim is noble, yes, but the British public has a long history of doing this without the taxman’s intervention: private donations are the highest in Europe. The Queen was made to say that the increase in tax money sent overseas will be ‘the first time that the United Kingdom has met’ the target of giving 0.7 per cent of national income in overseas aid. This is not quite true: the country meets this target already, due to the generosity of its people. But this proposed law, still on the cards, would only recognise government contributions. It is in fact the triumph of Big Government over the Big Society.
It is clearly a mistake to force the government to come up with new laws every year. Idiotic ideas like the International Aid Bill (and others) should not have been introduced. But as things stand, ministers feel under pressure to pass laws — rather than get on with running their departments. The legislation is often completely unnecessary. Andrew Lansley’s calamitous Health Act was a textbook example. Introducing the bill simply gave the enemies of reform a chance to insert amendments to slow it down.
Welfare reform is a ten-year mission, and so far progress has been reassuring. Iain Duncan Smith has started to overhaul the entire system, and started reassessing the 2.7 million who claim incapacity benefit to see if they are fit to work at all. Michael Gove has pursued his free schools agenda with commendable vigour, having passed the Academies Act in just 77 days. Now, of 3,260 English schools, some 1,300 have applied for Academy status.
But even here, there is room for improvement. There are precious few of the new schools that were promised. The Spectator’s Toby Young has succeeded, with a new school in Ealing, west London, but too few have been able to get through the still formidable bureaucratic hurdles. In two years we have seen just 111 new schools, and the immigrant-driven baby boom means that we need 400 new primaries a year just to keep pace with rising demand. The government’s most ambitious scheme now risks stalling. The irony is that Gove has won his battle with the unions. His biggest obstacles have come from within Whitehall. The Treasury’s refusal to grant Academies the freedom to borrow money places an obvious constraint on growth. New schools are being vetoed because of spurious planning objections (such as extra traffic on the road for the school run).
The Queen was also made to say that her ministers’ ‘first priority will be to reduce the deficit’, but this is not quite true either. Her ministers are softening on deficit reduction. When the coalition was formed two years ago, George Osborne condemned Alistair Darling for wanting to halve the deficit over four years. He is now doing it over five years, and gives no timescale for abolishing it altogether. His first priority is to restrict cuts in total state spending so they are just under 1 per cent a year. Even François Hollande, the new French President, looks as if he’ll balance the books sooner than Mr Osborne.
Nick Clegg is keen on constitutional reform. One option he might consider is leaving the Queen alone for a while and placing a moratorium on new laws until the government is able to finish what it started.
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