Westminster Diary - RUGBY - 23rd November 2009

Monday, 23rd November 2009

As I write this, MPs are discussing the contents of the Queen’s Speech, which was delivered at the State Opening of Parliament earlier this month. The pageantry was spectacular and the massed military bands were as stirring as ever. But as for the Speech itself, there was no radical plan to reduce the deficit; no blueprint to get millions of people back into work; and no mention of cleaning up Parliament. Instead, what was announced was a series of half-measures aimed at partisan point-scoring—even Government Ministers have said that their programme is about playing politics, not improving people’s lives.

But the situation facing this country is far too serious for such self-indulgence. After the furore over MPs’ expenses, the reputation of Parliament is at an all-time low. Sir Christopher Kelly’s independent report into expenses reform calls for several legislative changes to be made, including bolstering the independence of the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. The leaders of all three main political parties have agreed that Sir Christopher’s recommendations should be implemented in full, yet a Government bill to do so was entirely absent from the Queen’s Speech. Why? I assume that either the Government is so incompetent that it hadn’t realised that the Kelly Report requires legislation to be passed, or it simply doesn’t think that cleaning up the House of Commons is as important as it says it is.

Similarly, the Queen’s Speech provides no plan of action to kick-start the economic recovery that we all desperately want to see. The Government has borrowed so much that every family in Britain has effectively been saddled with £29,000 of debt, yet we are now the only economy in the G7 that is still in recession. Youth unemployment is now at 20 per cent, the highest it has ever been since records began. More than 600,000 people have now been unemployed for a year or more, and more than one-fifth of the working age population is either not in work or is not looking for work. There is no point in mincing words; this is a national economic crisis. The country desperately needs clear, decisive and sensible action to chart a course to recovery. If this Government is incapable and unwilling to deal with the massive mess that they have created, it is about time they relinquish the controls to one that is.

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Updated on Monday, 23rd November 2009