New Statesman & Society leader, 17 November 1995
The Queen's Speech was a damp squib – so now all the Tories' hopes rest on Kenneth Clarke's budget
This week's Queen's Speech has been attacked by Labour for containing nothing at all relevant to the problems confronting Britain, and rightly so. With a handful of somewhat banal exceptions – such as the long-overdue rationalisation of divorce law and the belated bill on the Channel tunnel rail link – the sole purpose of the legislation that the government plans to introduce in the final full session of this parliament is to embarrass New Labour.
Whether Tony Blair and friends will be embarrassed is another matter entirely. They certainly shouldn't be too worried by most of the promised legislation. Extending the "right-to-buy" for housing-association tenants, for example, is almost laughable as a keynote housing policy – not so much because it is wrong in principle (it isn't, necessarily) but because it so completely fails to grasp the mood of the times.
In the wake of the housing market slump, few housing-association tenants want to buy. Most feel rather pleased that they have managed to avoid the fate of their owner-occupier friends. And extending housing-association tenants' right-to-buy does little to encourage construction of more homes, which, as everyone knows, is the only way to tackle homelessness.
Similarly, the Tories' mean-spirited measures to make life even more difficult for immigrants and asylum-seekers should cause Labour few problems, just as long as it sticks to principled opposition. The same goes for the proposed criminal justice legislation to limit the access of the defence in trials to prosecution documents, and indeed for the plan to give a new anti-crime role to Ml5 – which is far less accountable than the police to democratically elected politicians. It's not "soft on crime" to believe that defendants in trials should know the case against them or to think that action against international organised crime should not be handed over to the security service. And it should not be beyond the capacity of Labour's front bench to denounce the Tories' proposals on immigrants and asylum-seekers for making scapegoats of some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
Education is more of a danger for Labour, although only on grant-maintained schools (and the difficulty there is less that Labour policy is a problem in itself than that the policy seems to be at odds with Tony Blair's choice for his own son). The Tories' nursery-education
voucher scheme looks like what it is, a cheapskate attempt to buy off discontent at Britain's miserable education provision for the under-fives, and Labour should have no difficulty showing that its alternative, expanding state nursery provision, is infinitely preferable.
Which leaves only the proposals to ease restrictions on media ownership, where the Tories hope that Labour will be torn between its distrust of media barons and its desire not to offend them in the run-up to the election. This is probably the most dangerous of all the 15 bills for Labour, simply because its own policy is at such an embryonic stage – but predictions of a revolt of left-wingers accusing the party leadership of selling out to Murdoch could easily prove to be Tory wishful thinking.
If New Labour has a single defining characteristic, it is that it is desperate to win, and a little hard swallowing over media regulation isn't difficult to do.
As an indication of what to expect, look at the response – or rather the lack of one – to Tony Blair's speech to the Confederation of British Industry.
Even five years ago, his explicit embrace of "caring capitalism" would have unleashed a storm of protest from Labour's left. This week, there wasn't a squeak, not even about Blair's apparent backtracking on implementation of the social chapter and the minimum wage. What Tony says, goes – even if what he says is that Labour has embraced the values and practices of continental Christian Democracy.
So does that mean that the Tories might as well aban¬don hope of doing Labour serious damage? Not quite. There is still Kenneth Clarke's budget later this month – and after that perhaps another one in a year. Clarke does not have a great deal of room for manoeuvre, but he has enough to make significant tax cuts, probably to be phased in over a couple of years. Then, the Tories hope, he will be able to challenge Labour to say whether it would reverse his tax cuts. If Labour says yes, it's damned again as the high-tax party, and if it says no, it has to accept his cuts in expenditure too.
It is a pretty crude game – and it's immensely dull to watch. But that doesn't mean it won't work, particularly after people start to see the extra money in their wage packets and salary cheques next spring. Even if the Queen's Speech was a damp squib, the Tories still have enough dry powder at least to give Labour a fright.
