King's speech was the damaging dying gasps of a Conservative government defined by chaos and crisis - Stewart McDonald

It is the swan song of this Conservative Government – one defined by chaos and crisis

In the Prime Minister’s introduction to this session’s King’s Speech, Rishi Sunak wrote that his government was proud to have brought “integrity, professionalism, and accountability” back to Downing Street over the past year. Has he told his Home Secretary that? Indeed, as Sunak went on to talk about his willingness to take “tough choices” to improve the lives of people in the United Kingdom, I couldn’t help but note, as Suella Braverman’s increasingly eyewatering comments dominate another day’s front pages, that the Prime Minister is patently unable to make even the kind of tough choices needed to improve his own Cabinet. But then, as the Tories know very well, tough choices are always easier to make when the burden falls on someone else’s shoulders.

Despite Sunak’s fabulistic introduction to this week’s King’s Speech, it is clear that this Conservative Government, in its dying gasps, is unable to make choices of any kind. We could – and should – have had a legislative programme rooted in prosperity, resilience, and aspiration; we could have had a King’s Speech which grasped the prickliest thistles of our time and sought to build national and cross-party support for initiatives to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, the housing crisis, or the climate crisis. Yet instead of a feast for a country hungry for meaningful change, we got red meat for the party faithful.

Instead of prosperity, we got peanuts. We got measures to encourage more fossil fuel extraction from below the North Sea – a region which even the most swivel-eyed climate deniers acknowledge has its best days firmly behind it. North Sea oil is mostly tapped out, production has steadily declined since its height at the turn of the century, and peak global demand for fossil fuels is reckoned to be just years away. People in the North East of Scotland need a government that will invest in a just transition rather than one desperately pouring its energy into squeezing out the last few drops of oil for one last quick fix. Rishi Sunak has made it abundantly clear that they will not find one in Westminster.

Instead of resilience, we got red herrings. The King’s Speech promised tougher sentencing for criminals – part of the Conservative Party’s well-thumbed playbook to make law and order a dividing line between them and Labour ahead of next year’s General Election. Yet this announcement came just weeks after judges were told to delay sentencing for rapists and burglars because there are now fewer than 600 prison places left in England and Wales. Indeed, blithely ignoring the recent warning from the President of the Prison Governors Association that “all our prisons are full to bursting every day”, Rishi Sunak has shown that he is more concerned about political battles than the genuine long-term (and often Tory-inflicted) problems that the United Kingdom currently faces.

And instead of aspiration, we got Rishi Sunak’s signature dish: small-minded, short-term forays into the culture war. We got, from the party of small states and free markets, the promise of a Bill to be passed by Westminster which would set politically motivated rules around public sector procurement, banning public bodies from making decisions about procurement or investment on ethical and human rights grounds – even if these financial decisions would otherwise be legal. Even his colleagues were appalled: former Conservative Home Office Minister Kit Malthouse said that "to not even be able to express opposition to the law whilst still complying with it seems to be very un-British, extremely illiberal and unnecessarily draconian", while George Eustice, another former Conservative Minister, described it as a “violation of freedom of speech”. Suella Braverman must have been delighted to hear such positive feedback.

Instead of prosperity, resilience, and aspiration, we got peanuts, red herrings and a healthy serving of the house special: the culture war. This government has the cheek to call themselves Conservatives, because they have contempt for this country’s institutions, contempt for its law, and contempt for its values. They are a Conservative party utterly unrecognisable to its traditions and massively out of control, unwilling to even consider long-term, consensus-based solutions to the problems that people across the country are now battling with. Even low-hanging fruit like a ban on conversion therapy – a policy supported by a clear majority of the country and, indeed, by a majority of Conservative voters – was forgone in favour of partisan policies designed to shore up an imagined core vote that successive polls show is, in reality, abandoning them in droves.

It would also be impossible to speak about the King’s Speech without a brief discussion of the monarch and the story, trotted out by George Osborne this week with a grin, of the time Queen Elizabeth II had approached him and implored him to reverse his proposed cuts to the Armed Forces bagpiping school. It is a request, of course, I would have made myself. And it is testament perhaps to the respect and even admiration that many of us had for the late Queen that her request was immediately honoured by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. But we simply cannot have a constitutional monarchy in which an unelected hereditary head of state is allowed to make decisions about public policy and public spending. What if we had a monarch who despised the sight of wind farms? Or one who was more strident and forthcoming about their views on the future of the Union? Royal intervention into political affairs is always a democratic outrage – no matter how amenable the request may be.

But the main story of the day is not the monarch or even the Home Secretary. It is the swan song of this Conservative Government – one defined by chaos and crisis and one the people of Scotland desperately need rid of. My only regret as they leave government is that their final year will be as damaging for this country as all those which preceded it.