Bill Jamieson: Lord save us from muddle and fudge

The Queen’s speech provides compelling evidence that the coalition government has hit the buffers, writes Bill Jamieson

Let Her Majesty’s government fiddle as the eurozone burns. Few events this year will be less memorable, more irrelevant, more outrageously feeble and so far short of what’s required than the pathetic list of Bills presented in the Queen’s Speech yesterday.

“It may do no harm” might be the best to be said of it. But it is another warning sign missed and a critical opportunity lost. If this is the best “focus” that the coalition government can offer to bring on the “priority” of economic recovery, parliament might as well opt for a course in therapeutic basket-weaving. If this is economic stimulus, it’s the next best thing to assisted dying.

Context is everything. We now have, by most authoritative accounts, a toxic combination of rising unemployment, a dearth of consumer spending, miserable retail sales, a tumbling stock market, business surveys trending down, feeble bank lending and tough spending cuts still to come. Oh, and let’s not forget: an eye-watering debt interest bill gouging ever bigger chunks out of the national coffers.

This country now has all the prospects of a train that has ground to a halt and with no evident fix for the engine. Only this is no ordinary dead halt. We are stuck by an embankment about to be engulfed in flame. The engine seems incapable of revival. Periodic announcements promise “focus” and action, but nothing happens. Smoke drifts into the compartments. But here at last, trundling along like the drinks trolley, is the Queen’s Speech, You can tell it’s a Cameron-Clegg Queen’s Speech. There’s the squeaky wheels, a rattle of empty bottles and a needling spat between the buffet stewards.

Look what’s on offer. There’s a big urn marked “House of Lords reform”. This might be coolly refreshing for some were there any substance therein. But there isn’t. House of Lords reform has been a long-chewed on old chestnut for Liberal peers bereft of a full set of dentures and still grieving for the loss of Lloyd George. There’s little wrong with the House of Lords that reformers high-fiving for “accountability” and innocent of history would not make infinitely worse.

What else is on offer from the feuding stewards? The trolley has just 15 Bills and four draft Bills. In a package proclaimed as offering help to small business, it includes plans for flexible parental leave more likely to add to the regulatory burden on small firms. There is a declaration, laughable in its näivety, that the UK will be exempt from eurozone bail-outs: about as credible as a rail chief executive promising a curb on his bonus and an end to fare increases. The Prime Minister says the coalition is “taking tough, long-term decisions to restore our country to strength”. But where exactly? There is no over-arching theme or joined-up purpose, the product of a coalition seeking to avoid awkward legislative entanglements. But if that is so, why is Lords reform still on the agenda? How ironic, in this stranded train, that no legislation for the high-speed rail link is on offer.

If the coalition was really serious about a legislative programme for growth, here is what the speech might usefully have declared:

“My government is determined to boost employment and enterprise. To this end, legislation will be introduced enabling small firms to take on trainees and young people free of all national insurance and employment tax imposts. My government will also exempt, outside of London and the south-east, small firms from taxes on employment and re-invested profits for a minimum period of three years. In addition, the burden of red tape is to be eased by a new Bill making it mandatory that for each new piece of legislation added, not one but two existing regulations will be scrapped.

“My government intends to ensure that each new piece of regulation from Brussels will not be enforced unless first promoted and supported by the UK parliament.

“Further measures to relieve the tax burden on small firms will be met by caps on welfare spending and in particular no welfare or housing benefit entitlements to immigrants unless they have been taxpayers for a minimum period of seven years.

“Further, my ministers, in seeking to cut government down to a size that ceases to crush enterprise, will impose from midnight a freeze on all central and local government recruitment, posts falling vacant to be filled from within until the government pay and pensions bill is reduced to a level we can afford.”

Flight of fancy this may be. But we are going to need a radical programme if we want to lift this economy off the rocks and make it worthwhile for people to set up on their own. The alternative is a deepening inertia and enfeeblement. With these come vulnerability to crises and downturns beyond our ability to control.

And one such is already upon us. The economies of the eurozone, on which we depend for some 45 per cent of our exports, now face a convulsion triggered by the rejection by Greece of spending economies on which its bail-outs critically depended.

This could jettison Greece from the single currency. Greece on its own need not concern us much.

It is the prospect of the exit of one loosening the mortar round bigger members that is causing investors to dump shares and the Euro to fall.

Even if, by some epic, word-bending euro fudge, Greece is kept in the eurozone, the “solution” may prove useless in solving the problem of a misconceived currency union from the start.

What haunts the world’s third largest economic zone is not so much the collapse of austerity economics but the onset of so much more muddle and confusion at the heart that no-one knows what the overall direction of policy is – or who will end up bailing out whom.

It is the stuff of nightmares. And about the best that can be said of it is that it may yet bring the UK government to its senses about what our priorities here really are and what is now required.