This Queen's Speech is all about the short-term political prospects of the Prime Minister, and not the long-term future of this country. Gordon Brown still has no big vision for Britain. Only a Conservative government can give our country the long-term change it really needs.

The best ideas in this Queen’s Speech are Conservative ideas.  The NHS Constitution, the independent exam regulator, the points system for immigration, the welfare reform package, and the direct elections for police accountability are all ideas lifted from previous Conservative manifestos and policy documents.  Without the Conservative substance, there would be nothing significant in this Queen’s Speech.

The problem with this Queen’s Speech is that Gordon Brown and the Labour Party have failed to recognise that the world has changed.  Government money is running out, so we need public sector reform to get better value for money.  Government borrowing is about to double, so we need to mend the broken society and reduce the demands on the state.  But this Queen’s Speech contains no long-term programme of reform.  Instead it’s about the short-term prospects of the Prime Minister and not the long-term future of the country.

Since becoming Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s promises have come to nothing.  He promised eco-towns, but only one is left on the table.  He promised zero-carbon homes, but there are only 15 in the whole country.  He promised three million new homes, but housebuilding is falling.  He promised free nursery care for all two-year olds, but that policy has been dropped.  He promised bigger maintenance grants for students, but he’s been forced to cut them.  This is because the Prime Minister’s promises are always about short-term politics and not real, long-term change.

Labour spun that this Queen’s Speech would be streamlined to allow ministers to ‘focus on the economy’.  But their claims about the economy are falling apart.  Gordon Brown claimed to be prudent, but we entered the recession with the largest budget deficit in the developed world.  He claimed to have delivered stability, but unemployment is rising more quickly in the UK than in any other major economy.  And of course Brown claimed he had ‘ended boom and bust’.  We’ve had the boom and now we’ve got the bust.

Now Labour claim that they can get us through the recession.  They say that we are better prepared than our rivals, but we are forecast to have the worst recession in the developed world.  They say that our debt is sustainable, but Britain’s credit worthiness has slipped behind the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal.  They say that the world is following the Prime Minister’s fiscal stimulus.  But as the German Finance Minister says: “Just because all the lemmings have chosen the same path, it doesn’t automatically make that path the right one… Since I’ve been dealing with economic stimulus packages, that is, since the end of the 1970s, they’ve never had the real effect that was hoped for.  In the end, the state was just more in debt than before.”

This Queen’s Speech should have been honest about the state we’re in.  Gordon Brown has taken us to the brink of financial and social bankruptcy.  Largely responsible for the collapse of the economy, and clueless on the collapse of our society, Gordon Brown is yesterday’s man. 

This Queen’s Speech is yet more proof that we need a Conservative government to give our country the long-term change it really needs.