The seven deadly bills

The Tories may have run a vague and convoluted election campaign, but now that they’re in with a wafer-thin majority, prime minister David Cameron laid out his policy plans yesterday (May 28) , as the Queen read out in a sombre monotone the dark direction the government will now take in the next five years.

 
Here’s UNITElive’s rundown of the seven most chilling policies the new Tory government is set to pursue.

 
1. Cutting the benefits cap
The benefits cap now stands at £26,000 but will be slashed to £23,000 for an entire household under Tory proposals. The new cap is far below the average earnings of a single person, meaning the people who would suffer most from the cap are families – and children.

 
An executive of the charity The Children’s Society condemned the move, saying it would only lead to greater child poverty in the next five years.

 
2. Extending Right to Buy
Extending the Right to Buy scheme to housing association tenants is a top Tory priority, but as UNITElive pointed out earlier this week, the scheme will decimate the already sparse affordable housing stock left. The Tories say that for every house sold under the scheme, a new one will be built, but their record on right to buy house replacements is abysmal – in Manchester, of the 863 social homes sold since 2012, only 2 have been built to replace them.

 
3. Scrapping housing benefit for young people
Although the Tories have pledged a preposterous £12bn in welfare cuts, they’ve still not revealed exactly where these cuts will come from. One of the few policies they’ve announced on this front is a blanket removal of housing benefit for all 18 to 21-year-olds.

 
According to the charity Centrepoint, scrapping housing benefit for young people will have a massive impact on youth homelessness. Any savings the Tories expect to make from this benefit cut, the charity argues, will be completely wiped out by the dramatic rise in young people sleeping rough.

 
4. State censorship in the name of combatting extremism
As part of home secretary Theresa May’s strategy to combat terrorism, she’s proposed giving Ofcom the power to vet TV programmes before broadcast. Even the Tories’ own Sajid Javid criticised the move in his previous role as culture secretary, saying it could risk turning the regulator into a state censor, and so silence opinions the government doesn’t approve of.

 
5. Increased pressure on the NHS
The Queen said that the government would pledge to have an NHS that “works on a seven-day basis”, with “improved access to GPs”. Sounds great in theory, but GPs themselves have said the plans are unworkable and would only further add to workplace and funding pressures the NHS already faces.

 
6. Scrapping Human Rights Act
Cameron’s plan to scrap the Human Rights Act did not get an explicit mention in the Queen’s speech – probably because of how controversial it is, even within Tory ranks. But a nod to a “British Bill of Rights” in the speech, however, is a direct reference to the planned attack on internationally accepted standards for basic human rights. Read more about what scrapping the HRA would mean here.

 
7. Repressing workers’ rights
A key aim laid out in the Queen’s Speech was to restrict the internationally sanctioned human right to strike. Under the Tory’s sinister strike laws, withdrawing labour in an industrial dispute would become nearly impossible. Permitting agency workers to break strikes will further swing the balance of power, leaving workers – who already have faced Victorian-era wage stagnation over the last five years — at the complete mercy of employers and businesses.

 
In response to the Queen’s speech, Unite general secretary Len McCluskey condemned the government’s future policy priorities.

 
“We urge this government to think again,” he said. “People will not be fooled by claims to be the party of working people if freedoms and democracy are swept away in a tide of repressive laws and showy PR.

 
“The first duty of a prime minster must surely be do not impoverish the people, but undermining basic freedoms, bringing further ruin to our broken housing market and paving the way for further attacks on the poor will see him embarrassed by his `One Nation’ claims.”

 
Read a further in-depth analysis of the Queen’s Speech here.