Cameron’s ‘bare cupboard’

The annual Queen’s Speech should ostensibly lay out the government’s forthcoming legislative agenda, but today’s Speech – dominated by meaningless rhetoric and peppered with a shameless rehashing of old plans interminably delayed – revealed more than anything a Tory leadership falling apart at the seams.

In an attempt to brush under the carpet the many U-turns the government has taken on so many of its key election pledges – rolling back cuts to tax credits and disability benefit, a watering down of the trade union Bill, and scrapping the forced academisation of schools, just to name a few – it focused instead on the language of so-called ‘One-nation’ Britain.

But even prime minister David Cameron’s more anodyne proposals exposed the government’s underlying ideological obsession with austerity, with privatisation-at-all-costs, with propping up the wealthiest at the expense of the most vulnerable.

Much was made of the government’s planned reformed to prisons laid out in the Queen’s Speech, which will grant prison governors greater autonomy to make decisions and will also require prisons to publish statistics about reoffending rates, education and inmates’ employment levels after being freed.

But prison governors themselves have said these reforms will not solve the central problem of dangerous prison overcrowding. Critics have also said to that these reforms are merely laying the groundwork for privatisation.

The Higher Education Bill highlighted in the Speech, too, provides the wrong answers for the problems facing university students, who have been crippled by skyrocketing tuition fees. The government says it aims to expand access to higher education, but it proposes only to make it easier for new universities to be created in order to promote ‘choice’ and ‘competition’ – all-too common euphemisms for privatisation.

And despite the government’s pledge “to ensure that more people have the opportunity to further their education,” the Higher Education Bill will use teaching assessments to enable universities to further hike already exorbitant fees – a move that will actually grant fewer people the opportunity to advanced education.

‘British Bill of Rights’

Mention was made in this year’s Queen’s speech of the commitment to creating a so-called ‘British Bill of Rights’. It was a nearly identical commitment put forward last year, but has gained little ground over the last 12 months because its endgame – scrapping the Human Rights Act – has received staunch opposition from all sides, even within the Tories’ own ranks.

Policy director of human rights group Liberty, Bella Sankey, called the proposal “worthy of a Donald Trump campaign trail, not a government that claims to govern compassionately for ‘one nation’.”

“From Hillsborough to Deepcut, the government must listen to the thousands who have relied on the Act for protection, truth and justice and dump this troubled policy once and for all,” she said.

Unite has joined Liberty and more than a hundred prominent UK organisations in a pledge to fight these proposals to erode human rights.

In yet another sinister bid to claw back rights such as freedom of speech, the Queen today confirmed the government’s intention to pursue a counter-extremism Bill, which would introduce a new civil order regime to stop so-called ‘extremist activity’ and allow OfCom to regulate internet-streamed material originating from outside the EU.

It would also give councils powers to shut down local premises that “promote hatred” and introduce a host of measures that could easily be abused and cause community breakdown.

‘Divisive’

Unite officer national officer for equalities and the steel industry, Harish Patel, said the proposals would “be divisive at precisely the time when we need to be strengthening cohesion across all our communities.”

“There are very real concerns facing the Muslim community that the government ought to be prioritising such as tackling high youth unemployment,” he added.

“It would be far more constructive and less divisive if the government were to actively invest in getting people into work and involved in their communities than these measures which we fear will isolate the very people that need to be engaged.”

Unite general secretary Len McCluskey said today (May 18) that “this messy Queen’s Speech confirms that the Conservative cupboard is bare.”

“Today the prime minister wanted us to believe he was committed to a `one nation’ Britain yet it is his government’s policies that have supercharged inequality across these isles,” he added.

“David Cameron desperately wants to establish his legacy but it is already there in the ideological, failing privatisations, the destruction of our public services and at least a decade of lost wages for working people.

“It is there in the mountain of personal debt people are amassing, the continuing climb in job insecurity and the growing queues at the foodbank.

“It is the misery wrought by his government’s policies that will be his lasting contribution to our communities, but the penny does not appear to be dropping in Downing Street, that when it comes to measures to grow our economy and make our nations fairer, a party sworn to endless austerity will always be incapable of delivering,” McCluskey went on to say.

“Sadly for the ordinary people of this country, who desperately needed to hear something better, this Queen’s Speech was a sorely missed opportunity.  It is not so much a vision for Britain but a bandage for a Conservative party riven with EU in-fighting and the limitations of its failing economic policy.

“We heard yet another reheated promise to build houses, but coming from a government that has just taken an axe to affordable social housing, the millions in desperate housing need are unlikely to feel that a decent home is any closer.

“And with record levels of cuts set to hit local authorities, when will this government accept that it is simply not possible to deliver the high quality services that must be central to tackling exclusion and poverty when it keeps hacking away at funding and staffing?

“Furthermore with measures expected to limit the powers of the House of Lords to scrutinise government policy, this is a Conservatives party that cannot shake off its sinister desire to silence dissent.”

Read more on the Queen’s Speech from Unite’s political department here.