If Labour can get half what they want onto the statute book, they will have done well

The King’s Speech was certainly packed and, at twice the length of the last, it was stuffed with ambitions that will ultimately define Keir Starmer’s government.

The overriding theme is of bigger government, with a plan to renationalise the railways, an English Devolution Bill, a Border Security Command to stop the boats, a new energy company, Great British Energy and many more big proposals.

Among the more bizarre is the plan to force peers to resign as they turn 80, an odd idea when the function of the Lords is to revise legislation rather than invent new initiatives. It reminded me of Gordon Brown’s recent reflection that he was too young to be president of the United States and too old to be prime minister here.

In short, the speech spelled out that Labour believes we need more government, more civil servants and inevitably more bureaucracy, whereas I think I speak for most of my readers when I state unequivocally that in fact we need the opposite. John Major recently pointed out that when he inherited No 10 from Margaret Thatcher, 150 people worked there and that, as of today, that number is 480. “Do we feel three times better governed?” he asked. We know the answer.

All that said, I predict this will be a one-term government. With such a huge majority, that may sound a rash claim, but the majority is a mile wide and an inch deep. Labour had 33.6% of the vote. A huge number of Labour wins are by tiny numbers. A huge majority is a millstone around the prime minister’s neck.

Already there are factions emerging. The Corbynite hard left, the Gaza group and a deputy leader of the party frequently on the opposite end of the political spectrum from her leader all spell trouble down the line.

Of course, the Conservative Party has to recover from its worst ever defeat and deal with Reform. One thing I can tell you that you might not read elsewhere is that with only five MPs, Nigel Farage’s party will find it tough to get airtime. He can write for the papers and appear on GB News, but he won’t get much support inside parliament.

You may think this is the rueful rantings of an old Tory, but in fact like all of us, I wish the new government every success in tackling the many issues that remain unresolved for too long while the last government grappled with once in a lifetime issues like the pandemic and a fighting war in Europe, the consequential rise in domestic inflation and the crazy idea that rising interest rates were the answer, and ultimately fell to fighting among themselves forgetting the golden rule that electors never vote for parties that are fighting each other.

It is good to see that reforming the planning system and building many more homes were both prominent in the King’s Speech. Reintroducing a mandatory five-year land supply is an obvious and helpful move, but within the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is the plan to remove the right of local councils to object to new housing. It won’t only be Tory councillors who find that a bridge too far.

I would add that the plan to ban new leasehold tenure and replace it with commonhold so that it in due course it becomes the default tenure is fraught with difficulty because it assumes leasehold landlords are essentially malign while commonholders will have the same professional capability to act in the interests of their fellow tenants. Sadly, that is simply not the case. Banning Section 21 evictions and extending Awaab’s Law to the private sector will both prove difficult. But the new government will learn the hard way that politics is never easy. If they can get half of what they want onto the statute book, they will have done well, and we should give them credit for it.