What a waste of time!

Written by David Heath MP and published in Somerset Standard on Fri 20th Nov 2009

The Queen's speech this week marks the official opening of the parliamentary session and sets out the government's legislative programme. But one thing we can be absolutely sure of is there will be a general election within the next six months, which means that few if any of the measures contained in the speech will ever become law. So what on earth is the point of it? Aren't we just wasting our time?

The answer is, of course, yes. Ministers know perfectly well that what they propose over the next few weeks won't get onto the statute book. What we have instead is a series of glorified press releases, where they hope that opposition parties can be portrayed as being on the "wrong" side of some fatuous argument or other. It is the start of a six month long election campaign.

How much better it would be if the list of tawdry bills were torn up, and we spent the remaining few months of this disastrous parliament trying to repair the damage by genuine and radical reforms to the way we do our business. That way after the election we could start with a more effective system, one where the abuses have been corrected, we can scrutinise the government more effectively, and for the first time have a proper handle on the spending of public money, the signing of treaties and waging of war. It isn't going to happen, but it ought to.