The Queen only spoke for a few minutes, but she still said startlingly little. There was some vague flim-glam about “continuing” to invest in infrastructure to boost jobs and growth (which was a surprise to me, as I didn’t think the government was doing anything of the sort), and there were some worthwhile measures (greater rights for carers and greater protection for people shopping online), but on the whole, this is a fairly dismal plan for government.
The line from Labour is likely to be that the coalition have “run out of ideas”, but that’s not really true. Both the Tories and the Lib Dems have ideas – but the coalition has become so completely sclerotic and disfunctional they just can’t agree on much anymore.
After a furious first couple of years in government, fuelled by a quickly cobbled together coalition agreement, the wheels have come off the coalition. There’s nothing more in the locker. And Cameron and Clegg seem determined to cling to each other for two years and hope that doing nothing much in the way of legislation is what will save them.
It won’t of course. The only hope for the coalition now is an upswing in the economy – there was certainly nothing announced today that will save them.
Welcome to Coalition agreement 2.0 – where the coalition can’t agree on anything much, the parties start to peel away from each other, and the General Election campaign begins…
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