POLITICS
In which Mr Major may find something to his advantage
SIMON IIEFFER
No ritual these days is so pre-empted by leak as the Queen's Speech. Her Majesty will be delivering this year's next Thursday, long after she and the rest of us have learned of its contents from the Daily Telegraph. In the unlikely event that the lobby has not been told everything by min- isters hungry for publicity, further clues are in the Conservative Party Manifesto. Remembering what was enacted in the ses- sion just closed, one has only to read this document to find out what remains to be done.
The answer is: not much. This is not just because most legislation was crammed into the long session between May 1992 and November 1993. It was because much of the verbose and vague manifesto published at the last election did not require legisla- tion. 'We didn't expect to win,' a senior backbencher told me. `So there was no point promising to do all sorts of things, only to find our hands tied by those promis- es in opposition.' As it turned out, this was just what the Tory party needed. The emerging theme of the last 18 months, set to be the dominant one of the next year, is that with a majority of 17 (and falling) it is wise not to promise to do anything.
These constrained circumstances threat- en to return us to that happy state, sought by the late Lord Ridley, where govern- ments do nothing. However, Nick Ridley felt this position should be taken out of ide- ological principle. Mr Major and his associ- ates are adopting it out of arithmetical necessity. The closing hours of the last ses- sion, in which even embarrassing U-turns were barely enough to secure the passage of the rail privatisation Bill, have struck further gloom and defeatism into the hearts of the Government's already gloomy and morally defeated business managers. 'The Government seems to have two aims,' a Labour front bencher crowed. 'First, spend as much time away from Westminster as possible between now and the next elec- tion. Second, if you must be at Westmin- ster, make sure you are discussing mea- sures that at least 326 members of the par- liamentary Tory party feel happy to sup- port.' There are only 334 members of the parliamentary Tory party left in a House of 651 MPs, which provides little room for manoeuvre. 'No wonder,' a backbencher observed, 'we are told to treat the Ulster Unionists like royalty whenever we come across them.' And the back-bencher did not mean the way the Daily Mirror treats royal- tY.
Mr Newton, the timid and increasingly rattled Leader of the House, has seen to it that one prospective measure — to deregu- late London's buses — has been strangled at birth. Yet the legislative programme the Queen is about to announce will not be entirely lacking in risk. The Government knows that some measures will invite divi- sion; but on others that might prove most problematic it does not seem quite to have understood the dangers. The three most important Bills, by the Government's esti- mate, are those on criminal justice, deregu- lation and education. The first and 'last of those should not prove difficult, as they are so populist in conception that only Tories who positively want to lose their seats should vote against them. The new Crimi- nal Justice Bill will undo the laxities of the last Criminal Justice Bill. It is intended to help Mr Howard, the Home Secretary, keep his promise to be vile to criminals. Mr Patten's Education Bill will include assaults on teacher-training colleges and student unions; bodies which, like criminals, are loathed by that section of opinion the Tories are keenest to appease.
The Deregulation Bill will, though, be just the sort of measure that the Tory back- benches will quibble over if Mr Major con- tinues to upset them and if they, as a result, seek ways of punishing him. The Bill aims to allow primary legislation of a regulatory nature to be overturned by order in council and other statutory instruments. This would prevent deregulation measures being obstructed on the floor of the Commons, and allow rapid removal of unnecessary regulation. As an example of the sort of thing the Government would like to do away with, Mr Neil Hamilton, the minister responsible, has cited an Act of 1871 that compels itinerant pedlars to apply for a separate licence from each local authority in whose area they peddle. The scope for arguing about what old legislation would or 'Thanks, mum.' would not be considered suitably non-con- troversial, and therefore ripe for treatment in this way, is immense. If speculation about the body that will overturn such Acts of Parliament is true, something reminis- cent of Henry VIII's Star Chamber may be on the way. The pedant constitutionalists will have weeks of fun with that.
The Government is also braced for trou- ble over the plans by Mr Lilley, the Social Security Secretary, to tighten up the award of invalidity benefit. But it seems not yet to have appreciated the scope for grief provid- ed by the Bill needed to honour a promise made to the Edinburgh summit to increase our contribution to the EC from 1.2 to 1.27 per cent of gross domestic product by 1999. So angry are some of the anti-Maastricht faction at the very idea that it seems this measure might get through only with such dramatic threats of suicide as pushed through Maastricht itself.
The Government's attitude to Europe is tied up with the most significant measure of the session: the Finance Bill, which will fol- low on from the Budget on 30 November. Some MPs who have talked to officials in the Treasury and the Bank of England begin to think Britain is once more shadow- ing the Deutschmark. One MP with good Threadneedle Street connections insisted to me that 2.45-2.55 marks to the pound is now the range. The circumstantial evidence is mounting. One of the more amusing commitments in the 1992 manifesto is to put sterling in the narrow bands of the ERM. Mr Clarke, a few months ago, told The Spectator of his belief in 'managed' exchange rates. How better to prove pro- European anti-inflationary credentials, and an ability to 'manage' an exchange rate with the best of them, than by shadowing the Deutschmark? 'There is simply no reason to have interest rates at six per cent,' a for- mer minister told me. 'There can only be one reason why Clarke isn't cutting them.'
To be fair to Mr Clarke there could well be another reason: to sweeten a tax-raising Budget. If, however, he sits down after his speech with rates still at six per cent, ques- tions familiar from 1987-88 will be asked again. Lady Thatcher claimed in her mem- oirs that she only learned of Nigel Lawson's mark-shadowing policy from the Financial Times. Perhaps, to his great surprise, Mr Major may find some benefit in being an assiduous reader of The Spectator.
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