DANIEL HANNAN: If you think this King’s Speech is Left-wing and bound to end in disaster, just wait for the one coming next…

An increasingly dangerous and volatile world threatens the United Kingdom, the King said in his opening speech yesterday.

If this is true, we must make our economy more competitive to fund reliable national defense.

I suspect that His Majesty understands this very well, as do we all. Unfortunately, he was reading a speech on behalf of his chief minister, as convention required, and what followed was nothing short of a recipe for economic revival.

A government that was serious about the dangers we face in terms of energy shortages, cyber attacks and direct military threats would, to paraphrase the First World War, put guns before butter. He will cut welfare spending to get the economy growing again. It will divert resources from social security to real security.

We do not have such a government. Everything Keir Starmer is proposing now is aimed at getting a few more days in office. Embarrassingly, it gives backbenchers everything they say they want, no matter how affordable, no matter how impractical.

So we delivered a King’s Speech that ignored what was urgently needed – welfare reform, an end to the North Sea drilling moratorium, targeted tax cuts – and instead proposed a raft of new regulatory powers on everything from water and railways to concert ticket sales and housing: all interventions that tipped the balance even further from the private sector to the state.

A government that can clearly propose something it calls the ‘Growth Regulation Bill’ is not serious about growth.

Of course we already knew this. But now even this claim is abandoned. Starmer has come up with a series of proposals narrowly aimed at buying MPs off for a few more days or weeks rather than finding ways to cut borrowing, spending and taxation and thereby return to the levels of growth seen before the Gordon Brown years.

Everything Keir Starmer is proposing now is aimed at getting a few more days in office

For example, the promise of nationalizing steel stems from this. The only other Labor leader since Michael Foot to call for a state-owned steel industry was Jeremy Corbyn. All leaders in between understood that state ownership hurt productivity.

Steel nationalization had been attempted twice before, in 1949 and 1967, and ended in disaster both times. What makes these people think it will be different now?

Indeed, the current semi-nationalisation of steel, which took place exactly 12 months ago, is costing taxpayers around £2 million a day, according to data from Parliament’s replies to shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith.

Most of this money goes to a Chinese company; this company appears to be exempt from its reported £2bn decommissioning obligations, again at the expense of taxpayers. But Labor MPs love the word ‘nationalisation’, so who cares? £2bn to stay in office for a few more weeks is a good return on investment according to Starmernomics.

Then there was the bill agreeing to unilaterally sign up to EU standards and regulations. Whatever happens, I think it makes sense to get closer to the EU economically. But only if doing so would not harm our relations with the rest of the world. It is madness to undermine our trade with growing markets in order to prioritize our trade with a shrinking market. But again, this isn’t primarily about economics. This is about appealing to the prejudices of Labor MPs to win over one or two more supporters.

It’s an odd tactic, even as low politics. Labor had just been destroyed by the Reformation in the old centers of the working class. If his response is to move towards deeper European integration, he is prioritizing the feelings of his MPs over the desires of his voters.

The rest of the government’s program ranges from displacement activities to self-harm measures.

Voting at 16 is one of the most hypocritical policies ever featured in a King’s Speech. Labor has backed raising the age of consent from 16 to 18 for everything from Botox treatments to buying a knife, to leaving full-time education and getting a tattoo. Even now it is trying to ban minors from accessing the internet. But again, mainly for tribal reasons, he wants young people, whom he now treats as children in every context, to determine national policy.

Of course, Labor embraced this promise when it was ahead among 16 and 17-year-olds. Young girls now mostly vote Green and young men are more likely to vote Reform rather than Labour; but due to ‘briskness’ the policy continues sluggishly.

In theory, Streeting could return to the Blair formula. In practice, the dynamics of the Labor leadership race are likely to push any candidate, including Streeting, further to the Left.

The proposal to remove individual members of the House of Lords is an example of why you should never introduce a general law in response to a particular case. The Mandelson saga reflected badly on Starmer, so in an early attempt to further the conversation he proposed a mechanism to sack some colleagues who had run afoul of the standards committee, even if they had committed no wrongdoing. Does anyone think that this power will not be used against political opponents?

The list goes on: canceling jury trials, taxing vacationers, promoting renewable energy sources, attacking the rental market. If these were smoke bombs thrown by a frightened Prime Minister who didn’t know when it was time to leave, that would be bad enough, because the changes we urgently need and that Labor initially promised are not happening: NHS reform, slimming the welfare budget, ambitious new housing.

However, among the smoke bombs there are also some real bombs. More welfare spending, more money for the EU, more powers for regulators, a weaker private sector and a smaller tax base.

Might a new leader act differently? Starmer has now lost the support of all Labor unions and Health Secretary Wes Streeting is about to challenge him.

In theory, Streeting could return to the Blair formula of encouraging growth and then using the resulting revenues for projects he wants. In practice, the dynamics of the Labor leadership race are likely to push any candidate, including Streeting, further to the Left. We expect greater commitment to regulatory control, nationalization and, above all, spending. In other words, next year’s King’s Speech may make yesterday’s speech look like the speech written by the great prophet of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman.

We are faced with MPs who refuse to accept the laws of physics. The prospect of a more left-wing government has increased the cost of borrowing, and that money has to come from somewhere. We now spend far more on debt interest (£110bn) than on education (£90bn) or defense (£60bn).

Labor MP Paula Barker said this week that ‘markets will need to be regulated’; This is more like saying the weather will need to settle. But Labor MPs, most of whom spend their working lives being funded by taxpayers in one way or another, refuse to understand the point.

Diane Abbott insists, on behalf of many of her colleagues, that Britain can largely command foreign creditors. ‘If the Government is going to have complete control of the bond market,’ he said, ‘MPs had better go home.’

This is true, but not in the sense he meant. By refusing to slow growth in spending, let alone return to pre-pandemic levels, the government is effectively ensuring that the bond market is dominated. And yes, once that happens there will be nothing lawmakers can do about it. This is the result of the choices they are making right now.

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is a Conservative peer.