I began business questions by welcoming our newest MP to the House of Commons. Emma Lewell-Buck will be a fighter for her constituents, and it is brilliant that she is the first woman to represent South Shields. I also welcomed Nadine Dorries back to the Conservative fold, after she was allowed back in the party this week. I asked the leader of the House if he is taking bets on how long it will take the chief whip to wish she was back in the jungle.
Last week’s local elections were a disaster across the shires for the Conservatives as Labour won in many southern marginals and hoards of true blue voters flocked to UKIP. I followed with interest the Conservative implosion in Lansley’s own backyard of Cambridgeshire where the Conservatives lost control of the Council for the first time in more than 15 years. The Conservative leader of the council even managed to lose his seat to a Liberal Democrat! It’s hard to imagine, but the leader of the House actually did better in the elections than his own prime minister who managed to lose Witney to Labour and who saw the Conservative candidate beaten into third place by UKIP. And the signs are that panic is setting in: Lord Lawson is calling for an exit from Europe; Lord Tebbit is reported as saying that UKIP’s policies are now ‘closest to a traditional Conservative agenda’; and the member for North-east Somerset is calling for a ‘big, open and comprehensive’ coalition with Farage.
This is a failing Conservative party that can’t even hold on to the Tory shires and whose members are starting to behave like headless chickens. They are so bad at listening to their own members that this week one of them resorted to taking out a full page advert in the Times to tell them how out of touch they are. The irony is, he probably paid for it with his millionaires’ tax cut!
I was shocked at the omission from the Queen’s speech of the promised legislation to ensure plain packaging for cigarettes.
When he was secretary of state for health the leader of the House said: ‘The evidence is clear that packaging helps to recruit smokers, so it makes sense to consider having less attractive packaging. It’s wrong that children are being attracted to smoke by glitzy designs on packets.’
I asked him if he could tell me if he still stands by that view, and also why minimum alcohol pricing has been dropped too.
After this week’s revelations that the prime minister’s election guru Lynton Crosby has business links to big tobacco and the drinks industry I asked for assurances that no inside lobbying has taken place at No 10. And why has the government’s proposal to introduce a statutory register of lobbyists has also mysteriously disappeared?
Yesterday’s Queen’s speech showed that the government may have legislated for fixed five-year parliaments, but they have run out of ideas after just three. Instead of new ideas to get our economy growing again, all we get is a thin, cobbled together legislative programme that is completely lacking in ambition. Our last session saw parliamentary time unfilled, badly drafted and badly managed bills and a U-turn on average once every seven sitting days. Yesterday’s Queen speech will give no one confidence that in the coming year we won’t see more of the same.
This was the government’s third Queen’s speech and all we have had is three years of failure with low growth, falling living standards and rising borrowing. The government had nothing to say on tackling the crisis in youth unemployment. Nothing to back small businesses. Nothing to boost housing. Nothing on rail fares. And nothing on growth.
This is a tired government out of ideas and out of touch. Even Sir Alex Ferguson couldn’t turn this lot into a winning team.
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Angela Eagle is MP for Wallasey, shadow leader of the House of Commons and writes the weekly Business of Parliament column for Progress. She tweets @AngelaEagle