Sound and fury signifying nothing

What a depressing Queen’s speech: full of more rhetorical Home Office legislation, sounding ‘tough’ for the tabloids, chipping away at freedom and fairness, but having little or no impact on terrorism, crime or anti-social behaviour. If legislation was all that was needed to make Britain safer, you’d expect that the 59 Home Office bills passed since 1997 would have made us the safest place in the world.

What we need is effective application of already existing laws, a roll-back of laws that erode our freedoms and add complexity and bureaucracy to the system but do little to tackle crime, a more visible targeted and locally decided presence of police and wardens in times and places that suffer from anti-social behaviour, closer collaboration between councils and police to tackle problem areas (as seen with Liberal Democrat councils in Liverpool and Islington), a prison regime that doesn’t make people’s drug problems worse and lead to such high reoffending rates with more training, education, work and drug rehabilitation, and more effective community punishments that have greater involvement of the community in identifying what work convicted criminals should be doing.

On terrorism, I don’t understand why we still aren’t going to see legislation to allow phone-tap evidence to be presented in court. We need to make it easier to close down terrorist operations and successfully prosecute those responsible earlier in their planning.

There are some bright spots, including free bus travel for pensioners (as promised in our last manifesto) and a climate change bill. Again on climate change, it would be good to see some more concrete actions proposed, particularly a green tax switch, rather than only target setting. Even with target setting, it’s interesting to see how Labour seems happy to set regular targets for everyone else, but currently only wants to set themselves a binding target for 2050.