Freedom, fairness and responsibility
May 25th, 2010 | 
Author: Those certainly seem to be good things on the whole, but what seemed very clear as the Queen’s speech ran on was that, by and large, it was a case of cancelling out just about every major piece of legislation that Labour has put through over the last 13 years or so.
Out goes the all-time black hole of expense which would have been ID cards and in comes the related limits on the DNA database and restrictions on CCTV. It’s nice to see that the big brother state is being rolled back in very concrete ways; hopefully they’ll rail back on some of the other less than libertarian ideas of the security services too.
Freedom of choice comes back to schooling with academies and to local authorities with more powers being devolved to them. Devolution in another form becomes safer through blocks on more powers being taken by Europe. Rolling back the state continues through reductions in the number of quangos and giving health professionals more say in the basic decision making.
Welfare reform is promised which is interesting as it’s something that the Conservatives have historically been scared of doing.
Pensions get some attention by regaining the link to earnings (good) and raising the state retirement age (not so good). Very good is the final acceptance that the government had a lot to do with the fall of Equitable Life and therefore should be paying compensation: this will take ages I’m sure and will definitely be complex as many of those due compensation have died.
A rather short speech which introduces a veritable mountain of legislation.
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Posted in Politics
It’s just a shame that the referendum on the voting system will be on AV rather than a proportional system like STV. But, at least (if it’s passed) it will get all of the UK introduced to preferential voting, making a proportional system that much easier for folk to understand when Clegg sweeps to power in 2015 … 🙂 Hope the OU studies are going well. Tim.
The problem with proportional representation is that there are so many variations. Less obvious perhaps is that it can take a LOT longer to do the counting. When they first introduced it here in NI (way back in the 1970s!), they were initially going to just run with the same number of counters as in the previous elections but rather rapidly hit the panic button and roped in as many civil servants from the adjacent complex as they could as it was going to take way, way too long to do otherwise.
Just working up to the Human Biology exam at the moment (16th June). Still debating what to do come October but SDK228 (Science of mental health) is looking quite likely. I really miss your notes!