The King’s Speech needed more volume

The presence of something in a speech means the government intends to do something on it, but the absence doesn’t mean it won’t – sometimes things are introduced that don’t make the speech.

As a result, while it’s good that the record contains a record 40 bills and draft bills, people might be entitled to shrug “so what”: one major bill might change the country far more than 20 small ones.

The key thing for a new government is to demonstrate there is much it wishes to change, and that it plans to start its term with some energy. Labour has evidently cleared that bar – it has a vast array of measures it plans to get done in the first year, across a huge array of government functions.

Train operating companies will be nationalised. Hereditary peers will be abolished. Great British Energy will be established. A workers’ rights package will be passed. The water regulator will get new powers. There’ll be a council of the nations and regions (which sounds a bit Game of Thrones).

Planning will be reformed. AI will be regulated. Conversion therapy is set to be banned (this is the third time it’s made the King’s Speech, though). Rishi’s Sunak’s age-incremental smoking ban will be introduced, as will “Martyn’s Law” governing event security (which Sunak promised Martyn Hett’s mother he would pass just hours before declaring an election).

That’s just 11 of the 40 bills, which suggests parliament will be busy. Lots of the measures announced have the potential to do good, and given many of them were in the manifesto, passing them should be easy – Labour has a thumping majority in the Commons, and the Lords cannot hinder manifesto commitments.

The real question – and this one may take years to answer – is whether all of this is enough. Keir Starmer is unlikely to ever have more power or authority than he has now. His ability to enact necessary but perhaps unpopular change will never be as strong as it is at this moment.

In just a couple of years, his MPs with small majorities will look nervously towards re-election and be aware of how even policies that are straightforwardly beneficial often have losers… and those losers complain loudly and can cost seats.

Starmer is clearly using some of this peak authority. Government after government has failed to meaningfully improve the planning system – if Labour actually passes meaningful reform here it will be significant, and it is something that could only be done shortly after a convincing electoral win.

But planning is hardly the only reform in that category. Council tax is ludicrously unfair and hasn’t been updated since 1991, and no government has dared to touch it. Labour seems likely to add itself to that list.

Social care funding is inadequate, disjointed, and the system’s failure is damaging the NHS too. There was almost nothing said about it here.

Other aspects of the tax system create unfairness and hold the country back, but are likely to remain. Labour is not reversing the Conservative decision to scrap HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester, leaving the whole enterprise a pointless waste of billions and leaving UK rail with no meaningful plans for the future.

Perhaps Labour is wisely not biting off more than it can chew, but it may be that in just a few short years’ time, Starmer and those around him are regretting not taking on more of the really hard problems while they could – as they’ll have to live with the consequences of not doing do.

More than that, though, the King’s Speech is the easy bit for any new government. Passing bills is easy if you’ve got a majority. Actually changing the nation is rather harder.

The first real signal of the Starmer agenda isn’t today, but will come in a few months, when Rachel Reeves gives her first financial statement.

The British state spends more than £1 trillion a year, and where that money goes is what decides the state of the nation. Reeves has inherited a nightmarish financial situation, and the baseline for her decisions – essentially what will happen unless she says otherwise – is yet more deep cuts to most government departments, announced by the Tories last year.

To reverse those cuts and still meet her financial rules, Reeves has to find tens of billions of new money, and that’s before she finds a penny for anything else Labour would wish to do. It is possible to start slower on spending than it is on legislative reform – this is essentially what New Labour did in 1997.

For two years, the party did what it could, changing institutions like the House of Lords, introducing devolution, and so on. Then once it had banked a bit of economic growth and found some places to raise funds, it opened the spending taps in 1999 – and delivered the biggest sustained funding rises British public services have ever seen.

This seems to be the playbook Starmer and Reeves are trying to follow, but they will find doing it very tough. They have no guarantee of a second term, and they have inherited both a nation even more desperately for change than in 1997 and a reduced pot of available money with which to effect that change.

Even so, there is no way that Labour can avoid the two-child benefit cap – also, correctly, referred to as the “sibling tax” – becoming an iconic issue that will define its approach. Every serious expert on anti-poverty says it wants to be abolished. Prominent Conservatives have called for it to be abolished.

And crucially, it can be abolished reasonably cheaply: Reeves needs to find less than £2 billion a year to scrap it, which would raise hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. There is no other intervention that could so cheaply help so many people. It is perfectly targeted.

The danger is that Labour become so preoccupied with showing they’re serious about making tough choices that they forget why they wanted to become the government in the first place. A Labour government that can’t find £2 billion to raise hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty is not worthy of the name.

The government doesn’t need to pass any new legislation to end the two-child cap, so it would never have needed to be in the King’s Speech in the first place. Its absence today is explainable and excusable.

The same would not be true of Labour’s first budget. Some of the aides in Keir Starmer’s orbit have got so used to kicking the left that they assume anything that upsets the hard left must be to the good.

They need to break that habit before it brings them down: every serious person knows Labour can end the two-child cap if it wants to. Should they keep it to prove some point, everyone will know that is what they are doing. It would be unforgivable.