Servants of the people

THE queen has never before delivered “Her Majesty's Most Gracious Speech” on behalf of a coalition government. This year's version of the ritual, which took place on May 25th, was peculiar in other ways, too. With 22 bills planned for an 18-month parliamentary session, it sets a fearsome pace. It is as though the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition does not believe it is long for this world, and has resolved to live fast even if it is to die young.

There may be wisdom in such a bleak self-prognosis. Coalitions are vulnerable, and this one's fate is to do searingly unpopular things in order to fix Britain's fiscal crisis (see article). Many doubt that the government will survive the five years that will soon be the fixed term of every parliament, and they are not just the Labour Party's wishful thinkers.

Yet the Queen's Speech also offered reasons to think that the coalition may confound these doubters. The two parties share not only a few policy specifics—something that is true, after all, of the Lib Dems and Labour, or indeed the Tories and Labour—but also an underlying critique of the British state, which both see as uniquely centralised by Western standards. “Freedom, fairness and responsibility” were the soporifically banal themes chosen for the speech by David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, and Nick Clegg, his Lib Dem deputy; “giving power away” would have been more fitting.

The Lib Dems' enthusiasm for local government, for example, got an airing. More power over housing and planning will be devolved to councils, which could also end up with greater financial freedom. The Scottish Parliament will be given more scope to tax and borrow. (There will also be mayors in England's major cities, if referendums are won there.)

The Tories are keener on pushing power beyond government at any level to the community organisations and charities that make up civil society. Mr Cameron's government will make it easier for state-funded schools to be set up by non-state providers. NHS workers can run their own services as co-operatives. In the police, perhaps the least reformed public service under Labour, the priorities of local forces will be set by elected commissioners. Welfare reform will hasten the trend towards enlisting private and charitable groups to help recipients into work. Direct democracy will get a look-in too: the public is to be given a vote on any further transfer of power from Britain to the European Union (EU), and more local referendums.

There are problems with all this centrifugal zeal. For one, it does not save money, at least not in the short term (though the promised online publication of detailed data on public spending may well do in time). It is really about better, not cheaper government. And although austerity is the watchword of the day, some details of this programme—such as plans for building high-speed railways and restoring the link between the state pension and earnings—will be costly.

Dirigisme also dies hard, it seems. The government's professed localism is hard to reconcile with its plan for a one-year freeze on council tax, which, however loathed a levy, remains the principal revenue-raiser for local government. Such contradictions could prove provocative to reactionary elements of the Whitehall civil service. They are likely to resist the loss of power at the centre if they sense that their masters are equivocating. There is also popular aversion to local variations in the quality of public services, even though the command-and-control welfare state has never managed to eliminate this “postcode lottery” either.

Still, the desire to shake up the British state may not only glue together the governing parties (in a way that reducing it as a share of GDP does not) but also gain radical momentum as a governing philosophy. Some Tories privately compare it to Thatcherism. Just as the former prime minister ended up doing things that were barely conceivable when she was elected, such as privatising utilities and deregulating financial services, this government may come to adopt policies that are the stuff of think-tank fantasies now: personal budgets in education and other public services, for example, or a local income tax.

That's all she wrote

Unlike Margaret Thatcher's government, the coalition may be spared vicious political opposition to its cause. Many of Labour's younger shadow-cabinet members, including candidates for the party's leadership such as David Miliband and Andy Burnham, see the limits of central direction. Indeed, the coalition's ideas build on those of Tony Blair, who recanted his Napoleonic approach to the public services in his second term as prime minister. Union leaders are more hostile, especially to the prospect of any erosion of national pay-bargaining, but their members may well find things such as public-sector co-operative ventures appealing irresistibly to their professional pride.

There is another feature of the government's programme—this time more tactical than cerebral—that could also serve to bind the coalition together. Europeans versed in coalition rule have been advising the neophytes of Westminster and Whitehall that giving each governing party most of what it wants on its pet causes is better than endless compromise. “Splitting every issue 50-50 means that nobody is really happy,” says an adviser to a continental prime minister. Sure enough, the Tories have retained the bulk of their policy on immigration and Europe, while the Lib Dems can claim a victory on voting reform. If MPs approve a referendum on it, the alternative-vote system will go to the country, though the timing has not yet been decided.

As set-piece events go, this Queen's Speech, even with all its novelties, is less important than the budget that George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, will deliver on June 22nd. The centralisation of the British state is a deep problem, but the structural deficit it runs every year is a more pressing one. The struggle to enforce austerity may yet sap the government's will to do anything else. Still, it is remarkable that, having haggled so hard to get their hands on power, the coalition's first instinct is to give it away.