Yesterday's State Opening of Parliament, the second of the King's reign, was the more theatrical of the two if only because the bill count, at thirty-seven, eclipsed every recent precedent except Tony Blair's fifty-bill 2005 programme and Boris Johnson's thirty-eight in 2022. The Institute for Government, in its very fast post-Speech analysis, observed the obvious thing: that a government on a stable Commons majority can attempt to legislate at high volume, but that the parliamentary year is the parliamentary year, the legislative drafting capacity at Whitehall is what it is, and the realistic conversion rate from announced Bill to enacted statute, on programmes of this scale, has historically been somewhere in the 60–70 per cent range.
The volume itself is not an objection. There are stretches of British history in which a thin programme would have been the correct criticism: governments that had nothing to do and pretended they did not. This government has, by any honest reading of its own political position, a long list of things it would like to do, a four-year window in which to do them, and an electorate that has indicated through several intermediate signals that the patience for slow legislative throughput is limited. The headline figure of thirty-seven Bills is, on that reading, an act of political signalling as much as a description of forthcoming legislation. The signal is: we know we are on a clock.
The substantive content of the Speech is more interesting than the bill count. The European Partnership Bill, briefed in advance to several lobby journalists as the headline measure of the Session, proposes a structured set of alignments between UK and EU law in food regulation, electricity trading and carbon emissions — three areas in which divergence has been most costly to UK exporters since 2020. The Bill is not, on the published prospectus, a re-entry to the single market. It is closer to what continental constitutional scholars would call a Schengen-style ancillary architecture: deeper than a free-trade agreement, less than a treaty of accession. Whether that distinction will hold under sustained backbench pressure is a question for the autumn.
The Energy Independence Bill is the other measure that will, on present indications, define the Session. The Bill's stated objective is to accelerate clean-energy projects, modernise the electricity grid and reduce the country's dependence on imported fossil fuels. The first of those objectives is achievable through planning reform; the second is a long-running infrastructure programme that will outlast any single Parliament; the third is, in the context of the war in the Middle East and the consequent gas-price exposure, an urgent strategic priority. Whether the Bill as drafted will deliver any of these at the speed the headline suggests is the question the energy press is asking this week, and the question the Scottish renewables sector — material to which is set out elsewhere on this site — is asking with particular interest.
A legislative programme is a list of intentions. A Parliament is what happens to the list.
There is then a long second tier of measures — the Civil Aviation Bill, the Highways (Financing) Bill, several housing and welfare measures that have been previewed for months — that will absorb a considerable proportion of legislative attention without dominating the headlines. The Civil Aviation Bill in particular is a substantive piece of legislation that addresses both airport-expansion planning and a structural reform of the slot-allocation regime that the aviation industry has been arguing for since the early 2020s. It will not be a flagship measure. It will be a difficult measure, with significant cross-party opposition on environmental grounds.
The schedule of the King's Speech debate that the Lords released on Tuesday is a useful tell about the government's priorities. Thursday — today — is set aside for economic growth, trade and the EU partnership; Monday for justice, home affairs and the Union; Tuesday for education, culture, technology and energy security. The placement of "the Union" in Monday's session is the part of the agenda Scottish observers should be reading most carefully. The internal Labour view, on the briefings of the past fortnight, is that the constitutional question is closed for the duration of this Parliament. The more difficult internal view, audible in the post-Holyrood briefings since last week's election, is that the question is in fact open, that the new arithmetic of Scottish politics will continue to test it, and that the British government's reading of the Union from a London perspective and from an Edinburgh perspective are not, this fortnight, the same reading.
What of the absences? There was, in the Speech and the supporting briefing, no specific measure on adult social care funding — the issue that has now defeated four governments in succession. There was no commitment to revisit the contentious welfare reforms that the Commons forced through last summer against a substantial Labour rebellion; the policy review the government conceded at that point is due to report in the autumn, and is being treated by ministers, on background, as the operative document rather than the King's Speech itself. There was no specific measure on the upcoming public-services workforce squeeze that, on every available indicator, will be the dominant operational story of the Parliament. Each of these absences is defensible. Each is also a hostage to events.
The Blair 2005 programme, the only recent comparator at scale, achieved roughly two-thirds of its announced Bills as enacted statute within the original five-year window. The Johnson 2022 programme achieved a noticeably lower conversion rate because of the political turmoil that followed it within months. Either of those outcomes, applied to the present thirty-seven-Bill programme, would still leave the government with a substantive legislative record by 2029. The question that yesterday's Speech does not answer, and that no King's Speech ever answers, is whether the government will hold steady politically for the four years required to deliver on the volume of legislation it has announced.
A legislative programme is a list of intentions. A Parliament is what happens to the list. The history of recent decades suggests that what happens to the list is, more often than not, that events overtake it. The next four years will be, as always, an argument between intention and event. Yesterday was the easy day.
By Fraser Lindsay — Opinion Columnist at The Scottish Review. He writes a weekly column on Westminster and Holyrood from his desk in the Isle of Mull.