BRITAIN: The British Labour government is prepared to risk the wrath of many of its supporters in its fight against crime.Frank Millar in London reports on yesterday's Queen's Speech
With 19 new bills declared and three more in the pipeline, Britain's Labour government will be busy - but will it be effective? Will its enthusiasm for legislation translate to meet public expectations for more personal empowerment, and the transformation of the sometimes bog-standard, often appalling, into world-class public services?
Or will much of yesterday's promises evaporate like so many other eye-catching initiatives with which the Blair government thought to put the world to rights?
This was the sixth Queen's Speech of Tony Blair's reign, delivered by the monarch barely hours after an indigestible breakfast of damaging headlines accusing her and Prince Charles of a "whitewash" over the collapse of butler Paul Burrell's theft trial.
Yet again David Blunkett's Home Office is set to claim the lion's share of parliamentary time, with no less than six new bills, the flagship - staggeringly the eleventh Criminal Justice Bill since 1991 - promising "end-to-end reform" of what New Labour recasts the "victim justice" system.
The government says the purpose of the latest shake-up is to re-balance the system in favour of victims, witnesses and communities, with tougher sentencing policies, greater use of fines and more cases heard in magistrates' courts.
Of similar potential significance - and in an area which will almost certainly fuel further internal Tory wars between modernisers and traditionalists - is Labour's commitment to root-and-branch reform of Britain's outdated sex laws.
Mr Blair and Mr Blunkett will doubtless be counting on much of the Conservative Party's continuing disposition to try to order people's personal lives and its inability - as evidenced by last week's fiasco over the right of unmarried or same-sex couples to adopt - to allow its MPs to treat issues of personal conscience as precisely that.
However, even this hapless opposition should have no difficulty identifying an already rolling bandwagon of concern and alarm, from the Bar and from civil liberties campaigners, about Mr Blunkett's latest manifestation as a Home Secretary somewhat to the right of his Tory predecessor, Mr Michael Howard.
Certainly an almighty row would seem in prospect over what many will regard as further evidence of this government's illiberal and authoritarian tendency. For Mr Blunkett proposes to end the "double jeopardy" rule, whereby accused persons cannot be tried twice for the same offence in cases where "new and compelling" evidence emerges; to limit the right to trial by jury; and to allow judges and juries to hear details of a defendant's previous convictions.
Much of the rest of the agenda might be considered surprisingly dull from a government with a massive Commons majority barely into the second year of its second term. Certainly there is no commitment to a referendum during this parliament on British membership of the European single currency. Worthy bills will seek to speed up house sales, make it easier to evict anti-social tenants, increase on-the-spot fines for minor offences, and herald a crackdown on graffiti, fly-tipping and the use of airguns. The government also promises legislation allowing MPs to resolve the long-running row over hunting with dogs.
The Conservative leader, Mr Iain Duncan Smith, tried yesterday to reflect a public mood of familiarity with a government that seems, year on year, to return to the Commons with promises to crack down on crime and criminals, make the streets safer, sustain Britain's economic effectiveness, lead in Europe, and reform its schools and hospitals, making them the envy of the world. All promise, no delivery, was his familiar charge.
And there should be potentially rich pickings here for a vigorous Opposition sustained also in the knowledge that, notwithstanding the size of its first-past-the-post Commons majority, public support for this government remains wide but threateningly shallow.
The Queen's Speech was unveiled against the backdrop of the first fire-fighters' strike since the last Labour government, at a time of renewed trade union militancy and a clear indisposition on the part of many public sector workers to await a third or even fourth Labour term before arriving at what they thought would be the promised land.
Yesterday's commitment to introduce "foundation hospitals", whose bosses will be given the power to raise finance and set wages, brought a reminder of the hostility of many in the wider Labour movement to this government's enthusiasm for ever-increasing private-sector involvement in running hospitals and schools.
Take its perceived willingness to trample on ancient liberties - and the likelihood that members of the public will see little relationship between arguments about double-jeopardy and the need to crack down on street crime and burglary - and there would seem the potential for a two-pronged assault on a government determinedly "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime".
Add to this what business leaders identify as Labour's "tax creep"; the projected £8 billion national insurance hike from next April; the anguish of the middle-classes now seriously exercised by the crisis in care for the elderly; confusion over the quality of their children's A-levels; and the prospect of top-up university fees or a graduate tax, and there could be the makings of real mid-term blues for Mr Blair.
But until the Conservatives resolve their problems, the Prime Minister has the comforting knowledge that the blues remain on the Tory side.