Jon Cruddas: A populist Queen's Speech will fuel extremism

There is a tendency to contaminate the very notion of liberalism

Today's Queen's Speech is best seen through the prism of political positioning. For the Government, the preoccupation is to define itself as tough on security issues while portraying David Cameron as weak and liberal. Conversely, the Tory leadership will welcome the liberal tag as part of their own redefinition away from being seen as the nasty party.

The curious outcome is that both parties will seek to obscure many of their actual policies. So, from the Government side, what will dominate are the muscular programmes to crack down on migrants and asylum-seekers, the tough love afforded to benefit recipients, stronger measures to deal with crime and anti-social activity, and bold new anti-terrorist initiatives. For the Government, there is no down side - we go with the grain of populist sentiment as articulated by the focus groups whilst we nail Cameron the wimp.

There are two problems with this approach. The first is a tendency to contaminate the very notion of liberalism; to identify it as a soft creed ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of the modern world. Consequently, whole traditions of thought become collateral damage.Indeed by necessity, we as a government must underplay our own progressive initiatives over the last nine years - we cannot talk about many of the good things we have done. The remorseless righward shift in the terms of the political debate will in the end, hurt the left more as we poison the well for any centre-left tradition of thought; it is not coincidental that the BNP currently feel so emboldened.

The second problem is the serious mismatch between the security agenda developed at Westminster and the material insecurities felt by many in their own communities. Arguably, the solutions lie less in ramping up fears over migrants, minorities and criminals than with addressing failures in the supply of housing, closing down the way employers abuse migrant workers, and overcoming inequalities in access to health care together with the environment through building infrastructure and cleaning land. In many areas, these inequalities are on the rise as the poorest communities with the lowest cost housing take the strain in accommodating migrants who have arrived since the last Census and who are therefore off the radar for the purposes of public policy.

A Queen's Speech that does not grapple with these insecurities reinforces the isolation of Westminster and creates space for extremism. An alternative approach would start by addressing the race to the bottom of the labour market. For many of my constituents, their conditions at work are under real pressure partly through employment agencies exploiting migrant workers, thereby further deregulating already insecure labour markets. We should introduce a law regulating these agencies rather than block any protections coming from Brussels. We could go further and introduce legislation regulating the working conditions of contractors in the public sector to ensure that a living wage is paid by those who bid for public money, as well as holiday and sick pay over and above the minimum in law.

These initiatives would start to address the downward competition in the labour market, a hallmark of the last couple of years, and would remove some of the pressures that link migration and job insecurity.

A further initiative would be to boost the supply of council accommodation. This would ease the sense of racial competition for a limited supply of low-cost social houses, and should be an absolute legislative priority.

Later today, we are also likely to hear about changes to the role of the Office of National Statistics. In terms of community cohesion, what is critical is a modern, real-time demographic picture of this country. Our attachment to the Census offers diminishing returns, and it is the poorest communities that lose out in this process.

The one redeeming element to today's speech is likely to be the Climate Change Bill. We should not retreat from year-on-year targets for reducing emissions. We should also build on the Climate Change Levy and improve standards of environmental audit for large companies. As an aside, we should also ensure that all authorities are obliged to show Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to every schoolkid in the country.

Such Bills would address the material insecurities felt in the country while also reinforcing a progressive momentum within the Government. Simply serving up a bidding war in terms of who is tougher on migrants and criminals intensifies feelings of vulnerability and does nothing for community cohesion.

The writer is MP for Dagenham and a candidate for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party