Measured by parliamentary time, there are 33 days left between the Queen’s Speech and the final date for a general election to be called. With time running out, there can hardly be much genuine legislative intent in the 13 Bills read out by the monarch yesterday. The very fact of such a full programme betrays an air of unreality, quite irrespective of the contents of each Bill.

The programme signally lacks any sense of priority, apart from the desire to lay some very obvious and avoidable traps for the Conservative Party. Look closely and it is easy to find some good things. The proposal in the Financial Services Bill to require banks to set up “living wills” may help to avert future crises. And the clauses for greater consumer protection, though by no means revolutionary, are certainly steps in the right direction. A new school report card is a small but welcome change. Greater flexibility to the primary school curriculum is desirable. Parental orders, when a child has breached antisocial behaviour rules, do work well and an extension is a good thing.

The best aspect of the programme is the introduction of public service guarantees and legal redress if the service reneges on the deal. For example, patients will have a legally enforceable right to private treatment if they do not see a cancer specialist within two weeks of diagnosis. The same redress will be available if more than 18 weeks elapse between referral and treatment. The response of the Conservatives has, so far, been vague. David Cameron’s argument that the guarantee is worthless without reform ignores the fact that the guarantee is itself a reform, and a good one.

However, the rest of the Queen’s Speech is a curiously apropriate comment on the Brown premiership. Elsewhere, the fantasy politics of dividing lines is elevated over any desire to change the country. This is most evident in the tendency to mandate good things over bad. Enshrining in law the commitment to eliminate child poverty, placing a duty on the public sector to narrow the gap between rich and poor, expressing a desire to cut the fiscal deficit in half in four years and requiring the Government to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on international aid take none of those aims forward.

This is law as a substitute for action in the vain hope that political chicanery will receive an electoral reward. This is pure cynicicm and merits exactly the reward that it will get. There is little real feeling of direction here, just a few bits and pieces, some good, some bad, and all designed to derail the Opposition rather than change the nation. This is a very diminished idea of politics and so it made for a diminished Queen’s Speech.

There was also an air of unreality because all the hard choices were left over for another day. There was nothing in the Queen’s Speech on the expenses saga, the issue that has dominated British politics for months. Though Nick Clegg’s demand for that to be the only issue at stake was frivolous, it was strange that the topic should have been ignored altogether.

The serious economic work was also postdated to the Pre-Budget Report. This was also a serious omission. In the absence of a credible assessment of the public finances, no pledge of more jam tomorrow is worth much. The chief casualty of largesse without money will be the Personal Care at Home Bill. The proposal to provide free care for the neediest, as a first step toward a national care service, sounds unobjectionable. But there are serious concerns about whether this can be afforded and whether it is right for the State to arrogate to itself responsibility that should belong to individuals. It is more difficult still to avoid the suspicion that this is yet another measure designed to be announced rather than implemented.