Gordon Brown will begin a six-month election campaign this week with one of the shortest but most deliberately political programmes of recent years.

With all the polls suggesting that he is heading for a heavy defeat, the Prime Minister has chosen the last Queen’s Speech before next year’s election to bring forward legislation — notably on education, health, care for the elderly and the economy — that most emphasises differences with the Conservative Party.

The programme, which is to be announced on Wednesday, will include 15 Bills at most, three carried forward from the session of Parliament that ended last week. It is almost certain that many of them will fall when Mr Brown calls the election. May 6 is the favourite date although the opposition parties are on the alert should the Prime Minister try to spring a surprise by opting for March or April.

Several of the Bills will be seen as populist measures that have been pushed forward at this stage to create dividing lines with the Conservatives.

One Cabinet minister said yesterday that the speech would be “the most political of the last 12 years”.

In a podcast on the Downing Street website, Mr Brown said that Britons wanted world-class public services underpinned by “guarantees not gambles”. He was referring to legislation this week that will enshrine in law the right of NHS patients to get treatment within 18 weeks or to see a cancer specialist within two weeks — or be granted free private treatment; an education Bill that will give parents and pupils guarantees of one-to-one tuition; and a social care Bill that will provide for free personal care in their own homes for about 350,000 people with the “highest needs”.

Labour strategists believe that those Bills will be popular and will cause difficulties for the Conservatives, who have opposed health service targets, are unlikely to match the education guarantees, and have published their own care policy, which would involve people paying a sum up front when they retire to waive any residential home charges later in life.

Labour will claim the Conservative plans are “gambles”.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary and one of Mr Brown’s closest allies, is one of the keenest proponents in the Cabinet of the “dividing lines” strategy.

Asked in a interview on Sky yesterday whether that was the Government’s tactic with the Queen’s Speech he replied: “To be honest, that is what politics is about. It’s about differences of values and differences of choices facing our country. The Queen’s Speech will lay out very clearly different choices.”

Mr Ball’s Bill will include plans for new powers for ministers to intervene in underperforming schools. It will make it easier for schools with poor results to be taken into partnership with successful schools, handed over to outside education providers or closed down by order of ministers.

Local authorities will be required to carry out annual surveys of parental satisfaction and publish an action plan to deal with any concerns.

Mr Balls made plain that his interventionist approach contrasts sharply with that of the Tories. If there was a “Michael Gove Queen’s speech” — Mr Gove is his Conservative shadow — it would be very different from the one coming this week, he said. He suggested that the Conservatives would not meet his guarantees on tuition, or on giving every 16 and 17-year-old a school, college or apprenticeship place. He also insisted that Mr Gove would not step in where a school was underperforming but leave it to the free market. However, Mr Gove said: “Ed Balls’s proposals are timid in their ambition and a backward step in terms of education reform.

“His bureaucratic and expensive plan to tackle failure is a damp squib. We promised last month that if we win the election the hundred worst schools will be under new management by September 2011, when Ed Balls’s legislation might only be coming into effect.

“In the long term we need the whole system to be more responsive to parents, which is why a Conservative government would allow new providers such as charities, parents or groups of teachers to set up state-funded independent schools while handing failing schools to the very best alternative providers.

“These reforms have worked in other countries such as Sweden, Canada and America, leading to parents getting more of what they want from education, like tougher discipline policies and smaller class sizes. By contrast, Ed Balls’s plan centres around more involvement from the very bureaucracies that have failed generations of children.”

The move to push ahead speedily with Mr Brown’s pledge to provide free home care for the most needy is also driven by the election.

At present anyone with a home or savings worth more than £23,500 does not receive help with funding their care, whether at home or in a residential establishment, and about three quarters of those who need it fall into this category. That means that each year thousands of people are forced to sell their home to fund their care.

Soon after Labour announced its plans, the Conservatives said that they would offer free care for the elderly for an up-front cost of £8,000.

Their scheme would be run by companies that already provide insurance policies. However, it emerged that while this would cover basic “local authority standard” residential care; anyone seeking a better home would have to top up the fees.

The average cost of care is about £30,000. However, bills can be much higher, especially for sufferers of degenerative illness such as dementia, which requires a greater level of help with washing, dressing and eating.

A senior minister said yesterday he was pleased that Mr Brown was making care for the elderly an election issue. “We are happy for both sides to try to make the case for their own solutions,” he said.

Even the Bill to curb “risky” bonuses appears to have been designed to cause discomfort to the Tories. It would give new powers to the Financial Services Authority to intervene. The Conservatives want those powers transferred to the Bank of England.

Philip Hammond, the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said that the Bill was “yet more headline chasing from the Government”.

He said: “Over a year ago the FSA said they had the power to sign off on the framework and structure of bonuses. The public will be asking what this announcement means for the bonuses that are due to be paid this Christmas — and the answer is nothing at all.

“When we announced plans to stop significant cash bonuses being paid this year, the Government were quick to criticise before eventually agreeing with us. It is clear that Labour prefers to talk about laws that would only be effective after a general election.”

He added: “What this legislation should be doing is fixing the broken system of financial regulation.

“The Bank of England should be put in charge and that is what we shall be pushing for as this Bill goes through Parliament.”

Even a promised Bill on crime will produce political differences. It will set out the categories of people whose details will be held on the DNA database, not all of whom will have been convicted of a crime. The Conservatives will make plain that they are opposed to innocent people having their details held on the database.

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