Waiting for the Future

Less than a year into his job, Gordon Brown is already on to his second draft legislative program, even as many parts of the first one remain undigested. Some of the most significant bills announced last year have yet to leave parliament - on terror, climate change, education, employment and embryology - and a prime minister in decent political health would feel no need to add to them. The whole idea of a draft Queen's speech is anyway rather absurd, the verbal equivalent of double counting. It is an artificial attempt to feign seriousness and consultation that yesterday saw parliament go through the motions of discussing the long-term when the purpose of it all was Mr Brown's short-term survival. He came to the Commons talking of the future in an attempt to ensure that he has one.

He does at least have a strategy. This week's costly retreat on 10p tax and yesterday's premature statement have abated the storms that seemed about to pull the government apart. Next week the Crewe and Nantwich by election may bring back Mr Brown's troubles, but for now he is crawling from the vortex. This is despite the fact that his statement was lumpy and repetitive to listen to, and David Cameron's assured response was one of his most engaging parliamentary performances. labor MPs will be fooling themselves if they think yesterday's statement will make much of an impression on voters, but it may change the mood inside their party, not least because many of the policies Mr Brown announced were sensible ones.

He deserves credit for resisting, as his predecessor might not have done, the lure of populist quick fixes. The emphasis was on public services and the economy, not instant tough laws on crime (although Mr Brown remains fixed as ever on ID cards and 42 days' detention). He is right to pay attention to housing and his scheme to buy unsold new homes to let to tenants is a good one, even if the £200m earmarked for it will not buy much property and is being allocated from existing budgets. It is good, too, to hear the prime minister talking of new rights for agency workers. The progressive package also included two smaller bills that deserve to find parliamentary time, after being dropped in previous years, on coroners' courts and marine protection. Like several other things mentioned yesterday, they are not new, but that does not make them any less worthwhile.

The prime minister's problem is that almost anything he announces now, after 11 years in power, stands open to two obvious criticisms. The first is to suggest that labor is simply trying to fix a problem that it created - the case with yesterday's new banking laws. The second is to ask why now, and why not before. Promises to sort out bad schools and focus the NHS on the patients who use it are all very well, but the government has been promising to do exactly this since 1997, with mixed results. As Nick Clegg put it yesterday, "another stir of the legislative pot won't save the prime minister".

What might is evidence that his government is achieving its goals. Mr Brown has never been short of ideas and ambition, but he is in charge of a government, not a think tank. The grander his proposals, the greater the worry that they will come to nothing. In the two years before the next general election - a poll in 2009 is improbable, and the tone of yesterday's statement makes it more so - the prime minister must find ways to show he is changing Britain for the better. Draft statements and more reviews will not do that. The climate change bill, mentioned again yesterday, was announced by Tony Blair in 2006 and is still not law, even though it only sets targets. That sort of sluggishness is dispiriting. If Mr Brown wants to enliven the government, he will have to narrow his vision on to a small number of attainable things. These do not have to be modest; he has the strength to be revolutionary. But yesterday's statement did not encourage the belief that it will happen.