The Alternative Queen's Speech

This Monday, 24 of June, I will be presenting (along with Christopher Chope, Philip Hollobone and David Nuttall) the second Queen's Speech of the year. We will be presenting some 40 true-blue bills to the commons.

This Monday, 24 of June, I will be presenting (along with Christopher Chope, Philip Hollobone and David Nuttall) the second Queen's Speech of the year. We will be presenting some 40 true-blue bills to the commons. This Alternative Queen's Speech will be about Conservative policy based on being, not on the centre ground, but the common ground of British politics.

The centre-ground is some mythical area where policies are compromised, devalued and muddled with a view to offending no one. In reality they are a mish-mash of inconsistent ideas that satisfy no one. This is why so many voters from the right-of-centre have moved over to voting for Ukip.

To help recapture the common ground, where most voters views are, my colleagues and I have developed an alternative Queen's Speech crammed full of proper conservative policies and ideas.

We chose the bills to present based on our own views but having taken into account the views of our colleagues, and most importantly, our constituents. An added advantage of our proposed raft of measures is that many of them supplement James Wharton's excellent Private Members' Bill proposing an in/out EU Referendum. Those bills include the EU Membership (Audit of Costs and Benefits) Bill, the Romanian & Bulgarian Accession (Labour Restriction) Bill and the European Communities Act 1972 (Repeal) Bill. All these bills complement, in one way or another, James Wharton's bill.

I am particularly keen to see us come out of the European Convention of Human Rights so that we can legally deport alleged terrorists such as Abu Qatada. We should then replace the European Convention with a British Bill of Rights that would mean that it would be up to the British courts to decide whether the rights of the British people had been infringed or not.

I am also keen to see that religious institutions are allowed to retain their charitable status. Recently the Charities Commission has been attacking religious institution and threatening to withdraw their charitable status.

Perhaps my favourite bill is renaming the Late August Bank Holiday 'Margaret Thatcher Day'. It seems to me that Mrs Thatcher was the greatest peacetime prime minister this country has ever seen and it would be wholly appropriate, in the year that she passed on, that our country acknowledged our gratitude to her by calling the August Bank Holiday 'Margaret Thatcher Day'.

Another aspect of the Queen's speech was to try and reduce the cost of government. The Department for Energy and Climate Change seems to serve no adequate purpose. All its functions could quite happily be absorbed into the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. By doing this you would save money for the taxpayer, and reduce the number of ministers in the government.

Similarly, by scrapping the Welsh Office, Scottish Office and Northern Ireland Office, and replacing them with a single, joint ministry, significant money would be saved and (again) the number of members in the executive would be reduced. It is also equally obvious that there is no need to have the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. It's quite reasonable to denote somebody as deputy prime minister in case the prime minister is incapacitated, but it is quite wrong to have an Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, with all its costs.

One thing is for sure. By presenting these bills to parliament, we will start the debate on a number of issues that the current coalition government is running away from.

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