The past few weeks have seen the Tory-led government's legislative agenda in the House of Commons grind to a halt.
MPs are stunned at the empty sudden space that has emerged in their schedule. As Labour MPs we value the opportunity that this gives to highlight the government's failings through opposition debates - as we did this week on the rising cost of living for families and making the case for our Five Point Plan for Jobs and Growth.
But after first denying MPs the time to give their plans the scrutiny they need, rushing significant pieces of legislation through the Commons - like the vast Health and Social Care Bill, David Cameron's NHS reorganisation plan which is three times as long as the Bill that set up the NHS in the first place - the government has now found nothing positive of its own to fill the space. First packing MPs' schedules, then emptying them - this is a government that is as bad at managing its diary as it is at managing the economy.
The government's economic policy ran into the sand this week, with George Osborne admitting that he will have to borrow £158 billion more than he planned, and make two further years of deep public spending cuts. But at the same time, the Tories and their Lib Dem supporters have run out of legislative ideas. At the moment it seems that the government is responding to the dark days of winter and the even darker days of the economic crisis by going into hibernation.
After just 18 months in government, at a time when millions of families are desperately worried about what the future holds, the Tories are showing how desperately out of touch they are by offering no debate of any substance.
So what is going wrong? Where is the government's legislative programme? Two explanations for this deeply worrying situation can be established.
First, it is clear that the government's damaging changes to public services are in trouble in the Lords - partly because of the haste with which they were forced through the Commons. The legislation relating to the changes to welfare and the reorganisation of the NHS is crawling through the Lords. The government is having to table numerous amendments in order to allow its ill-thought-through legislation to make progress. This is a serious indictment of the government's competence: one of the most important tasks of any administration is to ensure that its legislative programme is properly thought through and that it is capable of withstanding the force of Parliamentary scrutiny.
The second point is that this is a government whose economic decisions are unravelling. Plan A has failed, but rather than adopt Labour's Five Point Plan for Jobs and Growth, the government is devoting its energies to survival, to the task of scrambling for safe ground as it faces the threat of being submerged by a flood of economic bad news. No wonder, then, that we are witnessing a dire absence of new ideas from this out of touch Government. It has limited the scope of its agenda to the old, failed right-wing economic remedies of the past and the task of rolling back the frontiers of the state.
The people of this country deserve better than this. Britain deserves a government which faces up to the challenges we all face and does so with fresh ideas and brave thinking. David Cameron's Tories are just not up to the task.