The State of Parliament, or the Opening of One?

Every year, the British constitution performs a magic trick. A monarch dons a crown worth more than most pension funds, rides through London in a gilded coach, and reads aloud a script written by politicians who, in any other context, he would be constitutionally forbidden from agreeing with. The Yeomen of the Guard search the cellars for gunpowder. Black Rod gets a door slammed in his face. An MP is held hostage at Buckingham Palace. And everyone pretends this is normal.

Welcome to the State Opening of Parliament — or, as it might more honestly be called in 2026, the State of Parliament.

King Charles III delivered his second Labour-era speech on 13 May to a chamber groaning with ermine and tradition, just days after local elections in which the governing party secured the magnificent backing of 15 per cent of voters. Over eighty Labour MPs had publicly urged Keir Starmer to resign. Catherine West briefly floated a leadership challenge before retreating faster than a gilt yield in a liquidity crisis. The Prime Minister called the results “tough” and vowed not to “plunge the country into chaos” — a promise that, like many of Labour’s manifesto commitments, may prove aspirational.

Into this carnival of confidence stepped the King, tasked with reading out a legislative programme so sprawling it would make a graduate student weep: the European Partnership Bill, the Energy Independence Bill, the Civil Aviation Bill, the Highways (Financing) Bill, the Northern Powerhouse Rail Bill, the Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill, the Police Reform Bill, the NHS Modernisation Bill, the Courts Modernisation Bill, the Immigration and Asylum Bill, the Clean Water Bill, the Railways and Passenger Benefits Bill, the Education for All Bill, the Digital Access to Services Bill — and that was merely the warm-up. One half-expected Charles to pause, adjust his spectacles, and ask whether anyone had considered governing instead of legislating.

The speech opened with a line that deserves to be framed: “An increasingly dangerous and volatile world threatens the United Kingdom, with the conflict in the Middle East only the most recent example.” This is the diplomatic equivalent of describing the Titanic’s encounter with an iceberg as “a recent example of marine challenges.” The Middle East is not merely “the most recent example” of volatility — for Israel, it is an ongoing, multi-front war involving Iranian proxies, sustained rocket fire, and the single greatest existential threat to a democracy in the twenty-first century. To relegate it to a subordinate clause is not understatement. It is erasure by syntax.

And then came the obligatory incantation: the government “will continue to promote long term peace in the Middle East and the Two-State solution in Israel and Palestine.” This sentence has appeared, with only cosmetic variation, in every King’s and Queen’s Speech addressing the region for as long as anyone can remember. It is the geopolitical equivalent of a holding page — always loading, never arriving. The Two-State Solution has become Britain’s foreign policy screensaver: reassuringly present, functionally inert, activated whenever the system is idle.

To be fair, the speech did contain substance of genuine significance for Israel and the Jewish community. The opening pledge to “take urgent action to tackle antisemitism” was welcome, and the Tackling State Threats Bill — which provides the legal architecture to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — represents a long-overdue step. The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, and Labour Friends of Israel all noted its importance. Under the new legislation, those carrying out attacks on synagogues or Jewish institutions on behalf of foreign state proxies could face up to fourteen years in prison.

But here is the rub: this proscription was effectively pledged in Labour’s 2024 manifesto, which named the IRGC as a threat and promised new powers to tackle state-based security threats. It was recommended by the Independent Reviewer of State Threats Legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, a year ago. The IRGC has been orchestrating attacks, funding proxies, and threatening British citizens on British soil. And yet the government’s response has been to wait, consult, delay, and finally — with the theatrical timing of a man who arrives at a fire with an extinguisher after the building has been demolished — include it in a King’s Speech. The Yeomen of the Guard searched the cellars for Guy Fawkes. They might have been more usefully deployed searching Whitehall for the proscription order.

The contrast with Ukraine is instructive and, for Israel, damning. The King spoke of “unflinching support for the brave people of Ukraine, who fight on the frontline of freedom.” The moral language was unambiguous: sovereignty, aggression, freedom. When it came to Israel — a democracy under sustained, coordinated assault from a network of Iranian-backed militias explicitly committed to its destruction — that clarity evaporated. No mention of Hamas. No mention of Hezbollah. No mention of October 7th. No mention of hostages. Just the soothing bureaucratic hum of “long term peace” and “the Two-State solution.”

This asymmetry is not accidental. Supporting Ukraine has become a low-cost, high-consensus position in Western capitals. Supporting Israel requires acknowledging uncomfortable specifics: that Iran’s proxy strategy constitutes a coordinated campaign of encirclement; that the threats are not hypothetical but kinetic; that the moral calculus applied to Ukraine — a sovereign state defending itself against aggression — applies with equal force to Israel, yet is selectively withheld.

Credit, then, where it is due — and in this parliament it is due to the Leader of the Opposition. Whatever one makes of her domestic travails, Kemi Badenoch has been conspicuously clear where the government has been conspicuously evasive. She declared in January that she had “no issue” with removing the Iranian regime, calling it an enemy of the United Kingdom. She stood with Israel and the United States when the strikes on Iran came in February. As Trade Secretary, she resisted enormous pressure to suspend arms export licences to Israel. She told the Conservative Friends of Israel that her party is “the last line of defence” for Israel in the British parliament — a line that, unlike most political slogans, has the inconvenient quality of being largely true. On the day of the King’s Speech, she turned to Wes Streeting — the Health Secretary widely understood to be positioning for a leadership bid — and told him, with the economy of someone who has no time for diplomatic hedging, to “just do your job.” By Thursday morning, it emerged that Streeting had no intention of doing his job at all — he plans to resign and trigger a leadership contest, with Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham, and Starmer himself expected to do battle. It was, in retrospect, less a parliamentary taunt than an accurate diagnosis.

From a financial economics perspective, the King’s Speech reads like a portfolio constructed entirely of deep out-of-the-money call options on domestic reform, with the foreign policy section hedged by a protective put of studied ambiguity. The government is long on legislative volume and short on strategic clarity. The IRGC proscription is a real asset, but its delayed exercise has cost premium — in credibility, in security, and in the signal it sent to Tehran that Britain’s red lines are written in pencil.

For Israel, the implications are threefold. First, the antisemitism pledge and the Tackling State Threats Bill are genuine, if belated, commitments that deserve support and scrutiny in equal measure. Second, the continued invocation of the Two-State Solution as a mantra rather than a policy framework signals that Britain has no intention of engaging with the region’s strategic realities as they actually exist. Third, the rhetorical gap between Ukraine and Israel confirms what many have long suspected: that Western solidarity is not, in fact, universal, but is rationed according to political convenience.

The State Opening of Parliament is a ceremony designed to project continuity, authority, and purpose. In 2026, it projected something closer to a soap opera in fancy dress — a government that cannot command its own party, reading a speech through a monarch who cannot express his own views, to a parliament that cannot agree on what it stands for, about a world it cannot quite bring itself to describe honestly. The Health Secretary is plotting his resignation. The Prime Minister is fighting for survival. The backbenches are in open revolt. And somewhere in the cellars, the Yeomen of the Guard are still looking for gunpowder when the real explosions are happening upstairs.

Guy Fawkes, at least, had a plan.