BRITAIN: Tony Blair has been accused of opting for "the politics of fear" in the final queen's speech of his premiership - dominated by still more legislation to counter terrorism, crime and antisocial behaviour.
Mr Blair said the new 29-Bill programme for government was about taking the tough decisions necessary to provide for Britain's security and opportunity in a fast-changing world.
Tackling climate change, reforming pensions, creating secure communities and meeting the challenges of immigration and terrorism were at the heart of the "gracious speech" delivered by Queen Elizabeth yesterday at the traditional state opening of parliament.
However, with home office matters set to dominate the new parliamentary session - with more measures designed to make it easier to target nuisance neighbours, secure Britain's borders and deport foreign criminals - Conservative leader David Cameron said the prospect was "so depressing" people would think Chancellor Gordon Brown had already taken over.
The opening stages of yesterday's debate were dominated by the sense on all sides that - while Mr Blair was launching his 10th queen's speech - a different prime minister and a new cabinet would ultimately determine the fate of this legislative programme.
In a below par performance Mr Cameron suggested Mr Blair was still looking for his legacy after almost 10 years in office, claiming the tragedy was that he had promised so much but delivered so little. This queen's speech, he claimed, was not about keeping the streets safe but about keeping a "tired and discredited" Labour Party in power. It also marked a new dividing line in British politics, he said, between hope and fear - with Mr Blair opting for fear in order to mask his government's failings.
Amid the promise to push ahead with ID cards, and the likelihood of a new anti-terrorist package extending the period in which police can hold terror suspects without charge, Northern Ireland and a new climate change bill stood out as potential "legacy" issues for Mr Blair.
However in a sombre intervention Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell said Iraq would define Mr Blair's premiership, just as Suez had defined that of Anthony Eden.
Mr Blair had been characteristically uncompromising when dealing with an intervention from Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond. "The strategy [for British troops] is to go when our job is done," he told Mr Salmond, insisting it would be a tragedy for Iraq if allied troops left before then. The prime minister also asserted that repartition of Iraq "would be disastrous" and that foreign secretary Margaret Beckett had not implied otherwise in a recent newspaper interview.
However Sir Menzies said that, while there had been "many glad confident mornings" during the Blair premiership, this was not one of them. The Lib Dem leader said Mr Blair was too keen to introduce new laws, and reiterated his party's opposition to ID cards as an "expensive and unwarranted intrusion into the lives of British people" with no proven benefit to the fight against terrorism.
Behind the "bland words" in the queen's speech about supporting the Iraqi government, he said, there remained questions about the "flawed prospectus" on which the military action had been launched. Again calling for a phased withdrawal of British troops and "a British foreign policy based on British interests", Sir Menzies told MPs that just as Suez had defined Eden's premiership so "for all his achievements, Iraq will define this prime minister too".
Mr Cameron, meanwhile, was warning Gordon Brown that Iraq would remain an issue after Labour's succession had been settled and would carry into his widely predicted premiership.
The Tory leader said they all had "a profound interest in preventing that country from sliding into further bloodshed".
But while there were no easy options, said Mr Cameron, "the prospect of an open-ended commitment serves neither Iraq's interests nor our own, and anyway is simply not practical".
While against setting "an artificial timetable" for troop withdrawal, Mr Cameron again argued that, once the British mission was complete, the government should agree to an inquiry similar to the Franks report following the Falklands conflict.
Mr Blair rubbished Mr Cameron's suggestion that the Tories were offering a vision of "hope over fear", telling the House true hope was about producing a strong economy, investing in schools and hospitals and tough decision-making, while Mr Cameron had never taken a tough decision in his life.
"I may be going out," said Mr Blair, "but on that performance he's not coming in." Dismissing Mr Cameron as "a flyweight" and again seeming to come close to endorsing Mr Brown as his successor, Mr Blair predicted that the Tory leader faced a knockout from "a big clunking fist" delivered by a Labour "heavyweight" at the next election.