I have spent years studying Britain from the United States as a proud supporter of the Kingdom. I cheered Brexit, I admire the Special Relationship, and I respect the Crown as the living symbol of British continuity. So when I tune in to the King’s Speech, I do not see it the way Americans see our State of the Union.
In Washington, the president stands up and owns his agenda. In Britain, the monarch is compelled, by constitutional convention, to read out the government’s script. That makes the occasion solemn. It also makes any abuse of it glaring.
This week’s speech was not solemn. It was cynical. Keir Starmer’s collapsing administration hid behind the throne to push through measures many Britons will despise.
The text was not the King’s. It was Labour’s. And Labour’s agenda, delivered in that velvet setting, felt like disrespect to both Crown and country.
Let’s be unsentimental about what was actually said. Digital identity is coming, dressed up as convenience, but raising concerns about technocratic control: a single database potentially enabling greater state tracking and behavioural influence.
There was no clear electoral mandate for measures of this kind. Yet here it is, slipped into the legislative programme of a prime minister whose own party is already sharpening the knives.
At the same time, the speech confirmed the quiet re-entry into the European regulatory orbit. Swathes of EU rules will be adopted without a single parliamentary vote.
This is rejoining by stealth, the back-door reversal of the referendum result that Starmer once pretended to accept. Britain’s sovereignty, hard-won in 2016, is being nibbled away again, and the Commons is being bypassed. That is not governance. It is contempt for the democratic settlement.
Then came the familiar obsessions. Net Zero dogma, untouched by reality. Selective identity politics that weeps for some victims and shrugs at others.
The speech spoke of giving every child “a chance to succeed” and not being held back by poverty or lack of respect for vocational education. Fine words.
Meanwhile, British girls continue to be groomed and abused in towns the authorities long ignored, and the speech had nothing to say about the men and boys who make up eighty per cent of homicide victims.
The priorities are clear: certain protected groups matter; the rest are statistics.
Welfare reform, the one issue that could actually tackle the explosion in Universal Credit claims, was nowhere to be seen. Migrant numbers and border control, the daily concern of ordinary Britons, were airbrushed out.
Instead, the government will tinker with speech laws, jury trials, and the ancient safeguards that stretch back to Magna Carta, risking erosion of longstanding constitutional protections.
This is the same administration that has already shown what some describe as two-tier justice and raised concerns among critics about how criticism of Islam is increasingly treated as a public-order issue. Dissent is being reclassified as disorder.
All of this was delivered while the regime itself is visibly disintegrating. Nearly a hundred Labour MPs are said to want Starmer gone. Senior ministers are manoeuvring in plain sight.
The King’s Speech was meant to act as a constitutional fireguard after the local-election drubbing. It failed. The prime minister sat there looking like a man who knows the game is up.
The King's Speech was an insult to crown and country because the PM intended it to be - Lee Cohen
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The faces around him were funereal. A lame-duck leader, loathed by his own side and the country at large, was using the pageantry of Parliament to ram through a misguided programme before the roof caves in.
From my vantage point in America, this looks less like a governing agenda and more like the manifesto of a failing ideological clique.
Starmer sits at the extreme end of the spectrum: willing to rule without listening to cabinet, willing to undo a national referendum, willing to erode constitutional protections that predate the United States by centuries.
He has form on free-speech restrictions and on ignoring the concerns of the very working-class voters Labour once claimed to represent. The result is the slow tightening of bureaucratic control dressed in royal robes.
Sovereignty, the Crown, and the will of the people are not abstract slogans. They are the guardrails that keep your nation free.
This speech tested those guardrails and found them inconvenient. So the government simply stepped around them.
I say this without pleasure.
Britain remains the indispensable European partner for the United States, the one country that still understands the value of independence and alliance without submission. I want Britain strong, self-governing, and confident again.
That future is not compatible with digital serfdom, EU regulatory creep, or a prime minister who treats the monarchy as a convenient ventriloquist’s dummy.
The King read the words he was required to read. The country heard something else entirely: a failing government trying to lock in its ideology before the electorate throws it out.
The real test will come when the British people, not the scriptwriters in Downing Street, get their say. Until then, the rest of us will keep watching, and we will call it exactly what it is.