This week's Queen's speech opening the legislative session of the Westminster parliament will only be remembered for the fact the Queen was unable to attend.

This was a sad reminder of time passing, but beyond that the event was a classic damp squib. It confirmed that the government lacks radical ideas to tackle the economic crisis gripping families and businesses. There was more bluff than a poker player raising the stakes knowing their hand is precipitously weak.

The government suggested the solution to the inflation crisis lay in building a high skills, high wage economy. That may be true, but it is an economic fact of life that this is a plan that takes years to deliver dividends. The crisis it needs to solve is evident on supermarket shelves and fuel station forecourts now and in headlines when the monthly inflation rate is published.

This was not just kicking the ball into touch, but out of the grounds. Ironically as it was promising a high skills future, the government, through its policies on green issues and trade, seems intent on destroying agriculture. It already ticks those boxes and is potentially as globally competitive now as when British agriculture dominated the world from the 1850s onwards. Chasing dreams is no substitute for realising it is better to build on what you already have.

The UK is not alone in chasing a green nirvana in agriculture. The EU is doing the same, but while acknowledging that after 65 years the CAP still has to be centred on delivering food security. It has plans to increase self-reliance in food and inputs, but is still stuck with a mindset that this can be achieved while trying to get 30% of production organic by 2030.

This is not going to happen because of Ukraine, but politicians are sticking to that policy, while knowing it is undeliverable if the main goal is food security in an uncertain world. That is what mature debate is about, but it is sadly lacking at Westminster.

Often political debate goes back to the tale of the young boy pointing out the nakedness of the great emperor. That leapt to mind when I read a quote in The SF from NFU Scotland's Martin Kennedy, stressing the need for an agricultural policy that delivers for the environment and not the other way around. This needs to be written on walls in London and Brussels, but sadly it is logic lost in the green mist eclipsing the need for food security in an uncertain world.

The London government's approach when things are going wrong is to raise the bogeyman of the EU. Despite being out of the EU and insisting that no matter what followed it 'delivered Brexit', this dead horse got another flogging this week. The promise was of a bonfire of EU regulations, ending legislation carried over when leaving the EU.

The claim was that this would free businesses and people from red tape. The flaw with this is that it was not the EU that created red tape but how British officials gold-plated EU rules. All that has changed is that those officials are now doing the same while working from home, despite the government insisting they join the rest of the world back in work.

This bonfire of regulations will probably be like previous bonfires of quangos that failed to light. Proof that the red tape the government blames on the EU was self-inflicted by civil servants is clear when the bureaucratic burden of UK agriculture and any EU member state is compared. This, like the high skills economy solution to an immediate crisis, is a case of modest scores for bluff and sound bites but zero for logic.

In all the Westminster waffle of the legislative programme there was one nugget worth having. This was the commitment to ease regulations in gene editing. This is an area where the government can steal a march on the EU by encouraging positive science to deliver worthwhile outcomes. This will demand time, money and commitment while ignoring the naysayers that will come out to protest against it. The government does not have a great track record of seeing these people down, so if it wants gene editing to deliver it must make this happen by getting on with the job rather than endless public consultations that have been the downfall of every radical and good idea in Britain.