The Investigatory Powers Bill questions Cameron's claim to a liberal agenda in this year's Queen's Speech

The proposed legislation has already caused considerable controversy – and this is the second time it has been carried over from the preceding parliamentary session

The Queen arrives to deliver her speech to Parliament, setting out the Government's legislative agenda (Getty)

David Cameron hopes to be remembered as a social reformer, a Prime Minister who took the difficult path of austerity in the face of economic troubles, but who nonetheless made people’s lives better. Some will never be convinced. And should the country vote to leave the EU in next month’s referendum, he will carry a very different legacy with him.

Indeed, it is clear that Europe is the unspoken word at the heart of the latest Queen’s Speech, in which Her Majesty’s Government sought desperately to present a united face.

How else to explain a programme of legislation that endeavours so hard to avoid controversy? On prison reform, the PM and his EU foe, Justice Secretary Michael Gove, made a point of issuing a joint statement.

Perhaps to make us forget the possibility of Brexit, the government presented ambitious plans for the development of spaceplanes and commercial spaceports – why worry about Europe when you can pop to the moon? And who wouldn’t approve of proposals to better protect pension savings.

Sure enough, analysis of the Queen’s Speech has focussed on these efforts to restore party unity, however briefly, and to reinvigorate the PM’s vision of himself as social do-gooder. Yet it is vital to remember that among the bills outlined by the monarch is one that has no place in a 21^st century liberal democracy: the Investigatory Powers Bill.

The proposed legislation has already caused considerable controversy, and this is the second time it has been carried over from the preceding parliamentary session.

The government is determined to press ahead, arguing that Britain’s security services need to be better able to access the digital communications of potential terrorists and other ne’er-do-wells. It contends that revisions to the bill last year took account of concerns raised in the past about its potential to undermine civil liberties.

Yet those assurances are flimsy. While it is true that some of the more striking powers which the bill would grant to our security agencies (data intercepts, for instance) can only be utilised with judicial oversight, at its core the legislation requires broadband providers to retain the internet browsing history of every citizen of the UK.

That is a deeply worrying prospect not only because throws a pall of suspicion over the activities of all law-abiding people, but also because it assumes the vast stores of data which communications firms will be required to maintain are immune to illicit hacking. Bearing in mind recent corporate failures to keep hackers away from sensitive customer data, that is hardly a given.

Naturally the government wishes to present the Investigatory Powers Bill in the context of the fight against global terrorism and the maintenance of security on Britain’s streets.

Indeed, the Queen’s Speech also laid out plans for a new Counter-extremism Bill, which would empower the authorities to ban so-called ‘extremist preachers’. That bill, too, is likely to face opposition for its potential to diminish freedom of speech.

Ministers and their supporters regularly repeat the mantra that these proposed laws have a clear focus and that people who do no wrong have nothing to fear. It is a tediously facile line, which is intended to pooh-pooh the legitimate concerns of those who would resist the drift towards ever greater governmental interference in our private, digital lives.

At its second reading in March, Labour and the SNP allowed the bill’s passage through the Commons by abstaining, although Andy Burnham, the Shadow Home Secretary, highlighted several areas of concern. All thoughts may currently be on the EU referendum but that should not distract opposition parties from giving this bad bill further, rigorous examination.