No one wants to hear it but there are no silver bullet solutions.
The very phrase “a silver bullet” originates from a made-up solution for ridding yourself of a mythical creature!
However, witches and were-wolves aside, let’s assume those that believe in metaphorical silver bullets mean quick, simple, fixes to complex problems. The phrase also implies, wilfully or lazily, that one single solution will resolve all difficulties.
The truth is, success is actually best achieved through a multitude of individually unimpressive small shots rather than a single bullet. Like I say nobody wants to hear that and politicians don’t want to say that – but they should. The Conservatives should.
However, and Tories have to accept their part in this, disappointment with the Conservatives in Government, and the recognition that Labour are even worse, is leading voters to eye the silver bullet with ever growing desire.
Reform UK, whose threat to the Tories, I have never dismissed, have a box full of silver ammunition ready to fire in Government. Kemi Badenoch has taken the harder but correct road of telling the truth – these things don’t work. My old boss once said in a Home Office meeting something I wrote down so we could repeat it to anyone who offered their magic silver bullets – even from Conservative back benchers:
“Every time I’m told there’s a simple and quick solution to a problem, I tell them ‘it won’t be simple, and it won’t be quick, because if it’s either – I’ll bet you it’s not a solution’”
Now plenty of politicians, especially those in Reform – and frankly Labour in the latter days of their being the opposition – always counter with “that’s just a lack of political will to get things done”
I have a well thought out and experienced answer to that:
“Phooey!”
Government ideally should be a Nike advert – but “Just do it!” isn’t how it works – even when it works the way it should.
It goes to the heart of a long held view, even before Labour started floundering in office and proving the point, that the system we have right now manages rather than adopts the political will of a Government, and too often falls back into the risk averse, legally jumpy comfort zone that frustrates any change – especially anything ‘simple and quick’.
It’s not so much wilful frustration from Machiavellian ‘Sir Humphreys’ but more a creative inertia because changing things is challenging, scary and difficult. But it’s going to have to be tackled by whoever next takes power. They way to encourage better co-operation is making the solutions, though challenging credible and workable.
It’s also why, given the polls, increasing scrutiny of Reform’s ability to do that needs to be applied.
We’re all learning the hard way, that Labour who promised much, can’t. I’d never have imagined that in the early months of this Government, some of those inside it would privately concede “Cummings was right”
I don’t know about Dominic Cummings’ eyesight, but his foresight in diagnosing the problem of why Whitehall and Westminster don’t meld efficiently to provide agile and excellent governing has always been sharp. He knows what to break, however his solutions are either debateable or he never got to prove they worked.
Also in his latest interview with Sky, he says he’s explained things to Nigel Farage, which would be giving Reform at least some idea of what it is Farage is so easily promising to fix.
Labour’s problem is trying to fix a car while it’s moving, which is nigh-on impossible. Reform’s problem (dismissed every time by their voluble supporters in our comment section) is they’ve never driven the car, so don’t know how it’s going wrong and where exactly it needs the fix.
The Tories’ problem? I’m not going to try to dodge that bullet. Their problem is there are seen, by voters, and too many of their own supporters as having driven the car so badly, a significant number aren’t keen on letting them get behind the wheel again, having confiscated the keys in July.
Kemi’s job is to land the idea there’s a new driver with a new direction based on fixing the issues that made the car run off the road in the first place. I’ll bet though, the layout of any dynamic plan to fix this problem is more likely to look like the schematics of a hadron collider than a lump of precious metal in a cartridge.
That’s why, in the face of howls of disapproval, it makes sense for the Tories to eschew any silver bulletry, call foul on those that sell it, do the patient thinking about what to do next and tell the truth. Fixing this is going to take hard truths, bold ideas, and dogged work. Anything else is a dose of blind hope and snake oil. And will prove to be so.
I’ll take just one example, and make no apology for it’s repetition.
No Rishi Sunak’s government did not ‘Stop the Boats’.
He’s admitted he should never have promised to. He had too short a time and despite a real focus on it across government and doing an awful lot better than Labour are now, in the end reductions weren’t good enough.
The solution will be, whoever cracks it: a credible deterrent and breaking the business model of the people smugglers. And it will take time. Labours proposals will not deliver that result as they avoid the pull factors of why people are risking everything they own, even their lives, to cross.
It needs equal focus on an asylum system that can process and remove quickly – something we didn’t solve. Maybe that does require boldness on the ECHR – but the Party has not ruled that pathway out.
What it won’t be is ‘the Navy picking up dinghies’, a border force with ‘powers to pick up migrants at sea and drag them back to France’. There is not a single qualified skipper in the UK that can be ordered to do that without the risk of losing their licence for breaking International Safety of Life at Sea laws and then set about entering French territorial waters who will uphold that law even if we somehow didn’t.
There have even been people who’ve whispered solutions that would end all crossings, by ending lives.
Either accept mass deaths in the channel isn’t an option or stand up and clearly say you favour that.
Sorry, no bullets, silver or otherwise.
The litany of other suggestions last year from some in Reform involved destroying the dinghies at sea and letting people ‘swim’ back to France, or announcing boats would ferry anyone from Dover straight back to Calais. Sounds simple, but that won’t happen unless the French agree. Besides, tackling this on beaches, whilst necessary, is just ‘goal line defence’ – it also has to be done much further inland, before people gather along the 62 miles of coastline to be policed.
Apparently the received narrative is that unprecedented levels of illegal crossings (predictions of 50,000 this year) is ‘down to lots of good weather’ despite bad weather being used to dismiss our reducing crossings when in power. Nigel Farage even tweeted at the time that Tory results in reducing numbers were mythical because he’d been in his garden ‘close to Dover’ (not that close in fact) and it was ‘windy’.
The facts are year on year good weather days and bad weather days tend to even out.
‘Small boats’ is just one example where the silver bullet is a chimera. So far nothing has been suggested since Labour entered office that will solve this problem quickly or simply.
Having been booted out partly because they didn’t, the Conservatives are right to take their time to come up with a credible and workable solution, because they know what the obstacles really are.
They must also honestly but relentlessly shoot down any other hostage-to-fortune moon-on-a-stick stuff that will sink on first contact with reality.
