On the morning after the 2015 General Election, approaching my eleventh birthday, I gave an impassioned speech to my teacher and classmates on the devastation that was sure to follow David Cameron’s election victory. My words were laden with quasi-apocalyptic themes. To name just one premonition, I claimed that the NHS was bound to collapse and that people who needed medical care would simply be left to die – a forecast based on years of austerity implemented by the Coalition government. At the same time, I declared that this could have been solved if only Labour had won instead; Labour were a magic bullet we had missed out on.
There are major issues within the United Kingdom, and they require multifaceted and complex solutions. Yet, UK politicians, on both sides of the spectrum, mirror the approach I took when I was eleven – they oversimplify problems to an extreme degree. Rishi Sunak promises to ‘stop the boats’ and Sir Keir Starmer guarantees a ‘decade of national renewal’, with such promises readily received by the population. Starmer has in fact gone further; Labour’s election campaign was effectively reduced to just one word – ‘change’. To play on a creation of George Orwell, we live in an era of magic bullet speak.
By magic bullet speak, I mean that our political discourse has become dominated by references to quick fixes and simple solutions. Such discourse doesn’t match reality. The actual policies required to confront political challenges require a level of complexity that, at the very least, attempts to match the intricacy of the problems at hand. Yet the current presentation of those policies, to the general public and the media, creates the illusion of politicians possessing magic bullets.
There are two problems with magic bullet speak. Firstly, more often than not it will only ever lead to disappointment amongst the public. If solutions are always presented as quick, cheap and easily achievable, then it is no surprise that people struggle to understand why proposed solutions are frequently unsuccessful. Many proposed solutions simply fail, and even if they work, they often become far more costly (both financially and temporally) than originally suggested. Nearly a decade and a half after David Cameron promised to reduce net migration to the ‘tens of thousands a year…no ifs, no buts’, the figure is instead at all-time highs. The anger over the failure is palpable. More and more voters are shunning the major parties and turning to more extreme alternatives, such as Reform UK, who gained over four million votes at the General Election. To its intended audience, magic bullet speak is attractive and exciting at first. It often feels hopeful and provides a dose of positivity in an often bleak political climate. When it is, inevitably, realised that no magic bullets exist, however, there are understandable feelings of dissatisfaction and betrayal. It fuels an already potent distrust between politicians and populations, leading some voters to turn to greater political extremes, a trend Starmer has claimed he is trying to halt.
Secondly, and relatedly, magic bullet speak leads to problems being (often completely unfairly) blamed on public servants, and frustrates genuine and honest attempts by committed civil servants to combat the problems at hand. Politicians, unable to admit to the electorate that the magic bullets they claimed to possess do not actually exist, often attempt to pin the blame on institutional players. Such a strategy is tempting given the nature of government bureaucracies; they tend to be large, expensive and their members are relatively unknown to the general public. Further, the Civil Service must act impartially and so public responses refuting the blame placed on them by politicians are unlikely. Essentially, the Civil Service is a convenient scapegoat that lacks the right of reply. After her disastrous minibudget aimed at quickly achieving rapid economic growth, Liz Truss pinned the blame on the (independent) Bank of England and HM Treasury officials rather than accept that her policy was not a magic bullet for growth after all.
This blame game ought to concern anyone genuinely interested in solving political problems. Kenneth Meier’s claim that government bureaucracies are ‘storehouses of expertise’ who are ‘highly responsive to legitimate political demands’ is correct, but often unacknowledged by the public and politicians alike. Any politician wanting to find and implement effective solutions will have to listen to and work with the Civil Service, but that vital relationship will only be strained by magic bullet speak and the ensuing blame game.
It is time to bring some moderation back into our discussions about the problems the world faces. Moderation is not particularly thrilling and lacks the short term appeal of magic bullet speak, but it is not boring or meaningless either. People often mistake being moderate with being apathetic, insincere or constantly taking the middle ground, but that is not the case. Always striving to take a moderate, honest, well thought out and comprehensive position, is an extreme in itself, even if such an approach sometimes results in silence, delayed action and lack of clear policy prescriptions. The idea of moderation as a virtue is not new – Aristotle makes the point in his Nichomachean Ethics – but there ought to be new attempts to instil it in our political discourse. It is all very well to make impassioned speeches, and there is a place for those, but a healthy dose of moderation would do the world some good too. Some progress seems to be being made in this regard. Rachel Reeves’ recent statement to the Commons about the state of public finances, which she claimed were worse than expected, plainly laid out that the government would have to make ‘difficult decisions’. The Chancellor’s statement included very little positivity at all. Reeves offered no magic bullets. I am sure her former colleagues at the Bank of England appreciate her honesty, and the public should do too.
My 11 year old self grew out of magic bullet speak. It’s time for politicians to abandon it too, and instead start to more effectively, comprehensively and collaboratively talk, and tackle, the issues the country faces. I doubt that Starmer uses magic bullet speak in meetings with the civil service, given his record as a details man. All I am asking is that he, and others, export that approach to their more public interactions. The Chancellor set the right tone recently. Hopefully the rest of Starmer’s ‘government of service’ will stay the course, even when magic bullet speak appears a politically more favourable option.