Sharing the magic

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August is generally known in political circles as the silly season; a time when there is a lack of hard political stories to fill the news. Nature, however, abhors a vacuum, and fortunately both the Tories and the Labour Party have people on hand to make vacuous statements to fill the gap. I’m not entirely sure who got there first, Braverman or Streeting, but both seem to have chosen the Bank Holiday Monday as the ideal occasion to put forward their own version of magical thinking.

Streeting, for Labour, promised that patients would be able to see the GP of their choice rather than the one who happened to be in the surgery at the time, although how he plans to co-ordinate the timing of people’s illnesses with the GP’s holidays and days off was left unstated. Probably wisely. Implementing this policy will not, apparently, require any extra resource. Instead, those surgeries meeting the promise will be given extra financial incentives for doing so, and those incentives will be paid for by reducing the cash given to the surgeries who fail to comply. There is a rather obvious logical flaw in the argument: if you’re paying some doctors to provide this service by penalising those doctors who don’t, delivering the ‘promise’ to some people depends, inherently, on not delivering it to others. Still, why bother with mere maths when you can work magic on this scale.

Braverman, for the Tories, promised that police forces will follow all reasonable leads in investigating all crimes, rather than failing to investigate some at all. She also subscribes to the same sort of magical thinking, somehow believing that restoring some of the police numbers cut since her party entered government in 2010 will enable the police to provide a better service than that which they were under-resourced to provide before her party got its hands on government. I’m not sure how politically wise it is to present the days before her party came to power as a policing success story (particularly since it wasn’t), but then political wisdom and Braverman are not really words which belong in the same sentence. It’s also not entirely clear that her promise is any more universally applicable than that coming from Streeting – there will be many who will have at least a sneaking suspicion that suspected crimes allegedly perpetrated by a better class of criminal will remain less than fully investigated.

We probably shouldn’t take anything either of them says too seriously, though. In Streeting’s case, based on recent history, his leader will have reversed the policy within a month or so anyway, and in Braverman’s case she really isn’t expecting to be around long enough to implement anything – it has more to do with the leadership election expected in the wake of the next election. Assuming that the next general election is held in May next year – which is what many observers seem to expect – next year’s silly season could well be devoted to (yet another) Tory leadership election and, in celebration of the season, the silliest candidate might even win.