Targets against which one can never fail?

Tweet

 

Sometimes governments choose the targets that define their success or failure, sometimes the indicators of success are chosen by others, and often they just somehow become part of the collective consciousness as if by magic. One of the most potent of current indicators in that last category is that the UK government is considered a failure because it is led by Rishi Sunak. However, if Sunak is replaced in a coup by another member of his party, it will be judged a failure because it is led by someone other than Rishi Sunak. None of that is either fair nor rational, but collective consciousness is no slave to either fairness or rationality.

The man himself is keen to choose his own indicators of success or failure, although to date he’s shown that his success rate in choosing targets that he can actually achieve is somewhat wanting. Unless his objective was to mirror Cnut, and demonstrate the limits of his powers, he’s succeeded in showing only how bad his judgement of what he can do really is. It could be a cunning plan to turn himself into the underdog. He’s probably read somewhere that ‘the British’ love an underdog, but failed to understand that it’s one of those claimed values which really is no longer true, even if it ever was. In the real world, more people mock underdogs than sympathise with them; that’s just one of the cultural ‘successes’ of his party since the 1980s.

It is remarkable, though, that all the targets he chooses against which he wants to be judged share one amazing characteristic, which is that when the numbers are moving in the ‘wrong’ direction it’s all a result of global trends and matters outside the government’s control, but when they’re moving in the ‘right’ direction it’s down to firm and resolute government action, following a ‘plan’ which does no more than state the desired outcome with no actions identified to achieve it.

Take his oft-repeated mantra of ‘stop the boats’. In June last year, when the number of people crossing La Manche in small boats was temporarily lower than in the previous year, the PM was quick to claim that it was nothing at all to do with the bad weather at the time, it was all down to the actions being taken by the government – actions which basically consisted of trying and failing to deport a random small selection of people to central Africa. This year, with the numbers going up again, suddenly it seems that it is the weather which is to blame after all.

Then there’s inflation. When it went up, it was all about war in Ukraine and other far-away events, but when it came down again, it was all down to government action, although one would be hard pressed to find a government minister prepared to identify precisely which government actions led to reduced inflation. ‘Sticking to the plan’ when the plan consists only of a desired end point hardly counts as ‘action’ for most users of language.

Or economic growth. In the few recent months when there has been any, it’s been a result of unspecified government actions, but when there hasn’t been any – or even when it’s been negative – it’s a result of global factors which allegedly affect every other country as well, just as long as no-one looks too closely at the figures.

One could see this as an example of Sunak’s brilliance in selecting measures against which he can only ever succeed, because any and every failure is down to things outside his control. Occam might suggest a simpler and more plausible explanation which doesn’t require this mystical property to exist at all, merely the identification of mendacity.