Purpose is something that neither referendum results nor successive election victories can guarantee. Purpose and vision can only be drawn from years of clear and intentional persuasion both of the electorate and of the governing class.
The business inexperience within our political system leads to ill-conceived strategies and ballooning costs that hurt the nation’s fiscal health. Yet government oversight doesn’t have to be synonymous with bureaucracy.
Almost all of the new capabilities have no interaction with our ability to stop the boats. Monitoring is very little use if we and the French have demonstrated we have no willingness to turn a boat around.
It is imperative that future UK governments invest heavily in the work being done by Cameron and Andrew Mitchell, and that this approach to foreign policy and development does not get lost in the likely transition to a Labour government.
A tax holiday and two new bonds could turn a geopolitical crisis into the domestic investment story of a generation. It is the simplest most elegant most patriotic economic policy a government could announce.