If Only

Last weekend, I went to see “If Only”, a play by David Edgar about the politics surrounding the formation of the coalition and a subdued appeal for the political parties to rediscover their identities; identity destroyed by triangulation.

If Only

Triangulation is a political strategy used mainly by social democratic parties and the US Democrats, of moving to the right and forcing your opponents to differentiate themselves by moving further to the right. It’s extremely cynical and extremely dangerous. However, if it’s just about winning, it clearly worked for a number of years for the Labour Party, isolating the Tories under the leadership of Major, Hague, Howard and Duncan-Smith. The danger in this strategy is that many of those who genuinely agree with the policies abandoned have no-one to represent them in the national political debate; the left in society become politically voice-less. A further danger is that neither the acolytes of triangulation nor their supporters believe in what is being said and promised by politicians, it reinforces the slur that all politicians are liars by making it the truth. …

Once a ravine, now a ditch

I also discovered that Enron experimented with trading in weather and I’m not sure what they did, but its reminiscent of some ideas expressed in James Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds” where he explored the remarkable prescience of the University of Iowa’s Electronic Markets for the prediction of political events, most obviously elections but also other political futures. I read somewhere, during the last general election, that the most effective forecast for the result was the bookmaker’s odds, this must be very disappointing to the polling organisations, but it seems a financial interest sharpens the mind.  …