Following the success of dynamic pricing, for example in the recent sales of tickets to Oasis gigs, the Labour Party has announced it’s introducing dynamic policymaking.
The system, which increases ticket prices when it detects a high level of demand, came to the attention of a Labour minister who was about to go on Desert Island Discs, and was googling the names of some pop groups to pretend he liked. He immediately saw how it could be applied to policymaking.
“Instead of estimating how much bands can raise ticket prices without losing sales, it could measure the popularity of different policies - which ones would please the most voters, and piss off the fewest. And crucially, how much we could piss them off before we lost their votes.”
However, he refused to confirm that the recent decision to please the unions by giving train drivers a huge pay rise, while cutting the winter fuel allowance to pensioners to pay for it, had been made on this basis - whilst indicating with a wink and a cheeky smile that yes, obviously, it had.
“It’s turned the traditional wisdom on its head,” he grinned. “We used to think the grey vote was sacrosanct - pensioners always vote, so we have to keep them sweet. But this system can predict how many of them won’t make it to the next election. And look, you see how the number goes up if we cut their fuel allowance? Hang on, let me check what happens if we cut housing benefit too…”
Some Labour backbenchers were uneasy with the idea of such important decisions being left to a machine, but were eventually persuaded that when the alternative was Keir Starmer making them, was that really a significant difference?
“That’s the best thing of all about the system,” enthused Starmer. “Instead of me having to let down, say, pensioners who don’t want to freeze to death, Angela Rayner can just tell them ‘Computer says no’, and then cough in their faces.”
Image: Frantisek_Krejci - Pixabay