Experimental Politics

There have been a few encouraging signs from the current experiments at the Experimental Politics Collider in Westminster where political scientists have been experimenting with coalition politics.

As even the laypersons amongst us have realised by now, having only one party of whatever stripe in charge, no matter how nominal, of the country results in ideological disaster as the whole experiment grinds to a halt through the build up of contradictions when political ideology and reality inevitably come into collision with each other.

However, political theorists have long predicted that if experimental voters run two parties into each other at the speed of legislation, then there is the –theoretical - hope that a tiny particle of commonsense may result, even if – as the theory currently suggests - that particle only lasts for a split second in the antagonistic media atmosphere that surrounds parliamentary politics. There is hope that the existence of such a rare particle anywhere near the politics field could demonstrate that it may – in the future – be possible to construct some kind of political field that does turn out to cause less damage to the political environment than the current system. Not only that, some political theorists believe that politics could – at least, theoretically - actually be used for the good of mankind, rather than the mere furtherance of political careers.

Although, at the moment, experimental politics is still under a bit of a cloud after the massive failure of the Blair and Brown claims that they could create Cold Socialism in a flask. Claiming they could create a so-called third way without Socialism destroying the hand of enterprise that feeds it, while at the same time getting rid of the boom/bust cycle, and without the consequent heavy pollution that attempts to create communism left all over Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

However, those New labour claims turned out to be about as effective as the old alchemist trick of trying to turn urine into gold*.

 

*Although, to be fair, one European alchemist in the middle ages managed to perfect the art of turning cat’s piss into lager.