I Simulated the First Years of Every Party in Britain in a Video Game, and the Results Were Terrible | Games

INWhether they’re called manifestos or agreements, the documents published by political parties before an election tend to be less substantial than their many pages would suggest. They’re full of best-case scenarios, undetailed proposals and dubious costs, and it’s hard to imagine what impact each party would have on Britain if they went ahead with their proposals. So I poured party literature into the political strategy video game Democracy 4 to see how these policies might pan out. The results were… well, you’ll see.

Democracy 4 lets you play out your political fantasies (or nightmares) to see the impact of your choices and, ultimately, whether you can be re-elected. Using publicly available data, developer Positech Games has modeled various democratic countries, including the UK, with approximate state and private institutions, government policies, and taxes. Thousands of virtual voters live in this simulation. In the UK, most citizens consider themselves capitalists, but they can also be middle-income, wealthy, or poor, farmers, commuters, or self-employed. Each country has a different composition of the virtual population: the application of a carbon tax policy in the US, where many citizens are very car-conscious, will disappoint more voters than in Japan, where most people use public transport.

While Democracy 4 may not be an exact simulation of the political circus in 2024 Britain (honestly, what could be?), it does allow us to broadly follow the plans of each of the main parties and see who they benefit, who they annoy, and most importantly, whether they achieve anything at all.

Because Democracy 4 does not model Scotland and Wales separately, it is not possible to replicate the specifics of the SNP and Plaid Cymru plans. I have focused on the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats. To be fair, in each simulation the parties take power on 5 July with a slim 10% majority, facing the same economic challenges. Can Labour solve the underfunding in every area of ​​society by growing the UK economy? Will the Conservatives’ tax cuts boost business? And will the Liberal Democrats’ wealth taxes and investment in public services close the country’s debt deficit?

The short answer to all these questions is no, but the way these failures have played out really illustrates the scale of the challenge facing the party that takes power at Westminster on 5 July.

The Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are all putting the economy first, referring to the cost of living crisis and the state of the country’s finances in the opening paragraphs of their manifestos. This is no surprise, as Tom Waters, deputy director of the IFS, recently commented: “The UK has fallen from being one of the fastest growing countries before the Great Recession to being one of the weakest.”

Democracy 4 represents this stagnation with a situation called the Uncompetitive Economy, which acts as a constant drain on the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the happiness of British capitalists (who, as mentioned, make up the majority of the population). In order for the parties to solve this problem, their planned tax cuts, investments and new policies must create high-paying jobs.

The sluggish economy is not the only problem facing the next British government; more than a decade of borrowing has left the country with a mountain of debt, and interest payments are taking up a large chunk of tax revenue. This deficit must be reduced so that people’s taxes can be spent on public services. The Conservatives aim to reduce the national debt and stimulate the economy by cutting taxes and spending. Labour hopes to solve the problem by deepening the pool from which it can draw tax revenues. The Liberal Democrats plan to raise taxes on the wealthy.

At the start of each party’s term in Parliament, I will reflect the costs of the manifesto as faithfully as possible in tax cuts and spending increases. For the Conservatives, this means cutting national insurance contributions and the number of civil servants across the state sector; for Labour, I will implement tax policies that target the same people affected by closing loopholes on non-residents and VAT on private schools; and for the Liberal Democrats, a big tax on banks, corporations, technology companies and the aerospace industry, combined with huge investment in state health and social services.

All parties are hoping for £5 billion or more to be raised from tackling tax avoidance. While this seems like a policy that will only hit the very rich, in reality, according to the IFS, it will hit taxpayers at every level. I replicated this with a tax that hit the Everybody demographic and I can tell you they were not happy about it.

Each turn in Democracy 4 advances the timeline by three months, and party policies have an immediate impact. Increased investment in the NHS and policing has led to higher healthcare levels and lower crime rates; all three parties have also seen a reduction in poverty. Perhaps good times are finally coming to Britain.

Unfortunately, bad times have come. After prison budget cuts, the Conservatives found themselves embroiled in a prison overcrowding crisis (just right, if you believe HM Prison and Probation Service officials) and crime rates rose again. The Liberal Democrats saw GDP start to fall, prompting international agencies to downgrade the country’s credit rating and raise interest rates on its debt, and Labour saw an airline go bankrupt, hitting business confidence.

As the months passed, other parties joined the Liberal Democrats in the CCC credit rating. It wasn’t long before British business proved how fickle it could be. Advisers began to warn me of a growing corporate exodus.

Corporate exodus occurs when stability and productivity are low, business taxes are high, or, in the case of the Liberal Democrats, both. Once it begins, GDP falls and capitalist voters become enraged, deepening Britain’s already strained finances.

In Democracy 4, at least, it seems that big business is on the verge of leaving the UK if its profits are threatened. This dynamic sheds some light on the tax policies of the Conservatives and Labour: whoever comes to power, in order to hope to bring down the mountain of government debt, cannot risk one big business leaving the country and moving beyond the reach of HMRC. The country is one false step away from entering an economic spiral ending in a debt crisis.

Much of this election has focused on the party’s economic plans, which are the focus of most of its new policies. Funding in other sectors, such as education, remains broadly similar: Labour has pledged to employ 6,500 new teachers, but as the BBC’s Nick Robinson noted in an interview with Keir Starmer on Panorama, this means only one new teacher for every three schools.

Unfortunately, Democracy 4 believes that maintaining the current standard of our schools creates further economic problems. Both the Conservatives and Labour have faced a skills shortage because, despite creating highly skilled jobs through investment, schools have failed to produce the students who could benefit from them.

By investing heavily in schools, the Liberal Democrats were the only party to improve education. However, because of the tax they introduced on technology companies and businesses, highly skilled workers had no highly skilled jobs to fill. Britain was in danger of becoming a technological backwater.

The result for each party was a reduction in GDP, an increase in the debt deficit, a downgrade in the country’s credit rating and a corporate exodus. Democracy 4 may be just a sketch of Britain, but it underlines how closely the country’s services are intertwined.

Ironically, the poor economy and high unemployment levels caused illegal immigration to fall for all three parties. Legal immigration as well. Emigration, however, increased. Basically, nobody wanted to live in the UK.

At the end of each party’s five years in office, it was not a pretty picture, economically or electorally. Economic success for all three parties would have meant falling public debt, rising incomes and reducing the deficit. None of them did, although there was one that did least badly. Under the Conservatives, the deficit rose by just over £7 billion to £42.9 billion, which seems a lot. But under Labour it more than doubled to £74.66 billion – still a pittance compared to the Liberal Democrats, who rose to £95.7 billion.

All three parties were wiped out at the 2029 election. Labour came last with 13.6% of the vote, followed by the Conservatives with 14.6%. The Liberal Democrats, despite a slumping economy, secured 22.3% of the vote as the country saw significant improvements in healthcare and education under their leadership.

Democracy 4 is not a prediction of the future. It is impossible to produce a comparable version of every manifesto policy, nor to accurately reflect the cuts and reorganisations proposed by the parties for every part of the public sector, nor how the ruling party will respond to the challenges that arise. All I have done is crunch the numbers and see how things pan out. Nevertheless, the game illustrates the scale of the problems in the UK and how significant the challenge will be to cut, grow or invest in them to get out of them. If you think you can do it better than any of the main parties, why not try?