Stella Tsantekidou column: ‘Nice guys finish first’

Politics is a zero-sum game, we are told. That is why no party will touch the triple lock. You don’t even need to buy a Tory a pint before they admit, privately, that it is madness. But pensioners vote, so that’s that. So when Andy Burnham told conference that from 2030 he would replace it with a double lock, still guaranteeing that pensions rise with inflation or by 2.5 per cent, the reaction was depressing but predictable. “Andy Burnham will cut your pension,” warned Kemi Badenoch’s Tories. He would “abdicate his responsibility to British pensioners,” tutted Nigel Farage. It would “put more pensioners into poverty,” fretted Ed Davey. “Why is the Government going after pensioners?” demanded Zack Polanski, whose own party promised to scrap the triple lock two years ago. God, being a party leader must be exhausting: the itchy wig, breathing through that squeaky red nose, walking around in those massive CLOWN shoes. 

This is the prisoner’s dilemma of British politics. Everyone agrees something needs to happen, but whoever moves first gets punished, so nobody moves. Every party betrays. The whole country loses. To break the deadlock, we need one player willing to cooperate first, and opponents willing to cooperate back.

READ MORE: Stella Tsantekidou column: ‘One quid to rule them all’

Will the clowns win? Is politics a zero-sum game? Does cooperation pay among self-interested players, or does the world reward the mean and the vindictive? In 1980, when AI was still science fiction, the political scientist Robert Axelrod set out to find out. He ran a contest, inviting experts to submit computer programs, each implementing a different strategy in a simple game. Two players each choose to cooperate or to betray. If both cooperate, each gets 3 points. If both betray, each gets 1. But if one betrays while the other cooperates, the betrayer takes 5, and the trusting player gets nothing. If you only play once, it makes sense to betray -– you will always win something. But Axelrod’s programs played each other again and again, around 200 rounds at a time.

The strategies ranged from naive to fiendish. Some were simple; others were elaborate schemes designed to probe, outfox, and exploit their opponents. The winner was the simplest of all. It was called ‘Tit for Tat’. It cooperates on the first move, then simply copies whatever the other player did last time. Betray it, and it betrays you back, once. Cooperate again, and it cooperates again. It holds no grudges; it plays no tricks. Machiavelli, eat your heart out.

Axelrod found the winners had four things in common. They were nice: never the first to betray. They were retaliatory: betrayal was punished immediately; they were no pushovers. They were forgiving: once punishment was given, the slate was wiped clean. And they were clear: simple enough that opponents could learn that cooperating paid off.

Keir Starmer’s Labour was Machiavellian: vindictive, unforgiving and unpredictable, feared but not trusted. He would fall out with MPs over policy disagreements, often even suspending them with no timeline for return, only to U-turn on the policies shortly after, as happened with the two child benefit cap and the Welfare Bill rebellion. He would still be in No. 10 if he had shown goodwill in January when the NEC blocked Andy Burnham from running in Gorton & Denton. His decision to block him cost Labour the seat, gave the Greens the opportunity to show they can win and escalated, rather than tamed, leadership speculations. 

Burnham’s Labour, so far, is game theory. He cooperates first, retaliates only when he must, forgives quickly and lets his enemies defeat themselves. He offered electoral reform and reform of the triple lock in his first conference speech, and let Reform and the Greens fail on their own terms.

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Commentators warn the triple lock move may prove reckless come the next election. You have to play the game you are in, they said, and in an ageing Britain, the pensioner vote is king. It is true that in the short term the game shapes the player, but if game theory teaches us anything, it’s that in the long run it is the players that shape the game. 

On the 26th of September 1983, tensions between the USSR and the USA were at a high. Earlier that month, the Soviets had shot down a Korean aeroplane, killing all 269 people on board. And yet, when Stanislav Petrov, a duty officer at a Moscow command centre, received five consecutive alerts from the early-warning satellite system reporting that the Americans had launched a nuclear missile against the USSR, he dismissed it. Historians still argue about how close the world came to nuclear Armageddon that day. Tit-for-tat can still fail if, in a high-stakes environment, it doesn’t make space for generosity. Within four years, and after another near miss when the Soviets feared a NATO exercise was cover for a real attack, the two sides had set up new centres to stop false alarms and misreadings spiralling, and agreed to scrap an entire class of nuclear missiles. The players, in short, shaped the game. 

Here is what the clowns need to understand: ‘Tit-for-Tat’ never ‘beat’ a single opponent. At best, it drew. It won the tournament because it built more productive relationships than anyone else, while the others’ cunning strategies dragged them down. In politics, the one-to-one games are the tiring daily schemings, the rage-bait clips and the bad-faith arguments. The tournament is the country. As the Tories have learnt, you can win every election and still ruin the country. So let’s make winning count beyond election day. 

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