WE can’t be entirely sure when the concept of “gaming” was first used to convey cynical manipulation in the political realm. In this year’s Scottish election it’s been used to label the tactics of Alba in seeking to gain an independence “supermajority” through second votes in the Holyrood lists. This was always an over-simplification, though, that owed more to deep personal disdain of Alex Salmond by some commentators and those MSPs daft enough to run with it.

“Gaming” or manipulating the machinery of politics to secure a desired outcome has been with us for centuries. Take a look at the party lists right now and ask yourself why the names of so many party grandees lurk there rather than in the constituency contests? The list system itself is a form of democratic manipulation.

Prior to the 1832 Great Reform Act, the Tories gamed what threads of democracy that then existed by using Rotten Boroughs to maintain power. Indeed, what we understand as the modern democratic process where no votes can be bought and all of us are equal in the privacy of a polling booth is gamed shamelessly.

You might have thought that, for better or worse, the party that wins the most seats is mandated to govern for the next term. It’s just that for the next four or five years large corporations and very rich individuals spend large sums of money rendering the concept of voting equality redundant.

Our ability to influence the policies and attitudes of the political classes ends when we’ve cast our ballot. It’s at that point that the work of capitalism to tilt the level playing field a little in its direction is just beginning. Throughout a single parliamentary term all political parties market what power they possess for the purposes of selling access to those with the money and motivation to pay for it.

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All their policies are “gamed” too. You might think that before a policy becomes a white paper and then a parliamentary bill that the chief motivation behind it lies in a belief that it’s true to the overarching political philosophy of the party of government. Well, perhaps. But if you think they haven’t also “gamed” it to destruction, then you’re deluding yourself.

This is when parties seek the paths of least resistance and avoid having to be “courageous”. What will play well in the country right now; what will the bosses of The Times, The Telegraph, The Sun and the Daily Mail think of it? What do we know about the BBC’s new head of news and current affairs? Can someone pencil in a lunch date with

Sir Rupert at Wholesale Comestibles to make sure he and his £1 million cheques are onside too?

If, as numerous independent reports suggest, Boris Johnson found it preferable to have bodies piling up than enter a second lockdown he and others in, his advisors will have gamed this too. How many bodies will be acceptable? Can someone provide a list of key marginals together with their health and wellbeing stats? We don’t want too many dead bodies in these places.

Perhaps they constructed a colour-coded flow chart which attached a nominal value to each dead body. For instance, a stiff in South Kensington might be worth three points and be coloured red to denote “avoid at any cost”. One in, oh I don’t know, let’s say Sedgefield might be worth two points and coloured green (no great mischief if it falls). And in Glasgow or North Lanarkshire, well they’re always bloody dying of something up there, Covid or not. Half a point.

Why do we become especially outraged that a Conservative prime minister might view the pandemic in such a ruthlessly stark fashion? This, after all, is the distillation of the social policies of all the Tory governments there have ever been.

When you let the free market dictate your entire political philosophy, you’re effectively conferring the concept of herd immunity upon all social, educational and health agendas. It results in the survival of the fittest.

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IT pre-programmes all systems to ensure a specific and desired outcome: that those with money and influence (earned or unearned) will annexe a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth. Or, in the brutal reality of a lethal pandemic, ensure that they are best placed to survive.

If you’re living in a large residence with its own grounds, you’ll be far more able to see out the lockdown and escape infection than if you live on a council estate in Liverpool in over-crowded accommodation and little access to fresh air.

The prevalence of the private sector in health and education already gerrymanders the life prospects of British people to guarantee that only the right sort will advance to the most influential and best-paid positions in public life.

This can be observed in its most egregious form in the British Armed Forces. A recent Sutton Trust report showed that people from private schools are seven times more likely to reach officer class. If there’s one area of life where you want merit and ability to determine who gets to make the big decisions it’s surely in the realm of defence where, quite literally, many thousands of lives may turn on the decision of a commander in the field.

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In peacetime, the Conservatives’ ideology of austerity has, quite literally, led to unimaginable suffering and premature death in Britain’s most deprived neighbourhoods. When the adherents of this doctrine were making their plans to cast it in law they will have taken into account the numbers and nature of those who would be hit hardest by it. Likewise the hostile environment created by Theresa May’s administration to make life literally insufferable for refugees and migrants who had fled death and torture in their countries of origin only to find it practised in the UK, but in a more subtle form. Both of these were born of an ideology that was entirely comfortable in accepting “the bodies pile high in their thousands”. Just so long as they’re the right sort of bodies.

So let’s get real here and refrain from expressing too much outrage at Boris Johnson’s reported remarks. There aren’t enough of Johnson’s class in the UK to guarantee power by their own hands. To access and maintain power all Tory politicians must rely on the ignorance and capitulation of millions of those whom Johnson thinks are acceptable collateral damage in his desire to see tills ringing again.

For Whom the Till Rings it Rings for Thee, but never, it seems for those and such as those.