I Could Do Better

You won the May 2026 general election. You have sixteen quarters, roughly £1.4 trillion, and three things you can personally drive in any given three months. Most of the money is already spent. Everyone thinks they could do your job better.

One — the seed

Seed

The run is deterministic. The same seed, colour and pack produce the same sixteen quarters on any machine, which is what makes a run worth arguing about.

Seed

Anything you like. Paste someone else’s to play the parliament they played.

Two — your colour

Colour

No named parties. Five archetypes, and you may lead any of them. Your choice sets your backbenches, your factions, and which opponent hurts you most.

RedBroad-church centre-leftAgainst you: Unfundable spending demands and union leverageBlueEstablishment centre-rightAgainst you: Owns the fiscal credibility frame and briefs the marketsYellowLiberal centristAgainst you: Decisive in a hung parliament, and moralises about compromiseGreenEnvironmental leftAgainst you: Few seats, enormous legitimacy pressure on one issueTurquoiseInsurgent populistAgainst you: Huge vote share, few seats, wrecks your arithmetic anyway

Every party carries a shape and a label as well as a colour, here and everywhere else in the game.

Three — whose economics

Assumption pack

The contested coefficients — multipliers, behavioural tax responses, returns to public investment — are data, not code. You are choosing which defensible set of answers the model gives you. The post-mortem will show which of them drove which outcome.

Fiscal watchdog baselineCentral assumptions consistent with the published official forecasts. Moderate multipliers, moderate behavioural responses, and productivity returns that are real but arrive well beyond the next election.“The house view. If you want to know what the independent forecaster would say about your budget, play this one.”Growth optimisticHigher fiscal multipliers, larger and faster returns to public investment, and smaller behavioural responses to tax. Public spending crowds in private activity rather than crowding it out.“Investment pays for itself, eventually. On these numbers the borrowing to build is worth it, and the market is more forgiving while you prove it.”Austerity hawkLow multipliers, weak and slow returns to public investment, and large behavioural responses to tax. Higher rates raise much less than the static costing suggests.“The state is a poor allocator of capital and the market is the binding constraint. On these numbers, consolidation is cheaper than it looks and tax rises are dearer.”

— · Red · Fiscal watchdog baseline

The first thing you will see is the budget. It takes about thirty seconds and it reframes everything after it.

Or play someone else's parliament

Load a save

A save is a seed and a list of decisions, a few kilobytes, not a serialised world. Anyone's file replays here into the same sixteen quarters they had.

Save file