I was thrilled the other day to receive a personal letter from my local Conservative Councillor. It is not every day this happens. It said ‘Dear Mr Meader’ and was hand-signed at the bottom. How lovely. It seems they wanted to know my opinions on certain things, political mainly. The letter was titled ‘2009 Residents Survey’, but why they should send it to me I don’t know. I guess they think I’m important and wise and whose opinions should be listened to.
Now I disagree wholeheartedly with tactical voting. Voting for a party you would ordinarily pick as a second choice just to stop another party from getting in seems a bit negative to me. I can see the logic, but as a person of principle I just don’t like it. However, I found myself using tactics to answer some of the questions in this survey. In fact, I was using tactics so prominently that I was entering into a very elaborate form of game theory.
You see, if I say I think X is an important issue, they might think that I think that they can be trusted with what they think to resolve X, but I might think that what they think should be done about X isn’t what I think should be done.
If you get what I was thinking.
Then there were the specific issues. How should I indicate my support for “raising the threshold for inheritance tax to £1 million”? Hmmm, well that sounds like quite a good thing, what with the government letting families keep their own money. Can’t argue with that! But that’s what cleverly worded, loaded questions do. They lead you into a direction that is biased to a particular answer. So hang on, let’s think about this a bit more. If the inheritance tax threshold is being increased, then the government has less money to spend on other priorities. Do I really care about inheritance tax? Is it really a priority?
So I sat down and wrote a list of my political priorities and realised that inheritance tax wasn’t one of them after all. I was just about to read the next question when something caught my eye. In the letter it said the questionnaire should take no more than five minutes to complete. Five minutes, when I’d already taken at least half an hour.
Not wanting to disobey the instructions, I decided to tear up my list of priorities and just answer all the questions on gut instinct.
