Politics

Cancel the TV election debates

March 06, 2015
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Read more: The broadcasters need a clear formula for the TV debates, says Peter Kellner

The argument raging in Westminster about televised election debates serves at least one purpose. It allows the government a degree of influence over the news agenda. Much better to have attention focussed on the “will-he, won’t-he?” drama of whether the Prime Minister will participate in the debates than on, say, today’s immigration figures showing that since 2011 the English population has increased by more than half a million. As such, Cameron’s decision to blow up the debate question into some sort of “situation” has within it a kernel of political logic. Control has its own value.

But if these electoral debates are called off, they will be no loss. Despite what some of Labour’s more excitable senior spokespeople suggest, televised political debates are not the sine qua non of British democracy. They are a fad, introduced as an experiment in 2010. Their only effect was to encourage huge numbers of people to vote for Nick Clegg, a decision which opinion polls make very clear they now sorely regret.

Televised debates make politics more distorted, not less. The gifts that are required to win a televised debate are not the same as those required to run a country. A politician who “wins” a debate will have shown him or herself adept at superficial charm and rhetorical cunning—are these qualities desirable in a leader?

The uproar at the possibility that these debates might be cancelled is a reflection of the obsession among the political class in Britain with the notion of “debate”. Having “the debate” has become an end in itself. For career politicians who have worked their way up through the wonkish apparatus of political parties in which advancement is predicated on the ability to dazzle in policy discussions, this is not surprising. At this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition, both of whom share this background, threw the word “debate” back and forth at one another, both accusing the other of cowardice, of refusing to have “the debate”.

But “debate” is not an end: it is a means. The end in politics is the idea, and for a debate to have any substance, use, or any real meaning, it must involve the process of one idea being matched against another. But the character of political debate, in Prime Minister’s Questions especially, does not consist of this matching of ideas. Instead we are subjected to the theatre of debate. In this theatre, all of the accoutrements of debate are present—the opposing sides, the bold pronouncements, the baying crowd—but there is no substance. There are no ideas—what idea was ever born in PMQs? In the theatre of debate, the debate itself has become the end.

So, do away with the televised electoral debates. They are nothing more than theatre and their principal effect is distortionary. The notion of “debate” has itself become corrosive, insinuating itself into the political space where ideas should be.

Televised election debates are a wholly unnecessary injection of artifice into British politics. If they are scrapped, only those with a direct interest in their taking place will mourn their passing.