It was announced recently that the two broadcasters, the BBC and ITV, will host a series of General Election TV debates for our viewing pleasure. ITV and BBC will each feature one debate with the leaders of the Labour and Tory parties, with other TV debates by the BBC also including leaders/members of the other parties too. These debates are intended to inform, flesh out policy and ideas and let the people decide who made the most convincing argument. The format will be very much up to the host broadcaster and the studio audience will also largely reflect the production choices of the host channels as well. They will be evenly spread out and this will largely be it for the TV spectacles in the coming weeks. There may be another TV debate but in terms of eyeballs and viewing figures the debates announced by the two broadcasters here will be the most impactful.
TV Election debates are now a constant in our General Elections. Originating from the TV debates of the US Presidential elections in 1960 between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, the British versions appeared in some variety from 2007 but it was 2010 when they became a staple dish of the British election cuisine. The leaders do battle against each other with an adjudicator in an attempt to sway voters to their side of the argument. Often seen as a piece of Socratic dialogue, the participants don’t have their minds changed as the emphasis is not on them but on the viewer who gets to see the policies they like argued out on the floor. The questions are chosen by the broadcaster but they often reflect the major issues for voters at the time. Reflecting also the nature of politics being by its own nature reactionary the TV debates will hope to capture the public mood and see elaboration pushed on the politicians by the host in an attempt to cut through the media/vague answers politicians often give in more relaxed interviews we often see.
TV debates have been impactful in history. In the 1960 Presidential election Richard Nixon was tipped to win the Presidency, but performed badly in the first TV debate; mostly because he was not well, he had a boring suit on and was not very charismatic. His opponent, a young and dynamic John F. Kennedy, by contrast was better dressed, appeared with a lighter background, had energy and charisma and spoke well when asked questions by the adjudicator. Kennedy went on to win the Presidential election by a handful of votes, thereby showing that these debates can swing an election. In 2010, ‘Cleggmania’ was the term for the popular support the then-Leader of the Liberal Democrat’s Nick Clegg was awarded following his successful appearance in the TV election debates. There has been some impact on an election as people with a limited amount of invested time in politics and current affairs can see an abridged version of the issues and responses to those issues crammed into an hour on average and this can be very valuable.
TV debates, however, leave somewhat of a bitter taste in the mouth of political commentators who understand the unique nature of how Britain has done politics throughout history. The TV debates are debates between very small individuals in an often sanitised environment where the ‘reaction’ to what they say is controlled and in some instances manufactured. Politics in this country has not historically been about individuals. Why? We do not vote for individuals. We vote for parties. We don’t even vote for parties necessarily, we vote for a representative in our local area. Whereas the American system is immensely personal, with individuals running for President at the head of their party that they have been elected by in democratic ‘open primaries’ (where voters of a party literally vote on who they want to run for President). Therefore it makes sense for there to be TV debates as the individuals have been put there by voters of the party and have been put there to front their campaign, not necessarily the campaign of the Democrats or the Republicans completely (how could you in a federal system with two parties representing almost half of the 350 million people in the United States). In Britain we do not elect party leaders; they are chosen largely by the parliamentary party. We do not vote for the leaders, they stand in a constituency of their own that is local to them. We vote for individuals standing in our constituency. The leaders represent the winning side in the broad church that is their party (in the Labour or Tory party) but that is not by popular consent necessarily but by political intrigue. Our system is also a unitary system whereby we are only voting for one representative, whereas in the United States you vote for a President, a Senate member and a House of Representatives member, all with actual legislative power before you even get to the individual state governments. The TV debates make sense for American politics but they don’t for British politics, and yet now we can’t really see elections without them.
You could make the argument that at least the TV debates help educate people about the arguments going on at the time. The ‘Drive Thru’ nature of the TV debates is perhaps an example of assisting with accessibility of politics for people who just don’t have the time to get into the nitty-gritty of detail. Perhaps this is true, though with the importance of politics in peoples lives it might be a good idea to get a bit more than the abridged version of issues that affect the very core of peoples’ lives. But then it seems baffling that we are having at least two TV election debates featuring ONLY the Tory and Labour Party, not only that, just the leaders. Two people, who can only be elected by at most 120,000 people (60,000 per constituency on average), who aren’t even standing against each other and will be politicians at the end of this election anyway as they are due to win their seats anyway, and when polling suggests that the two main parties have a predicted vote share of around 40% of the country (lumping in Lib Dem, Reform, Green, SNP etc and non-voters together). These debates are reserved only for those with an actual shot of being the next Prime Minister (which is another problem itself but more on that in a later article) but the Prime Minister is not the President. You could argue due to the nature of executive power, assuming many powers of the monarch, we now have a pseudo-Presidential system but that reflects the powers and not the people. This election is the only chance of the people to get involved properly with the sovereign body of the United Kingdom; parliament. Setting the scene for a TV election debate with only two people from two parties that no longer command any sort of majority within the UK, two people we had next to no say over being leader, in a British political system that is by its own nature consensus-driven (no executive power, you HAVE to have a parliamentary majority), seems out of place. It seems more to be a wilful desire to Americanise our politics, quietening the voices of other parties and trying to make politics binary when the strongest part of our politics compared to the United States is that it is not.
There is a real and growing problem that originated in the 1980s of creating a disconnected political class. This has been growing more and more and today there has been a real desire to erode that class and bring politics back to the people. The TV debates of the two major parties looks like an attempt to push back against the growing desire for populism in British politics. Of course, there will be TV debates that will include some of the other parties but the media often revolve around the obsession with the two big parties with many of their questions revolving around those parties. The TV debates with our political leaders is often chaotic otherwise and there are just too many voices and arguing from many different angles which can often seem confusing. But that is the nature of politics here; we have many different options available to us. TV debates, in so many ways, just don’t make sense at least in this format. The media reacts to this by trying to streamline politics into a binary argument. The political class rubs its hands in glee.
The BBC flagship political programme on TV is called BBC Question Time, in which the channel chooses quite a partisan crowd and a selection of 5 panelists, often with two representatives of the two major parties, a journalist and two others from other parties. It used to be quite popular. Now it is not. Whether this is down to the nature of hosting by Fiona Bruce which has been seen largely as far less effective than the host beforehand, David Dimbleby, we don’t know. But the format is tired, gets people nowhere and there is a growing sentiment around the country that Question Time is not exactly able or willing to seek objectivity in its production. Whether this is true or not is not the point; public confidence in the programme is very much down. And Fiona Bruce is due to host one of the TV Election debates. Maybe this shows us that the TV debate format just is not working.
There is, however, one format that is effective. When a leader stands on his or her own in front of an audience and they ask questions; and that is it! Just a leader, a microphone, a host and members of the public (ideally designed by an independent polling company) is all you need to really get the information out. The BBC did this in the 2019 General Election and it was really effective. Rather than shouting matches or restricted invitations, this format allows politicians to be properly grilled by the public and for them to answer to the public rather than to journalists with their own political/media desires (like sensationalist searching). GB News recently did one of these with Rishi Sunak (weirdly under investigation by OFCOM for something) and it really helped clarify where politicians stood. We might get this format back again and, if we really do need politics to be on TV and individuals representing a broad-church party, then this is the best so far that has been thought up.
The TV election debates will hopefully bring some clarity to people but it can equally put people off the whole thing altogether. Shouty matches between squabbling people with no desire to see their minds change saying things which may not make any sense or mean anything to voters can turn people off as well as on to politics more generally. Are these TV debates the gateway to political interest that can only improve politics in this country? Or do they show off the disconnected nature of politics, reflecting the feeling that Westminster and the media are a long way away from the voters they want their vote or their attention from? As they will say after each bloody TV Election debate; “you decide”.
This article first appeared on the TDL Times. For more information, articles and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.
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