Is there a lack of bravery in UK politicians? Peter Kirby-Harris discusses.
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It is widely understood that David Cameron is an excellent debater. Both his experience at the Oxford Union during his undergraduate days and being Prime Minister for the past five years should give him the edge over his rivals in upcoming leadership debates. It comes as quite a surprise to election watchers that he seems to have done everything in his power to sink the original format (involving a head to head with his only rival for Prime Minister Ed Miliband plus a three way and four way debate) and only agree to a single 8-way debate and some very carefully staged interviews and questions from the audience in a town-hall style format (with candidates not able to go directly after each other’s answers). Ed Miliband is not regarded as a great debater but he will have had time to prepare, hence his enthusiasm for a series of head to head debates. The idea is that if he turns up, gets some points across and goes after the government’s record then it will be regarded as a success based on the low expectations the public have for him. For Cameron, he would need to wipe the floor with Miliband to justify his involvement.
Herein lies the heart of the matter — one party leader has nothing to lose and one has everything to lose. One is one the record criticising the debates (Cameron) and the other is itching to go given the publicity that it offers (Miliband). Cameron outpolls his party consistently thereby ensuring that a focus on him (Cameron) throughout the 6 week election campaign will be mostly positive while Miliband is more unpopular than his party due to several years of negative media publicity. It therefore seems baffling that the party that would do better if their leader was given a chance to go head to head with his rival is the one who is reluctant to agree to the debates and has as of this month effectively scuppered the original plan and replaced it with a bun-fight and a reworked version of BBC’s popular programme ‘Question Time’ with a tried and tested formula. There is a simple answer to this and it is the lack of bravery in our political class and the higher up in the party the politician is the more risk averse they seem to be.
Do we need politicians to be brave? It’s a good question and there are many answers. There are some politicians who do operate by conviction, who turn up and do the job they are elected to do and paid for. There are others who are weather vanes for polling and focus groups who won’t act unless there are favourable opinions. In the UK it appears that the latter are now in charge. This is a pity given that the 2015 General Election is being billed by all parties as the most important in a generation. Perhaps because of its perceived importance no party leader is willing to commit themselves to any further public scrutiny than will already be applied. Many parties are focusing on running local campaigns leaving the leaders off election materials, out of party political broadcasts and working on getting core voters out through bread and butter issues. The men who run the major parties seem reluctant to do beyond repeating soundbites and focusing on a single strategy.
In the 24 news cycles there tends to be a focus on a single issue which is done to death then discarded. This is the calculation of most politicians who are in the news for good or bad. The focus changes in the run-up to a general election as certain issues stay in the public eye. Cameron’s failure to commit to a repeat of the 2010 debates is one of these and one that his rivals will pounce on claiming that he is running scared of his rivals (which he isn’t) or unwilling to defend the record of the government (which might be true). Given the current speculation over the future leadership of the Conservative party it can be argued that the first two weeks in March was the time that they lost the 2015 election. They didn’t lose it on the economy or on competency in government or on scandals that occurred during their time in office. It can be argued that the Conservatives lost the election because of fear and the lack of bravery to overcome it. By attempting to change the terms of the debates it has given the impression that Cameron is an arrogant politician who refused to commit to a format not of his own choosing. His gamesmanship might come back to haunt him given his need to increase his number of MP’s in this election, something that very few of his predecessors as Prime Minister have managed to achieve. When he should have been on the attack he went on the defensive and the impression we as the electorate have been left with is that he is either hesitant or indifferent about the leadership debates.
What it underlies in our political class is an epidemic of fearfulness, of attempting to steer the political discourse to such an extent as to trivialise important issues and focus on point scoring and cheap populist tricks. The evidence for this is that neither of the two main political parties in the UK will be taking on each other on the same issues. Focus groups have led our two leaders up the garden path to the point where they seem more detached from political reality than was considered possible before. The Westminster bubble is stronger than ever and ‘the most important election ever’ could become the most boring one ever. What is needed is for someone to stand up and be counted to agree to debate on terms not of their choosing but in the national interest. Cameron should be willing to do this but he is reluctant to share a stage with his rival in case he slips up and loses his job. For all Miliband’s faults, and there are many, he does show a degree of tenacity about going after Cameron’s reluctance to debate him than will serve him well in the coming month and a half. Political miscalculations can often be dismissed as part of the media cycles except for when they occur in the run-up to a general election. When they happen here they get turned into political hit-jobs, a sign of the negative politics which turns so many people off voting. Our last election gave us a glimpse of the future of British politics with party leaders being held to account for their electoral platforms. This current election is an attempt to reverse this position.
The first quasi-debate will be held at 9pm GMT on Thursday 26th of March. The format is one where the two leaders are interviewed separately and then take questions from a TV audience, again separately. Neither of them will be given a chance to respond to each other in a debate format.
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