The election debates

Many people are frustrated by their lack of substance, or worried by the (additional) importance they bestow on personality, but I've always enjoyed set-piece debates between political parties. Primarily as a form of entertainment, to be sure, but also for the light they shed on the candidates participating. They may not be the best place to learn about party policy, but forcing politicians to respond to the same questions and to one another's talking points can be revealing in other ways.

An example I posted recently was President Obama's visit to the GOP Retreat in Baltimore a couple of months ago. This was hardly a typical debate; it had Obama standing at a podium like a lecturer, first delivering some brief remarks to the gathered Congressional Republicans and then responding at length to their challenges. That was an unequal setting, and Obama took full advantage of it to take apart talking points that had faced too little pushback in his first year in office. Politics were never far from the agenda, but it was nonetheless an unusually substantive, policy-oriented affair. Sufficiently so that it has led to a movement called Demand Question Time.

If the prime ministerial debates taking place for the first time this UK election are of the same standard, I'll be happy. It'll certainly be interesting to see what effect they have on 'my' party, the Lib Dems, and how Labour and the Conservatives respond to the opportunity it provides for them.

(We've already had a taster event in Monday's Channel 4 special, Ask The Chancellors,  which can be seen on 4OD for the next 26 days. I watched it while playing a drinking game with Laura and my friend Alex; our respective drinking words were 'cuts', 'tax' and 'deficit'. Cuts - even savage ones, which counted for twice the normal penalty - were mentioned so often that by the end I struggled to register all the details. A few that I nonetheless noticed were: Vince Cable getting the warmest audience response; Alistair Darling looking smug, according to both Laura and the Great British Public, as represented by a focus group on the news; George Osborne attempting to leverage his leader's supposed popularity, and calling for tripartisanship. Further calls for that will be something to watch for... to the frustration of many people who have clear political views, bipartisanship plays well in the States, but is the same true of tripartisanship in the UK?)