Comment: Debates privilege style over substance
Yesterday’s first ever televised debate between the party leaders was a historic first for Britain.
By Azeem Ibrahim
I’ve written in the past about the dangers of televised debates: judging on appearances, and the exclusion over decades of perfectly competent party leaders because they won’t look good under the lights, and so on. But the debates are now a reality, and there is no point dismissing them. And indeed it is possible that despite my criticisms, many young people who previously would have taken no interest in the election were watching and are more likely to have an opinion as a result. And that has to be a good thing.
So, here are my thoughts on the debate.
Firstly, Gordon Brown was not the train wreck that many had expected him to be. True, he didn’t manage to drop his unsettling habit of smiling awkwardly. Not just awkwardly, but also at the wrong times. He smiled, for example, as Nick Clegg told a story about his teacher friends not being able to find the troublemakers easily in the classroom, because class sizes are so big. His reactions seemed inexplicable. But then arguably this will only hinder him to a limited extent – everyone already knows that Brown has trouble smiling well. That is not news.
Unlike the others, he did seem to have a debate strategy: agree with Nick Clegg as often as possible, and try to paint Cameron into a corner as often as possible, often by asking him direct questions. This was a shrewd move, as it made Cameron seem the unreasonable outlier, and Brown the potential inheritor of a perceived Lib-Lab consensus on a range of topics. Time will tell how successful that strategy turns out to be.
Brown also had some neat catchphrases, at one point telling David Cameron “you can’t airbrush your policies, even though you can airbrush your posters”. But he was incompetent at telling individual stories. Discussing immigration, he talked of a chef to whom he promised that he would not face competition from economic migrants, following it up with something like “I met a care worker, no competition from immigration for care workers”. It was as if he had been told by his aides not to forget to mention real people.
But Brown’s real problem was encapsulated by what he said about education: “I want to see our education improve, as it has done over the last few years.” His problem is that his party have been the incumbents for the last 13 years. However much he tries to sound like a man with a plan for the future, he could always be bashed with the question, “why have you not done that already”, and that encapsulated his basic problem.
David Cameron, it was clear from the start, had grasped the need to tell stories. He had one about a woman whose house was burgled by a recently released offender who set fire to her sofa, for example. But after a while, it seemed almost formulaic. He seemed to have a story on cue for each topic. And he didn’t seem prepared for Brown’s direct questions, for example on whether he would maintain police numbers at their current levels. For my money, he should have taken the electorate down the path of why it was a bad idea to be competing on who can spend more on what, as the urgent priority for the coming years is to pay down our ballooning national debt. And that is a task for which competitions on who can spend more – as the debate invariably became – are particularly ill-suited to solve.
And so to Nick Clegg. Clegg was always going to be the biggest beneficiary of the debate, as the other two were relatively well-known, and so even an unremarkable performance would have helped him by introducing him to many voters for the first time.
But by the end of the night, the snap polls tended to show that he had come off best in terms of style. Of course, the reason I objected to these debates in the first place is the way they privilege style over substance. And nothing I have seen changes my mind on that.
He made a few strong points: his is the only party to have costed their manifesto pledges, for example. But his idea that it is safe to scrap Trident is dangerously wrongheaded. And ultimately, his ability to find the right tone and respond directly to questioners illustrates the problems with TV debates like this – they are likely to leave viewers to judge on superficial qualities, and not on the merits of the policies the party leaders espouse. On that front, the Liberal Democrats had the most to gain from tonight anyway.
Azeem Ibrahim is a Research Scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Member of the Board of Directors at the Institute of Social Policy and Understanding and Chairman and CEO of Ibrahim Associates.
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