Friday 16 April 2010

The Leaders' Debate

I didn't have high hopes, but the first prime ministerial debate between the leaders of the three main parties was better than I expected. That doesn't mean it was any great shakes or particularly inspiring, but it did stick to the issues without the yah boo sucks we've been long accustomed to at Prime Minister's Questions. Nor was it deadly dull.

Ultimately, the success or otherwise of the
The Leaders' Debate will be measured not by the after show polling figures or the numbers of points parties gain or lose on election day, but how it effects turn out. According to the Graun, 9.4 million tuned in, and it's probably fair to say a good proportion of them are not only undecided over who to vote for, but also whether they will vote at all. I'm pretty sure some enterprising political science-types are already trying to design research that will offer an approximate answer to that question.

It is fair to say Nick Clegg won the evening, but when all is said and done, regardless of the punditry puzzling over Brown's choice of shirt, whether Clegg was right to address the camera over the audience, and Cameron's hand gestures, it is the political fare that matters. Brown's strong suit was the economy and he played this hand well. Clegg's positioning himself as a slightly more radical alternative to the other two is what enabled him to win the night. And Cameron, well, it will come as no surprise to say I thought most of his policies were piffle. But what really came through is how fundamentally similar all three leaders' politics were. We had the disgusting sight of them competing to be the toughest on immigrants (which, sadly, probably went down well with a lot of viewers). On defence spending it was wrangling over the number of helicopters that should be in the field - Clegg showed the depth of the LibDems anti-war credentials by not once questioning whether the war in Afghanistan is right or just. But it was also Clegg who raised the case against Trident, to which the others could barely give a coherent rebuttal.

And so it was with policing, education, health, MPs' expenses - they were all pretty much singing from the same hymn sheet. Small wonder the pundits are obsessed with the form in which the arguments were delivered than their substance.

6 comments:

Nick Fredman said...

"the success or otherwise of the The Leaders' Debate will be measured not by the after show polling figures or the numbers of points parties gain or lose on election day, but how it effects turn out. ... I'm pretty sure some enterprising political science-types are already trying to design research that will offer an approximate answer to that question."

Well since you sort of asked ... construct a sampling frame out of the voting age population, ask, after the election, members of a representative sample of your frame whether they watched the broadcast and whether they voted, code the responses and whack them in SPSS, construct a cross-tabulation of watching by voting, perform a chi-square test to determine whether any differences are statistically significant, i.e. whether you are confident the differences are the same as those in the population. QED.

I reckon the British Election Study would be asking about the broadcast, the Australian version has for some time (there's been debates here for 20 odd years).

Phil said...

Ugh, no. I still have nightmares about SPSS and chi-squares.

Be interested to hear what comrades who feel they didn't have a dog in this fight thought about it.

Callum said...

I agree that it wasn't quite as bad one expected it to be.

The only really stomach churning section was the immigrant bashing, but that's to be expected.

Clegg did well, Brown did OK - although he look a bit terrified - and Cameron looked like a PR middle manager who was 'trying his hand' at Politics.

Probably made a hung parliament more likely.

Simon said...

Clegg would have had to try rather hard no to win, given the circumstances.

And Cameron managed a response to the Trident issue... something about war on China???

EddM said...

I for one am seriously worried that one day we will wake up and find the Chinese ravishing us in our beds. This is why we need a nuclear deterrent.

Bristol Red said...

EddM wrote: "I for one am seriously worried that one day we will wake up and find the Chinese ravishing us in our beds."

I dunno, I think it's important to be open to new experiences. I was surprised that Brown didn't pounce on what was either a blunder or a totally mad comment from Cameron...