This year’s General Election in the UK will be the first to feature the live debates that the U.S. and other countries have enjoyed for 50 years.
Come on, we gave the world the Magna Carta, what more do you expect?
Tonight we got our first taste of how these debates will play out with Channel 4’s Ask the Chancellors [1], which pitted Labour’s incumbent UK chancellor Alistair Darling against the Liberal Democrats’ Vince Cable and the Conservative party’s George Osborne.
Kennedy versus Nixon this was not – it was more like watching three Council officials quibbling [2] over how much money to spend repairing the duck pond.
Despite repeated mentions of Britain’s ‘serious’ problems, a viewer from Mars or Minneapolis would never guess we’re currently borrowing £167 billion every year – nearly 12 per cent of our GDP [3] – or that we’ve just come through the deepest recession since World War II.
Instead, it sounded as if the three would-be UK chancellors had been hauled in front of the headmaster to find out who’d taken 50p from the tuck box tin. And naturally, nobody was confessing.
Dishonest guvs
What the electorate claims to want is honesty, though just like the politicians I doubt it really does.
No matter – on tonight’s showing, it will go wanting.
The nearest we came to across-the-board candor was when the host, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, got each candidate to concede that the cuts required [4] are on the same scale as those implemented by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
Really? I lived through those times and I can remember the scraps, the pain, and the huge social changes. Yet there was no portent of that in this debate – instead we were offered the prospect of a few knobs being dialed back here, and a few zeroes being lopped off there.
Only Cable admitted that ring-fencing anything – such as the NHS – would mean even bigger cuts elsewhere. A brave move, given that every question from the audience pleaded a special case to avoid the axe themselves.
When the cutbacks come, the country isn’t going to be ready for them, that’s for sure. This is downright reckless, and I’m starting to wonder whether there will be 1980s-style civil unrest as a result.
All pain, no gain?
Perhaps the electorate is as stupid as everyone keeps claiming it isn’t, if it really thinks we can reduce the vast public debt without some fundamental changes as to how our economy functions.
What’s truly lamentable on this score is that as I bemoaned on Saturday [5], none of Darling, Cable or Osborne have any big ideas to rival the Thatcherist agenda of the ’80s (or even the Blairite one of the ’90s for that matter) and so they offer no hope of gain for all this pain.
Osborne in particular just sounds bleak and defeatist.
The UK was one of the leanest economies in the world in the mid-1990s, thanks largely to the years of austerity under the Conservatives, and the nasty recession of the early 1990s that forced through yet more change. Osborne should be shouting that from the rooftops, and condemning Labour for not putting aside money in the good years that followed, or at least giving more money back to the public through lower taxation so we could raise taxes from a smaller base now.
Instead, he sounds like a new Labour imitation of a Conservative.
Unlike dyed in the wool Tories, I do believe the first Labour administration had some decent policies, and that it redressed some deficiencies where things had gone too far, particularly in health and with the minimum wage.
But after 13 years, the public sector has become so bloated – even before the downturn – and the reliance and reflexive lauding of public sector spending so institutionalized, that the idea of the private sector generating wealth has become almost the dirty word it was in a pit village in the 1980s.
I supported Government spending during the recession [6] but the recession is over.
Britain is growing again [7], and emergency measures shouldn’t be taken as an excuse to maintain public spending for years to come, nor to avoid reform.
What about the private sector workers?
It was a full 52 minutes into the one-hour debate before George Osborne had the guts to say we needed a strong private sector recovery to best tackle our debts, and that we couldn’t rely on the public sector to generate prosperity.
52 minutes!
Oh far a Margaret Thatcher standing in Osborne’s place and tearing shreds off Darling and Cable, while inspiring us with the obvious truth that capitalist economies work best when private enterprise is put front and centre.
Yet there was far more time given to bankers bonuses [8] and the pseudo-problem of banks not lending than any discussion about helping businesses grow.
Cable got in a good quip about ‘pin-striped Scargills’. He didn’t sound like he could tell an entrepreneur from a main course at a French restaurant.
Darling admitted that banks were in actuality lending, but just not as fast as healthy private businesses were repaying their debts. Yet he then went on to bash the banks for not lending more money anyway, only to say in barely the next breath that HBOS and Northern Rock [9] went down because of reckless lending!
This is Alice in Wonderland stuff that most people aren’t clued-up enough on to follow.
Obviously Darling knows the same, the man’s no idiot, yet both he and especially Osborne often sound like they’re talking to school children. You might expect nanny-ing from a socialist, but Osborne really should be doing better.
Cable as ever is in the luxurious position of being able to tell the truth because there’s no chance of him ever being elected into power, and he did so again tonight. Tomorrow morning, as always, most viewers will tell their workmates that they wished Cable was a member of the Labour party, yet if he was standing in Darling’s shoes I’m sure the honesty would be taken out of his delivery, too.
The key is that Osborne and Darling don’t sound dumb – there’s clearly plenty going on behind their earnest masks. Rather, they sound like they think we’re dumb, and it rankles.
The final verdict
On the subject of rankles – the final scores.
Winner: Vince Cable
Score: 8/10
Not a vintage performance but a predictable champion, Cable got the first and the most laughs, yet far from playing to the crowd he also warned several times that deep cuts would be required, and that no Chancellor could please everyone – and he did so without the obligatory ‘but’ tacked on the end. Cable remains the nation’s answer to Gandalf the Wizard; it will be fascinating to see if he can pull anything out of a hat come a hung Parliament.
Second place: Alistair Darling
Score: 7/10
Darling sounded more human than he previously has, and I stand by my previous begrudging support for the man – perhaps if he’d been Chancellor instead of Brown alongside Blair, less radical spending cuts would be required now. He called the recession right and did a fair enough job in herding the banks through the worst of the crisis (albeit it near-crippling Lloyds [10] in the process). Darling has also increased the right taxes, if we must increase taxes, but he’s showed no sign of how he’ll do the harder bit – the cuts.
Last Place: George Osborne
Score: 4/10
Poor George. No knockout blows, no killer marshalling of the facts (Cable sounded far more with it on the details) and worst of all he seems to be fighting with one hand behind his back. Desperate not to sound like an old-school Thatcherite – let alone on Eton-educated one – Osborne comes over like Tony Blair by talking about equality and bigging up today’s National Insurance announcement like it’s some great rolling back of the State.
The irony is that I agree with many of Osborne’s core points (remember that spending cuts now [4] would still take months to get going anyway) yet his delivery is hopeless. I can’t believe he’s as out of his depth as he seems, which makes him the biggest unknown quantity of the three should he ever get into power. And like the markets, voters hate uncertainties.
Readers: Did you watch the debate? Who did you think won the day?