Thursday, April 02, 2015 

An alternative leaders' debate live blog.

Not Kay Burley: Good evening and welcome to the ITV leaders' debate.  I'm Not Kay Burley, and you're no doubt ecstatic about that.  Tonight we are joined by David Cameron, prime minister and leader of the Stupid party, Edward Miliband, leader of the opposition and the Less Stupid party, Nicholas Clegg, deputy prime minister and leader of the Middle of the Road party, Natalie Gordon-Bennett, leader of the Green Crap party, Nigel Faragista, leader of the Stick Up Your Arse party, Nicola Caviar, leader of the Moon on a Stick party, and finally, Leanne Who, leader of the Party of Wails. 

All: Good evening, Not.

Not Kay Burley: Shall we get the preliminaries out of the way now?

Everyone, except Clegg: We don't agree with Nick.

Not: Excellent. The leaders drew lots beforehand and Natalie gets to start us off with her opening statement.

Gordon-Bennett: The Green party is not an inevitability.  Other parties trade on fear of immigrants: we don't trade on anything.

 Faragista: There are six other leaders on this platform this evening that don't monomanically focus on one issue.  I will never ever sink to their level.

 Clegg: I won't pretend things are perfect, or that I haven't made mistakes.  I have.

 Caviar: This is your opportunity to affect change at Westminster.  Do this by voting for a party that wants to leave it.

 Cameron: 5 years ago Britain was on the brink.  I've done my level best to push it over.

 Who: I'm from Wales.

 Miliband: We can do better than this.  My party could have done better than me.

Not: Our first question is from a politics student.

Cunt: I'm 17 years old.  This is incredibly important.  How can I possibly believe anything you say about anything?

Clegg: You can't.  But rest assured we'll cut the deficit the Liberal Democrat way: by pretending to have not actually done anything at all.

Cameron: It's all Labour's fault.

Who: I'm Welsh.

Faragista: You're right, you can't trust anything I say.  Now watch me try to troll Caviar.

Miliband: We'll do it fairly, just like the other parties.  Who you can't trust to say they will.

Clegg: Balance.

Cameron: Balance.

Miliband: Balance.

 Farage: BALANCE.

 Cameron: I have here on this piece of paper...

Miliband: The past.  Not the future.

 Who: I'm from the valleys.

Farage: There needs to be a rebalancing.  The Scots have to be tipped over.

Gordon-Bennett: Let's talk about employment.  How did I get this job?

Clegg: You have to make the necessary cuts because you have to.  Here, have my neck, I don't need it.

 Cameron: A lot more debt and more taxes.  A lot more debt and more taxes.

 Faragist: Let's stop spending money on Bongo Bongo land.  And then put our relations with Europe on the same level.

 Not: Time for our next question.

 Kelly: I worked in the NHS.  How are we going to keep funding it?

 Faragista: The NHS is great, and I don't bear any grudges over the loss of my left bollock, that was entirely down to an Indian doctor.

 Caviar: The way to save the NHS is to end austerity.  We can do this by simply willing it enough.

 Gordon-Bennett: The NHS wasn't important in 2010.  It still isn't for me, I've got private insurance.

 Clegg: The NHS doesn't need warm words, it needs warm blood.  I'm doing my bit.

 Who: We invented the NHS.

Miliband: Here's a ream of the new doctors we'll hire that I hope won't completely wash over you.

 Cameron: There's only one group of politicians who cut the NHS over the past 5 years, and that was my party as funding didn't keep pace with inflation.

 Farage: Let's discuss something entirely irrelevant.  Romanian vampires are drinking our blood banks dry.

 Gordon-Bennett: I think you'll find Romanian vampires are the very backbone of the NHS.

 Clegg: No, let's talk about mental health.  Everyone watching this must be suffering very severely.

 Caviar: I have set out an entirely sensible plan whereby we can raise funding on the NHS by 100% while not cutting welfare at all.

Faragista: No one is listening to me, so from now on I'm going to keep on talking about irrelevant things that would shame fascists.

Who: You are a despicable human being.

Audience: *Applause*

Cameron: If Labour get back in, their target culture will kill your elderly relatives.

Miliband: You broke your promises.  You failed the country.

Cameron: You bankrupted the country.

Miliband: The people will decide.

Everyone watching at home: We've decided to turn this ghastly spectacle off.

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4/02/2015 08:11:00 pm | |

Thursday, May 15, 2014 

Allegedly guilty.

Three cheers for the Graun! They've teamed up with the Torygraph and YouTube, aka Google in a bid to host one of the expected leaders' debates next year.  An online debate is clearly necessary, as it will give "voters more opportunities to engage with debates through tweets, likes, shares or questions to politicians", all things that simply wouldn't be possible if they were once again hosted by the old media.  Translated, the bullshit puffery means they simply want to get in on the act, as the debates will be a guaranteed source of hundreds of thousands of hits: 9.4 million watched the first debate live on ITV in 2010.  Even if the novelty of seeing the big three (or possibly four, this time) engaging in mock verbal combat has worn off since then, it's certainly not going to be something they'll lose money on, which for the Graun has to be a bonus.

As to where and why it's losing money, you only need to look at the ever mounting piles of crap being served up on Comment is Free, which this week hosted an article by Becky Smith on why she wasn't a hypocrite for taking a selfie (along with millennials, quite possibly the worst neologism coined in recent times) with David Cameron in Nando's.  I would explain further, but frankly I just, I just.  I don't know.  Imagine the scene from Fulci's City of the Living Dead where Giovanni Lombardo Radice's character's head meets a huge industrial drill, and know I'd rather it was my skull than have to think about Smith ever again.

Smith doesn't have anything though on Jessica Valenti, whose latest piece goes against just about everything the Graun is meant and usually does stand for.  In it, Valenti praises the people who have named alleged rapists at New York's Columbia university as "heroes".  She agrees it would be awful if someone named on the lists pasted up all over the campus were innocent of any crime, but it's OK as all those named so far are "allegedly guilty".  Let that sink in for a second.  Allegedly guilty.  Besides, for as long as humiliating women for allegedly having sex as they apparently do on certain online forums is legal and naming those "allegedly guilty" of rape is criminal, she'll support the victims, regardless of the methods they choose to make themselves heard.

I am obviously simplifying the forces at work here.  If the men weren't reported to the police by the college authorities due to their status despite being found responsible for sexual assault, then I like Valenti don't have much of a problem with their being named.  We don't know that's the case however, and neither does Valenti.  All we have is a list of names.  In this country we were rightly sensitive when the News of the World under Rebekah Wade (now Brooks) started publishing the details and whereabouts of convicted paedophiles, precisely because it resulted in the police having to intervene to protect some of those who were named.  More recently, Bijan Ebrahimi was murdered after being falsely accused of paedophilia, while Luke Hardwood was also killed by a vigilante gang after he was pointed out as a rapist, again without any corresponding evidence.

There's an extremely fine line between protecting women from sexual predators through naming those responsible, especially when they are only "allegedly guilty" and starting a witch-hunt, the end result of which can't be predicted or anticipated.  The Guardian of all papers ought to know why we should always be cautious of welcoming anonymous accusations.  When it comes to America and the internet it just doesn't seem to matter as much.

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5/15/2014 09:16:00 pm | |

Friday, April 23, 2010 

The second obligatory debate post.

Yesterday's debate was clearly inferior to the first, both in the questions posed and the substance offered by all three of the leaders of the main parties (transcript PDF). Maybe it was partially down to the novelty of the first having worn off, but even though both David Cameron and Gordon Brown had clearly improved on their showing in the first debate, the event was hardly electrifying. It did have its moments, especially when Brown told Clegg to get real over Trident, which was less disingenuous than one of the other lines he had noted down to use, and when Cameron did his usual unrighteous indignation act at Labour misrepresenting Tory policy, which always seems to make him far angrier than anything else, especially when they are far more worthwhile things to be furious about, and lastly when Clegg seemed to be almost flirting with the woman who posed the question on political reform, but for the most part it dragged along.

Part of the blame for that surely has to be laid at Sky's door. For what was meant to be at least partially a foreign policy debate, two questions, one on Europe and one hypothetical about what we might do if there was another "multinational operation to remove al-Qaida ... from a failed state" was pathetic. Were there seriously no other questions posed on foreign policy which were worthy of discussion, such as their stance on maintaining the "special relationship", on foreign aid, on Israel/Palestine, on Russia, on energy supplies, on African development, on tackling violent extremism, on the exporting, promotion and collusion with torture and rendition, even on North Korea or Iran? Instead we covered ground which had already been gone over in the first debate, both on immigration, with the question posed naturally by an immigrant as seems to be required now, and on political reform. Important topics both, but not ones which couldn't have been sacrificed for questions on what the debate was actually meant to be on.

Not that Sky seemed to have any interest in even pretending to be impartial. I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed just how much the camera seemed to love David Cameron in contrast to both Clegg and Brown, but it was becoming so obvious at one point that it was getting beyond a joke. Time and again the shot focused on Cameron head on, slowly zooming in as he made his point, with even the director presumably realising he was over doing it by then also giving Clegg and Brown the same treatment in the last half hour. It may just have been how the cameras were set up and how the three were positioned, but Brown seemed to get the brunt of the unflattering shots, with him often being shown in profile, his jowls dangling and his crumpled, cavernous face being emphasised, while Cameron's jokes resulted in cutaways to laughing audience members, despite Brown getting by far the biggest laugh of the night with his polarising line about the other two squabbling like his children at bath time. Then there was Adam Boulton, a far less effective moderator than Alastair Stewart, whose smugness when asking Nick Clegg about his appearance on the front of the Telegraph, likely to have been a breach of the debate rules, was insufferable. The only thing Clegg and Brown can take is that the camera did at least still see just how unhappy Cameron looked at times when not answering a question, grimacing and almost certainly not enjoying the event, even if his overall performance was better than before.

Despite not gaining the clear victory that he did last week, Clegg just needed to do well again to keep his party's profile high, and even if he took up positions on occasion which were inadvisable, such as defending the EU on the grounds of cooperation on crime and repeating the nonsense which is that by being in Afghanistan we're somehow preventing attacks here, he still stood firm on Trident and an amnesty for illegal immigrants, making the obvious point that you can't possibly deport 900,000 people even if you knew where they lived. He came out of it looking again like a real alternative, and when the polls suggest that they could even win the largest share of the vote, that's all that was being asked of him. Cameron did better, but nowhere near as strong as his sessions at prime minister's questions have on occasion been, and again banged on endlessly about the jobs tax while mentioning very little of the policies actually listed in his manifesto, only bringing up the "big society" in his closing statement. Brown defied his unpopularity by either drawing level in most polls or only being a short distance behind the others, and even if he plumbed the depths on occasion, especially in accusing Clegg of "anti-Americianism", he's standing firm and doing far better than many predicted. It remains Cameron that's lagging behind the others in expectations, and while he has not been "found out" or shown to be shallow, the Tories must continue to disappointed in his failing to rise above one leader of the past and one upstart as they have so often been depicted.

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4/23/2010 08:24:00 pm | |

Friday, April 16, 2010 

The obligatory debate post.

It's fairly typical that just a day after I attack Nick Clegg for not being able to strike the right tone or have the gravitas which his role requires that he turns in such an assured, rounded and really rather impressive performance just when it really did matter. Admittedly, it doesn't take much to be able to come off as the brilliant outsider when you're standing alongside the jowls of Brown and the shiny head of Cameron, but it wasn't just his success in casting himself as different to the other two that has led to him being declared the undisputed winner of the debate, it was also that he came across, whisper it, as genuine. As Alix Mortimer has already identified, this was most clear when he actually bothered to answer Joel Weiner's (aka the Jewish lad who was also on Question Time when Nick Griffin made his appearance, and who now has approaching 7,000 fans on Lamebook) question about how school students were being tested too much and not taught enough, while Cameron and Brown just took the opportunity to bleat on about their schools policy.

As has been repeated ad nauseam, it's true that Clegg was always going to be the big winner: being an equal alongside the two main leaders in such a setting gave him the most exposure a leader of his party has been given since the revelations of Charles Kennedy's drink habit and Paddy Ashdown's affair with his secretary. He could however have still just been seen as the also-ran, given a welcome into the big boy's club just to be shown up. Instead, while you wouldn't exactly say he either humiliated or gave Brown and Cameron a kicking, he came across as the relaxed alternative with policies to back him up. He said beforehand that he was just going to try to enjoy it, and that seemed the best way by far to approach it.

Cameron, by comparison, looked close at times to being sick. The reaction of both the Tories and ex-Tories is also instructive: Michael Portillo on This Week having an outbreak of sour grapes at how Clegg being invited along at all, Michael Gove today banging on about "eccentric" Liberal Democrat policies. Clegg at least made reference throughout to his party's policies; Cameron, having launched a manifesto which had by far the biggest actual innovative political idea of any of the main parties seemed to have abandoned the "Big Society" as soon as it had been launched. Throughout he instead he settled on being the biggest populist of the three, referring to possibly mythical "commoners" who he'd encountered on his journeys around the nation who supported him. It was however his closing statement which really stuck out as being completely lacking in anything even approaching substance, expressing the vacuity that voters should choose "hope over fear". For someone who has been so keen to market himself as the heir to Blair, he looked and spoke throughout as closer to Major than our own past Great Leader. Some will undoubtedly prefer the homely demeanour rather than the extravagance and mendacity of Blair, yet it was almost as if he'd forgotten everything which he'd undoubtedly practised beforehand.

Brown, more simply, was Brown. He did little more throughout than how he's approached PMQ's, but he did so with a magnanimity which has been undetectable in those sessions, and at times even looked as if he was enjoying it as much as Clegg, making one of the few jokes and smiling and laughing without coming across as he did in that infamous YouTube video. More pertinently, while Cameron has often had Brown rattled and angry when they've faced off across the dispatch box, much to the delight of the Tory mob behind Cameron while Labour MPs have sat in surly near silence, here he failed to let anything rile him and often came out on top on the substance front. One suspects that if Brown had been the insurgent rather than the incumbent his scores afterwards would have been far ahead of Cameron's, and that it was only the general dislike for him, both justified and unjustified, as well as how many have just switched off whenever he speaks that either put him equal with Cameron or slightly behind.

More depressing was the politics espoused: starting off with a question on immigration, only Clegg saying that we needed some, even if he put it in the awful Brass Eye like fashion of there being good and bad immigration, the contempt showed by Cameron for the Lib Dem policy of limiting prison sentences of 6 months or less, and the tendency, especially of Cameron, to focus on the irrelevant, shallow or relatively frivolous instead of actual detail. 90 minutes was also far too long, and the secondary responses could have bit cut down to fit in more questions, or even, horror of horrors, some further audience participation rather than simply posing the questions. Besides all this, it was clearly an unqualified success: it may have just been because of the novelty, but an audience of 9.6 million for anything to do with politics, and that's not counting those who have watched it online today, is well worth celebrating. If it does also lead to a fully justified increase in the Liberal Democrat share of the vote, Clegg will have even more to thank the other parties for.

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4/16/2010 09:45:00 pm | |

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