TV Debate
September 5th, 2007 at 00:08
Having just caught the start of Newsnight, I witnessed Gordon Brown saying that he wouldn’t be up for a televised debate with David Cameron á la the US Presidential debates. I’m not sure what he’s so scared about, to be honest. Sure, Cameron is probably the more photogenic of the two, but I’m pretty certain that his plastic face would melt under the heat from the TV studio lighting.
I thought Brown’s excuse was a bit crappy. He said because we don’t have a Presidential system and directly elect our PM, it’d be silly, as we don’t even get to choose. I think this is less a good reason why not to have debates, and more a reason to reform the electoral system.
Newsnight showed a clip of Brown talking on Breakfast Time in 1987, arguing in favour of televised debates so were able to say “what a hypocrite!” and essentially say “Why, Gordon, why?”. I think it’d be refreshingly honest for a politician if Gordon told the truth and said “Now I’m in charge, a debate would be a whole load of hassle, and might make me look bad, so I, a grumpy Scot, am not going to be stupid enough to go up against a slimy toff who used to work in PR, am I?”.
Maybe politics would be better if everyone was honest and transparent all the time. Rather than be coy about their reasons for doing things, maybe the public would have been able to get behind some of the government’s more ludicrous ideas:
“Right, I’m afraid guys, we’re going to have to invade Iraq. Yeah, its a poor country that has been economically crippled by sanctions and militarily crippled since the first Gulf War, but if it goes well, we’ll look well ‘ard so none of the actually evil countries be too scared to try anything. We also need to secure our oil supply – you know how things are, what with having oil in all the places where there’s nutters, we need to be in control of it. If we massacre a few million civilians in the process, I guess we’re sorry about that, but we need some way to [literally] fuel our rampant consumerism”.
“We want to build a big tent, and fill it with a load of tat that doesn’t know if its in a museum or a theme park to commemorate it being an arbitrary point in time since we started counting”.
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, Osmar.