TV election debates don’t fit the UK democratic system. Hence the chaos

I wish I could get worked up about the televised election debates (or lack thereof). I can understand that it’s a very important to the broadcasters, who don’t mind reducing the campaign to three US-style standoffs. But if they don’t go ahead, is it really an outrage? Is our democracy really the poorer for it? When broadcasters are angry, they have a platform to vent – which is why the furore is been given disproportional coverage. But without the debates, the election will go on in the way that every election before 2010 went on. And I rather welcome that. The TV debates do make good entertainment but they do rather take over the campaign – and put the whole thing a little more in the hands of the political and media elite. And a little less in the hands of voters like Mrs Duffy who torpedoed Gordon Brown last year. Also, 98pc of us don’t get the choice to vote for or against the people we watch on the telly in these debates. Indeed, after the last election, it was briefly possible that we’d get a new Labour leader to do a deal with the LibDems – so the new Prime Minister would be one who didn’t appear in any of the much-hyped debates. Hence the flaw in the whole idea: TV debates seek to impose a US-style presidential dynamic on a UK constituency system. It’s an awkward fit, hence today’s chaos. Miliband may end up Prime Minister, propped up by the SNP who dump him in time for their 2016 Holyrood election. In a hung parliament the Tory leader – probably Boris Johnson – could form a government. So Britain could end up watching 7-leader debate yet still end up governed by someone else. And Cameron’s right – if you invite the Greens why not the DUP? They are right to complain about their proposed exclusion by the broadcasters. They could well be kingmakers after the next election. We could do with knowing more about them. Yet they get shunted out of the picture because Ulstermen would ruin the optics. Peter Robinson, DUP leader, is understandly angry about all this asking “just who the broadcasters think they are, that they can set down a diktat?” It’s a good point. But no one is in charge or these debates, no one has authority.  Of course, Cameron has himself to blame for hyping all of this up in the first place (or allowing Andy Coulson to). Five years ago it was him leaning across the despatch box asking Gordon Brown what he was scared of. Now it’s Miliband’s turn to use the pious language saying that these debates ‘belong to the British people’ – as if they were somehow an ancient tradition rather than a Coulson spin wheeze. So Cameron deserves to take some stick for chickening out of the debate tradition which he invented (“part of the modern age” etc) and Labour is richly entitled to mock him for a volte-face. The TV debates may be a bad idea, but they were his bad idea. Yet still, the excitement is overdone. TV debates just don’t fit the UK political system, and their apparent collapse is proof of this basic point.