Though Cowards Flinch

There should be no doubts. Labour should not be participating in a televised debate involving any of the other parties. It is not a question of testing each man’s ideas in the fire of debate. It’s not even about the cheap point scoring which will almost inevitably be heavily featured. It’s about creating a spectacle which should not, but could, end up having a huge effect on national politics.

Practically, the debate means nothing. Like Question Time and the other such shows, it will not be about serious policy. Yet depending on what actually happens, the media may end up crowing about how one side ‘won’ the debate. Not that this will be a seriously considered analysis either, if the preliminary crowing is anything to go by. Witness the Independent’s Matthew Norman:

[Gordon Brown's] a telly catastrophe. Disturbingly unnatural and unnervingly weird, with the top lip of The Joker, eye bags the size of Caligula’s imperial couch, waxen flesh the hue of unwashed grey flannel, and the rictus grin of a jackal in its death throes, he is by light years the least accomplished television act of the trio. His MPs’ expenses tour de force should be made available to any outsourced Syrian torturer tired of strapping electrodes to genitals.

What. A. Dick. It’s true enough that Brown is hardly the best performer in the world. Yet everyone seems to have forgotten what happened the last time we had a bloody circus monkey as Prime Minister. Three wars, plus all the stuff we seem to forget had being going on during the Blair years – the expenses scandals, businesses giving fantastic amounts to political parties as ‘loans’ and so on.

Whenever I saw the Fabian leadership debate between Gordon Brown, John McDonnell and Michael Meacher, the only thing which saved Brown’s performance was that Meacher was even more of a dribbling idiot. And yet Meacher, by all accounts, is a conscientious parliamentarian. I don’t agree with a lot of what he says, since he’s a soft Left wimp, but at least in his newspaper articles he tries to show a critical engagement with the issues.

Unlike some other parliamentarians I could mention, whose newspaper appearances mostly consist of self-aggrandizement and gasbaggery designed to override opposition almost by force of personality. Because it’s certainly not by rational argument. Ask yourself, which character does the televised debate encourage, and which character would we prefer as our Member of Parliament?

Or, indeed, as leader of a party and leader of the country.

There’s plenty to complain about, as regards Gordon Brown and the Parliamentary Labour Party. They have made politics worse in many respects. But measuring how well they can please a crowd with rhetorical trickery and then using that to make judgments on who won a televised debate, as though it impacts on the substantial issues, this is not what I think politics should be about.

It is, as Matthew Norman alludes to, a sop to the ‘X-Factor generation’, as though a few flashing lights and theme tunes will fix the problem of a declining youth vote or political participating generally.