Broadcast General Election Debates (Communications Committee Report)

Lord Finkelstein Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Finkelstein (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for holding this debate on this important topic. I wish to detain the House only briefly, with just a few direct points.

When I was 23 years old, I was selected to run for Parliament for the first time. I was not remotely ready to be a Member of Parliament. I seemed to my prospective constituents to be what I undoubtedly was: preposterously young and immature. I still have a letter from the citizens advice bureau after one of my campaign visits. It said:

“Dear Mr Finkelstein. It was very nice to meet you. And your mother”.

This much I did know, however. If you want to make yourself look good, you should challenge your opponent to a debate so it was the first thing I did. He either agreed to it and awarded you a status as his equal or avoided it, so you could accuse him of running scared. This much I knew, but Ken Livingstone knew more. He accepted my invitation but held the debate at the Kilburn Irish Centre. I was not elected Member of Parliament for Brent East. I therefore come to this debate as a pragmatist, aware of why people call for debates and of what makes them turn out well or badly. The thinking of my old as well as noble friend Lady Grender is entirely clear to me.

With this in mind, here is my attitude. First, on the whole and taking one thing with another, I would rather have an election debate between the leaders than not. Should anyone question their value, the report to which the noble Lord directs our attention makes the case admirably. Secondly, while I realise that the House of Lords is often a machine for the discovery of hitherto unknown constitutional principles, the holding of leadership debates is not such a principle. We had almost a century of elections since the universal franchise without television debates. The party that believes they are in its interest suddenly discovers that they are vital to democracy then forgets this point again, or the other way round.

I notice, for instance, that my friend Alastair Campbell has been attacking the Prime Minister over what he wrongly asserts is a refusal to debate. He says that if Mr Cameron was confident then he would debate, and the principle involved means that the broadcasters should go ahead with an empty chair. Yet here is Alastair’s diary from 3 March 1997:

“We went back to Islington and on the way TB suddenly said he didn’t think it was really in our interests to have a television debate. Bizarrely Gordon, Peter and I had all come to pretty much the same conclusion over the weekend. GB felt Major was now seen as the underdog and therefore a TV debate was likely to help them. Our general view was that whilst we could see it would be good for TV, we were not convinced it would be good for politics. TB said can you imagine how ghastly the build up would be? It’s really all balls that it would improve democratic debate”.

I gently note the contrast between this and Alastair’s position now. I gently view many remarks about the imperative of the debate in the same way.

Thirdly, there is a way of reconciling the desirability of debates with inevitable and necessary political pragmatism, which everyone in this House shares when it suits them—a way of doing it sensibly and doing it right. That is to hold the debates on a fair basis that does not obviously favour any one party. There should be at least two debates: the first between the two serious candidates for Prime Minister, and the second between all the parties with a serious chance of securing seats at the election. This is an arrangement that all the party leaders would agree to and that would not favour any one of them. There would be no cause for an empty chair because a fair offer to debate had been made on a basis that everyone could agree to. It could allow the debates to go ahead—which, on the whole, I am mildly in favour of—but if not, then not.