Broadcast General Election Debates (Communications Committee Report)

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Lord. He was chair of the Communications Committee and he played a large part in stimulating us to adopt this as a topic for investigation. I think that he was absolutely right to do so. It turned out to be one of the most interesting things that we have done in that committee.

I should like to set the context a little. We are of course in a situation of declining turnouts in elections—I will say a bit more about that in a minute—with the notable exception of the Scottish referendum. It bucked all the trends, and at some other point it may be worth thinking about why that was the case. Another part of the background is that there are fewer public meetings. I remember when there were massive public meetings. We filled Wandsworth town hall to hear Jim Callaghan when he was Prime Minister, and all that added to the sense that an election was coming up and there was a sense of excitement. However, some of that has now gone.

Perhaps I may refer to something that a friend of mine, Chris Mullin, the former MP for Sunderland, said at a book festival in Keswick in the Lake District. He was talking about his remarkable diary, which is good reading for everybody. He is a friend of mine, so I can plug his book quite happily. He was asked by a member of the audience in the theatre in Keswick, “Is the day of the political meeting over?”. He said, “No, it has been transmogrified into the book festival”. He said—I am more or less quoting him—“When I was MP for Sunderland, I had a job to get six people to come to a public meeting. Here, in this packed audience, there are over 200 of them paying £9 a head”. Book festivals are thriving but politics and political debate are not.

Therefore, having looked at the question of the party leaders’ debates, I assumed, along with most members of the committee, that they would happen. Indeed, we said in our report—this was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood—that we thought it would be a pretty poor show if any party leader who had been offered a place in the debates were to climb down and not take part, as he would be seen to be running away. Somehow implicit was our belief that these debates would take place. I should say that the book festival analogy is not that close; I just wanted to mention it as an example of something that is increasing in interest in terms of political debate.

Those leaders’ debates were absolutely compelling. Of course, we all had to stop canvassing during the election to watch them, so they had an effect on local activity. I thought that, by any standards—and this was the evidence that the committee got—the 2010 debates were a success. They worked well; they added something to British politics and campaigning and they were very revealing—as were the debates in Scotland more recently. Of course, as the report shows, they particularly appealed to young, first-time voters, who watched in large numbers. They admitted that the debates had sometimes persuaded or influenced them into thinking hard about policies, and had possibly even helped them to make their decision on how to vote.

Certainly, the majority of people who listened to the debates said that they had a better understanding of the issues, that they learned something and that the debates overall had influenced them to vote. Indeed, many of them watched the whole of the debate; they did not just switch on for 10 minutes and then switch off, as one might expect if politicians are held in such low repute, as they say—but that is a subject for another debate.

I will refer to some of the figures on turnout that are in the report. In 1992, the general election turnout was nearly 78%. By 2001, it was down to 59%; in 2005, it went up to 61%; and in 2010, it went up to 65%. Of course, one cannot attribute the improvement in 2010 to the broadcasts as simply as that: it may be that it was going to be a closer election and therefore there was more interest in it. However, I would have thought that the debates were helpful. As I said, most of the viewers stuck with them right through the period of the broadcast, which was quite long.

It has been said that the debates are helping to make our election campaigns more presidential—some would say too presidential. They would probably have become that willy-nilly, just because of the way the media operates, and so on. It would probably be a pity if we got too presidential, but there is nothing we can do about that. It is also clear that the debates on television tended to dominate the campaign—so much so that some other aspects of the campaign, for example the party leaders’ press conferences, got much less attention. All eyes were on the debates and the media wrote about them, so the emphasis switched a bit. That has happened, but that is not an argument against having the debates.

We did not feel that it was appropriate for us—as the noble Lord said—to specify who should take part in debates in the future. There was, of course, a formula that was used in the past, which was that it should be only party leaders who had a realistic prospect of becoming Prime Minister. I am not sure that that applied last time: with all due respect to the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg was not on his way to becoming Prime Minister. We probably felt that that was too limited an approach.

However, how does one then draw the line in a different direction? If it is done on opinion polls, they go up and down; if it is done on the European elections, they always have a slightly eccentric outcome in terms of who wins. They are more a protest vote in Britain than anything else, so they do not give us too good an indication. Certainly, I assume that Ofcom has taken an amalgam of all these things—an amalgam of Members of the House of the Commons, of parties that secured good support in elections and of opinion polls—so it is a bit of a hit-or-miss system. It was a lot easier when there were just two big parties. It would be very undemocratic to wish that we were back in the two-party system, but these things were clearly easier when we had just two parties.

During the European Union elections, there were two debates between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage. They were not quite party leaders’ debates, but they were an interesting extra. I am not personally sure what conclusions one should draw from them: it is difficult to know, but they were interesting. What they show, of course, is that a minor party gets more of a boost than a major party. That is to say, the protest party gets a wonderful platform, and that has a distorting effect on the way the public see it, because if they are going to make Nigel Farage equal to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Labour Party, that puts him in a much better position. There is, therefore, a downside to this, but equally it would be pretty undemocratic to say that only the leaders of parties with a significant number of seats in the Commons should be allowed to take part. So there is a problem.

In our report we considered whether, if one leader withdraws, the debates should go ahead. We thought that no one would want to do that because of the stigma that would be attached to it, as I said earlier.

I am interested in the formula that has been touted a bit that there should be one debate between the two main leaders, one between the two main parties plus the Liberal Democrats, and a wider debate which would include four parties, or possibly five if the Greens are to be included. I believe in democracy and that there should be one debate at least in which some of the smaller parties can have their say. On the other hand, I am concerned that if there are to be five parties to the debate, would that not, as it were, lessen the tension? Would it not get the main party leaders off the hook because all these people will be having their say and somehow the tension that we have seen in previous leaders’ debates—and we certainly saw in Scotland—would disappear? So if the leaders of the big parties do not want to be under pressure, it might be easier if more parties were there—which may be why David Cameron has said that he wants the Green Party there. I would like to see a mix of participation, some debates with two or three parties represented and some with more. That would be a better way of doing it than simply staying with one formula that would fit them all.

I will make two further comments. The people who moderate the debates are important. We do not necessarily want only white men of a certain age doing this: there should be a mix of gender and ethnicity in the moderators of these debates. That would help to project the debates in a better way and stop them being seen simply as part of the Westminster circle.

In our report, we refer to the possibility that broadcasters could use the debates as a way of reaching out to the public and getting them involved. They could use the debates as a peg for wider public involvement. I am not quite sure how that could be done but it certainly has support, and I would like to see it happen. Assuming that the debates go ahead, I would like to see the broadcasters use them as a basis for education, outreach work and so on, so that they are a part of a wider effort in the community. That would be a good thing.

Our report is a good one. I will be disappointed if the debates do not go ahead and I hope that four parties will take part—and I would not mind if the Greens took part as well.