The Leaders’ debates: a personal view
So, that’s that out of the way. While your local candidates hust in churches, classrooms and town halls, the Leaders of the three main parties had the hall of the University of Birmingham in which to debate. Here’s a personal take on last evening.
The big headline is Labour’s failure to recover: Gordon Brown didn’t really turn up. He went through the motions, a breathless litany of numbers, without really getting across a strategy or agenda. People who vote Labour will do so despite the Prime Minister rather than because of him.
The debate was between Nick and Cameron. The snap-shot polls after the debate suggest that audiences divided nearly evenly between the two. Stop and read that sentence again: in an election that was said to be the Tories’ to lose, they just can’t land a knock-out blow. What Cameron did for me last evening was remind me (as if I needed it) why I am a Liberal — and how desperate our right-wing opponents are getting faced with their failure to have this election ‘in the bag’.
Cameron talked of his values but, scratch the surface, and what lay beneath was something mean-spirited and intolerant. His values are cheap and nasty. Let’s take two points:
Immigration — as I have said to electors, I have been delighted that immigration has become a live issue in this debate. It concerns many people but has been kept out of the spotlight for too long by two old parties who are too frightened to discuss it. Let’s have the debate but let’s be honest about it. What the Tories said last night hints at an agenda that is either unworkable or so statist it is frightening. There are illegal immigrants in this country — some have been here for over a decade. That in itself suggests how broken our system has been under past governments. We could, as a one-off, wipe the slate clean and begin again, accepting that those that have been here for over 10 years can apply to stay, be brought into the main economy and thus pay into society. Or — what else? Cameron seem to suggest that his government would round up people whose locations are presently unknown and divert resources to deport them. Don’t just think how many police officers it would take to knock on every door and forceably remove the inhabitants — officers who could be on the beat. Think also about how the government would have to gather the information to find these people and prove their ‘illegality’. That would demand a database of information, backed up, one presumes, by forms of ID — so much for Tory opposition to ID cards or the national identity database.
Second point, Europe. Here again, Cameron was most revealing in the implications for his own stance when attacking the LibDems. Once again, his attack was based on a lie: a ridiculous insinuation that the LibDems were gagging to get Britain into the Euro. That’s not in our manifesto and not on our minds. What we have said is that, if the economic situation suggested it would be in Britain’s best interests to join, then there should be a referendum — but the economic situation is clearly not going to suggest that for many years, at least. And, anyway, there is a much bigger referendum that must come first: whether we should be in the EU or not. As I’ve said before, the EU does frighten or anger some people and it’s right that we should have the fundamental debate. But Cameron, in his attack, by his very silence on this issue, revealed his party’s line: no referendum on in or out of the EU. That’s where the debate should be now, not in hypotheticals that are years away — but the Tories just don’t want to have that debate that would divide them and which they fear they could not control.
LibDem policies have undergone tough scrutiny and they have come through the test. The only way that the other parties can get close to hitting is by misrepresenting. And by beating about like that, they reveal their own underbelly. The Conservatives like to portray themselves as a patriotic party, but they have forgotten the British values of fair play and tolerance. They can only offer a rhetoric of fear. Nick’s so right to focus on an agenda of hope and of real, radical change.