Foreign Perspectives

Last night there was the choice between watching round 2 of the UK wide debates or, for those of us outside England, watching our own local guys debating instead.

In the end we opted for the local guys simply because the UK-wide debate was getting really boring with all the expected reactions trotted out on cue. There’s only so much interest you can drum up to watch a fairly calm debate: what’s needed is a bit more fighting between the parties I think as there didn’t seem to be any real depth of feeling coming across this time around.

Our local debates were even more calm and collected if anything (there was the one with the main leaders, another with the also-rans). As in the national debates, the parties that have no real power had all the wonderful ideas to put forward but with no worries about taking responsibility of implementing whatever grandiose ideas that they could come up with. As usual, the greens came across as wanting to take us all back to that calmer and gentler time that was the middle ages when we could all grow our own food, didn’t pollute too much and died horrible deaths at an early age. They generally don’t mention that last bit for some reason.

There wasn’t even much following up of the scandals that the two major party leaders had been involved in which seemed a shame in some ways as it was the only part where the level of debate even approached an interesting level.

Why are they all so boring? Everyone says that they want to encourage people to become interesting in politics but they don’t seem to do anything substantial about it. That’s a shame because it is interesting and affects us all: it’s just that the debate format being used at the moment just isn’t a suitable means to generate that interest.