Will Burstow is a Conservative activist in Dorset and blogs at The Burstow Blog.
Yes! Let’s have television debates between the party leaders, it will be the dawn of a new era in accountable and transparent politics, and we’ll all live democratically ever after! Or will we? Because I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that we’ve got this all terribly wrong.
Now I don’t doubt that they will encourage a level of passive engagement with the political process, as Jonathan Isaby has said, akin to that of election night coverage. Nor do I seek to expand on Tim Montgomerie’s previous comments. I come at it from a different angle, a constitutional angle.
What most concerns me about the proposal is the amount of potential power it places in the hands of the Prime Minister, and in turn, the amount of power it will remove from Parliament and Cabinet. Because as we all know, politics comes down to having the power to get things done.
We’ve run elections with a constituency link and a manifesto (collective or otherwise) that each candidate aspires to implement after the election pretty much since the dawn of democracy in the United Kingdom, but the idea of a television debate changes the structure of an election campaign and so the structure of the constitution.
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