The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Benn’s view on it would have been interesting
AREYOU as fascinated by the Clegg-Farage debates as I am? That depends, I hear you say, on how fascinated I truly am. Fair point. I am so fascinated by them that I watched theAntiques RoadTrip instead. But what I really think is this. How can these two apparently intelligent men be so desperate to try to convince us they have a rightful claim to a seat at the big boys’table that they signed up to participate in a farce of such spectacular irrelevance to anything that is going on in Britain or for that matter anywhere in the world? A farce that will only be remembered for anything at all if clips of the most tasteless moments crop up on Have I Got News ForYou?
If you know the answer to how these two apparently intelligent men, etc, please let me know, because as things stand it eludes me. I blame theTV companies. Firstly, I blame them for not disabusing the said apparently intelligent men of their delusions about their political gravitas. Secondly, I blame them for deluding themselves that there is an audience out here in the real world for so-calledAmerican-style debates (which inAmerica are usually between presidential candidates and to which Americans are mostly indifferent). Here, when the participants represent the political equivalent of say, East Stirling versusAlbion Rovers, did anyone really watch who is not medically addicted to the outermost reaches of the political margins?
But the juggernaut of UK politics operates more or less exclusively on the road less travelled, while remaining utterly convinced that it travels the Route 66 of the democratic process, which might explain why George Osborne turned up at a bingo hall in Cardiff. It also explains why anyone at all thought it was a good idea to televise two live debates between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage, the Chuckle Brothers of Westminster.
No wait, Nigel Farage has nothing to do with Westminster. You tend to forget that because the London media seem to find him irresistible. (He would do well to realise that that is usually a dangerous place to be.) What he is, is the leader of a political party which occupies a very dubious portion of the fringe of the fringe of UK politics and an MEP who as far as I can tell has done nothing at all for our relationship with the EU apart from hurl abuse at it. Whatever else that may constitute, it has nothing to do with thoughtful politics. It would appear that he is fooling some of the people some of the time, but whatever happens in the European elections, expect him and his party to come under some unpleasantly heavy scrutiny from the said London media in the run-up to the next general election, and expect skeletons to tumble from cupboards.
And for those of the political classes who would still have us all believe that we are all in this together, it is perhaps worth pointing out that Mr Farage’s party has not so much as a councillor in Scotland and that no candidate in a Scottish constituency for eitherWestminster or Holyrood has saved his deposit. As they say onThe WestWing, a leader with no followers is just a guy out for a walk.
Which brings us to the other Chuckle Brother, also known as the deputy prime minister, which in terms of political credibility is not dissimilar to the vice-president inAmerica. Be honest, could you pick Joe Biden out of an identity parade?
Do you know what I was thinking last Thursday? It was the day after the first of the two debates and it was the day ofTony Benn’s funeral and I was thinking how instructive it would have been to have heard Mr Benn’s critical appraisal of the broadcasts.
The older he became the wiser was his counsel. His political thinking was never more astute than after he gave up professional politics. You may remember that when he retired fromWestminster he said it was so that he could devote more time to politics. It was a good line, but it was also true.
Politically, he was a giant, who could keep any kind of company at all and enthral and enlighten that company. Of which working professional politician in today’s Westminster could you say that? He would have forensically shredded the very irrelevance of every word of those two overblown political egos, would have shown them for empty shirts with nothing to say that could possibly matter to the future of this country, however you might care to define it.
The Clegg-Farage television debates may well be the only political debates we see between now and the general election, because everyone knows that there is nothing to lose by them and nothing to gain. David Cameron will certainly never debate with Alex Salmond (which might be worth the price of the ticket if only to underline just how different are the priorities of an independent Scotland and a United Kingdom with Scotland as an irritating northern extremity that Westminster feels the need to placate from time to time).
Mr Cameron is also too astute to get whupped, as he surely would, in a head to head with Mr Salmond.
And who would switch on a CameronMiliband debate, an hour-long re-run of any vacuous, ritualised session of Prime Minister’s Questions plucked at random over however many years it is now since the pair of them locked what passes for their horns across the despatch box? Not I.