The general election campaign is well and truly underway now after last night’s one-and-only TV debate between the country’s seven main parties vying for our votes in just over a month’s time. While at times it was a bit of a stramash, with the leaders trying to get their voices heard over the others, in general it was a very interesting piece of political television and what will hopefully be a real spark to what promises to be a powder-keg few weeks.
In some ways the debates can be characterised by what they weren’t – they weren’t dominated by one person or party in the way that they could have been and they weren’t overly personal debates either. All the leaders did reasonably well in getting their parties’ points across, and no-one landed any killer blows or suffered an appalling gaffe either. While perhaps not the best for entertainment purposes, it did give a good standard of information about the parties to the electorate – and that’s what they were designed for. All the critics of the seven-way format must surely agree that the leaders were in control for most of the proceedings and all got a chance to put their views across in the two-hour span.
What I found most interesting about the debtes were the wide range of battles going on. Clegg darted at Cameron the first chance he got to criticise him, taking on his coalition colleague to put distance between them as quickly as possible. Miliband too couldn’t wait to sink his teeth into the Prime Minister. Nigel Farage criticised everyone for being “all the same” and tried his best to take points off both Miliband and Cameron, while also criticising the Barnett Formula to Nicola Sturgeon’s disapproval. The three progressive party leaders all kept a similar message of decrying austerity, benefitting from their earlier meeting to co-ordinate their plan of action for the debate, and hammered Cameron for his actions and Miliband for his plans (or lack of them). Everyone jumped on the comments that Farage made as he seemed to relate all his points to immigration, as he and his party are wont to do. It wasn’t a free-for-all, but a carefully balanced web of battles that kept things heated but never let anyone lose their cool.
For my money, Nicola Sturgeon was the best performer. In many ways she had the most practice at it, with her experience in debating before the independence referendum coming into play for sure, but she played her hand exceptionally well. She challenged Miliband on his plan for cuts and attacked Cameron on his slashing of benefits (both of which weren’t really answered). She was also very strong on the education question, highlighting that she got to where she was because of free higher education and that she had no right to take that away. Sturgeon did something else that no other leader did though, and that was command the respect of all the other leaders. No-one challenged her when she spoke, and no-one took issue with her points. Whether it’s a sign of her reputation for tenacity and ferocity or her policies that kept them at bay isn’t clear, but when it comes to the debate it’s clear that she was the one that came out of it with the biggest boost in opinion across the UK – something she was clearly aiming for to smooth out any possible coalition negotiations.
Of course one of the big takeaways from the debate was that it was the only chance that Ed Miliband and David Cameron would have to go head-to-head in the campaign, and although the interchange between the two was limited through the debate it was interesting. I think Miliband came out of it slightly stronger, going more on the offensive at Cameron’s record of austerity and failing to bring down the deficit as promised. However, Cameron did well enough in a debate he didn’t want to take part in. He was quiet, and didn’t have too much to add at times, but he kept to his guns of being the main party of Government and of the party line that is keeping on with the long-term economic plan. He was confident and assured in that, and looked Prime Ministerial in doing so. It was an effective dead heat between the two, as the polls below will show, but I think that if the public at large get to see that Miliband is just as competent then it could prove to be the kick in the polls that Labour need to get over the line.
Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru and Natalie Bennett of the Greens both had their first wide-scale appearance on national television last night and both showed no signs of inexperience. Leanne Wood focussed on issues in Wales, which is to her advantage as unlike the SNP Plaid have no major ambitions for holding the balance of power across the country, and did a good job of taking sensible, anti-austerity politics. Although sometimes so softly-spoken that she was drowned out by some of the male leaders, she took Miliband to task time and again for the Labour administration in Wales’ failings, particularly on the NHS, and she also hit back at Farage’s anti-immigration rhetoric, telling him he should be ashamed of himself and drawing audience applause. Natalie Bennett too did relatively well, but with her party’s alternative agenda she did seem to veer off the message of the debates at times and didn’t score any pointing blows on the other contenders – which makes her performance fall foul of the cardinal sin of debating: being forgettable.
Nick Clegg had a solid outing last night, in trying to recapture the form of the last debates that set him up for a stint in Government. It will likely have reminded many voters of who he is and what the Lib Dems stand for, and as sarcastic as that sounds it is actually true – as Clegg and the Lib Dems have been silenced in many ways by their participation in Government and the actions of the dominant Conservative party. Clegg made a concerted effort to appeal to the centre ground, saying they’d borrow less than Labour and cut less than the Tories, and with many ebbing and flowing between the red and blue sides at the moment it might pick up some votes. It was an exercise in damage limitation in a lot of ways though, as he apologised again for his “infamous” blunder on tuition fees that has long since been the signature on the Lib Dems’ death sentence. While it was a good performance, Clegg didn’t set the world alight like he did five years ago – and while he can say he did fight the good fight in the end, it won’t be enough I feel for the Lib Dems to avoid the annihilation that they seem destined for.
And finally, Nigel Farage used his trump card at every opportunity and while appealing to the “man-of-the-people” image and the populist staunches of his party as often as he could he did exactly what he set out to do – prove his party was the only one serious on immigration. While that may have appealed to many voters, and it certainly shows up in the polls that he did, it seemed like one message being replayed over and over again. He also showed some particularly strong beliefs, such as denying HIV treatment on the NHS to those who come from overseas – something that Nicola Sturgeon lambasted saying “when I look at these people I don’t see a foreigner I see a human being”. Farage was a decent debater, but whether his message sets his party up as a real choice to cover the wide-ranging remit of Government is unclear.
So, for me the ranked order of the politicians was: Sturgeon, Clegg, Miliband, Wood, Cameron, Farage, Bennett – but it appears the British public don’t fully agree with me or each other on that. Here is the table of polls asking who performed best, with an average along the side:
| YouGov | ComRes | ICM | Survation | Average | |
| Cameron | 18% | 21% | 24% | 25% | 22.0% |
| Miliband | 15% | 21% | 25% | 25% | 21.5% |
| Clegg | 10% | 9% | 8% | 6% | 8.3% |
| Farage | 20% | 21% | 19% | 24% | 21.0% |
| Sturgeon | 28% | 20% | 17% | 15% | 20.0% |
| Bennett | 5% | 5% | 3% | 3% | 4.0% |
| Wood | 4% | 2% | 2% | 2% | 2.5% |
While it’s clear that there was a wide range of opinion across the country, with different polls likely using different weightings to arrive at their final conclusion, it can be said to be a four-way tie between Miliband, Cameron, Farage and Sturgeon.
What I find most interesting though is the table asking who performed worst, as this implies taking a strong negative away from the debate and who didn’t hit the bar that people had set for them:
| ComRes | Survation | Average | |
| Cameron | 15% | 15% | 15% |
| Miliband | 14% | 16% | 15% |
| Clegg | 6% | 9% | 8% |
| Farage | 20% | 17% | 19% |
| Sturgeon | 4% | 4% | 4% |
| Bennett | 25% | 23% | 24% |
| Wood | 16% | 16% | 16% |
You’ll see here that these results are a bit starker, with Sturgeon out in front as the one that people rated best with Clegg just behind – and the rest roughly around where I ranked them. The results are also far less volatile, in that the both polls arrived at the same conclusions within the margin of error. These are perhaps more an indication of who people generally agreed with most, rather than who they liked or will vote for in May, which gives a more objective view of debate performance I feel.
Now the real question is to see how these debate performances really change things in the all-important voting intention polls. In the last debates, in 2010, we saw the advent of Cleggmania which gave the Lib Dems a boost in the polls that lasted all the way to the election – but that ended up in an actual loss of seats. These debates may or may not do the same to the polls, which have been more or less stagnant for a few months apart from a slight slip from UKIP and a slight gain for the Tories, but in an election as close as this any change from what has been the norm is going to be significant. We know that 7.4 million people watched the debate, down from the 9.4 million that watched the first debate last time, so there are certainly many undecided voters that will have taken a cue from last night’s performances that will last with them until polling day.
The big debate has come and gone, and we are now five weeks away from one of the most unpredictable elections in British history. Last night showed that multi-party politics has arrived in the UK, and with the prospect of all number of different coalition possibilities the British public now have a clearer idea of what their vote means in May.