Then, Nick Clegg won. I think I was quite interested to see what happened in the debate. But after seeing what happened, I think that they are a bad idea... yes I know, that is because I'm massively bias. That is true, I'll be up front and say that I'm a Tory (despite being of a throughly working class background).
The reason why I don't like the debates (after seeing one) is because of my old simple complaint. Nick Clegg won, no, that isn't the complaint. Why did he win? He won the first debate because no one knew or cared about him. He was a nobody and so when he said something no one really criticised it, because they didn't know enough about him to know all the really stupid things that his manifesto contains. Is that his fault, not at all. But is that a good reason for someone to succeed, not really.
Let me put it this way, the policies that he made were the same ones that existed before when no one would bother voting for him. What changed was that he looked good in the debate. No new policy, no change in substance, just he looked good, he looked new.
As a result apparently he has garnered quite a following amount floating voters. He has even got lots of new people to sign up to vote. Great! most people are thinking, he has increased interest in politics.
But why is that great? The people who are voting for him couldn't care enough to be bothered to look at his policies before and yet they now want to vote. He has gathered to himself, those who can't be bothered to put any effort into voting, the 'he looks quite good' vote.
In short this debate has made politics less about policy and more about personality. This is shallow and pointless. Why not just skip out the debate and decide purely on which tie the leaders choose. Make it even more asinine?
I understand why people don't bother voting, the complexities of the economy are so difficult to grasp not even those who are trained in it get it right (inter alia the recession!) so what chance does Joe Bloggs have who doesn't know how the stock exchange works, has no idea what the IMF does and can't manage his own credit card bills let alone understand our countries credit?
I'm not being harsh, I'm not saying people are stupid, it is just a perfectly valid observation. So why do you want such people to then decide who is best to help the economy recover? Everyone is going to say they know best and everyone is going to say the other party will ruin it. How is the public going to decide? Most of them, on personality and class. The Tories are going to look out for toffs, Labour are going to look out for single mothers and Liberals.... no one knows... or should I say knew. Which is why they were failing so badly. They had failed to ally themselves to a class of the population.
Now they have the young and hip vote... anyone who doesn't really care but has decided they don't like the parties in at the moment because they are too 'mainstream'.
So that is what our countries future is going to be decided on... who has a reputation for being nice to their 'class' and who is seen as a bit alternative, a little bit edgey... suffice to say it 'does my head in'.
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