Debate

There has been time to reflect upon the recent election campaign, and again I am left disappointed.

Whenever I saw or heard a “debate” I was reminded of Monty Pythons Argument sketch. The interviewer always took the position of opposition; “the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes”. It is never permissible to say good point, I think you’re right, there was always bah humbug! No wonder we have such a low opinion of politicians when our only view of them is at the end of an interviewers pointy stick.

One of the few political programmes I could watch with any regularity was ’This Week’, I dislike Andrew Neil, I can’t warm to Diane Abbott, and am not the greatest fan of Michael Portillo. I watch it because Diane and Michael will discuss things properly, their friendship shows through no matter how much they disagree. Sometimes they even agree, they do not look to score points of each other as usually happens, and they even gently make fun of each other. How I wish more programmes were like this.

It is such lazy journalism to enter in to a fake argument. All politicians suffer from being criticised constantly by journalists. I would love to see a journalist actually do some research, put forward a point of view. Perhaps, they could try and understand why a particular policy appeals to the public. So often a party policy was argued over, statistics thrown around, but no journalist ever put forward a view or indicated what the public perceptions were.

One of the difficulties facing journalists is that they must be impartial, this just makes them equally critical. Removing impartiality runs the risk of political rants, as favoured by US journalists and the UK papers.

The solution seems to be to replace the population of the world with thoughtful compassionate and reasoned people, oh well.