Further to Craig’s heroic live-blog, a few afterthoughts.
I don’t know (neither do you) whether the avalanche of criticism over the recent crescendo of lefty bias affected the strategy of David Dimbleby and his BBC back-room team, but something strange happened last night. Rather, something unusually unstrange, which was of course the unique reversion to balance, from both chairman and audience.
I know many left-leaning viewers didn’t much like it, but one could gloat over the fact that they were experiencing at long last a taste of their own medicine. Anyway, to many people it looked less like bias than a well-timed reversal to normal.
I’m inclined to agree with Nick Robinson, or was it Norm, who said that the audience won. It was a sharper than usual audience, and there was little of that appalling whooping that was allowed to wreck previous election programmes with audiences.
I am not much of a political aficionado, but there are certain things that interest me more than others. One topic I would have liked to have seen addressed was the Islamophobia come antisemitism pledge, be it Theresa May’s ‘Crackdown” or Ed Miliband’s ‘criminalisation’, but I might as well admit that if it had been raised, it would inevitably have been couched in such obfuscational language that we would have been none the wiser.
In fact that was a theme throughout all the electioneering to date. Politicians (apart from Nigel) trying not to reveal their hand, as in poker. “Who will you team up with?” Can’t show my hand. “What will you cut?” Can’t possibly show my hand.
Of course they can’t. They’d be crucified if they did. So why the pointless, hiding-to-nothing, persistent badgering from ALL the BBC’s finest? Andrew Neil is as bad as the rest on that score.
The most memorable aspect of the debate was Ed’s attitude towards the previous Labour government’s mistakes. One, squandering the crown jewels and plunging us into massive debt. Two, deliberate open door immigration. On the first, Ed revealed that at the end of the day, he thought that the spend spend spend principle was justified by the acquisitions it brought ‘are country’, as he pronounces it. Schools, hospitals and so on. This exposed him as the serious lefty he is. But my goodness me. He is always inclined to admit to his party’s failure on immigration with the phrase, “we got it wrong.” Is that phrase really suitable for something that has had such a massively detrimental effect on ‘are country?’
It’s a phrase more appropriate to something like placing a wrong bet. Heads or tails? Oops. Got that wrong! Winner of that match? Wrong again.
But it wasn’t a sport, it wasn’t roulette. It was a much more fundamental gamble, and saying “We got it wrong” is a very offensive and glib. It’s an understatement and a gigantic cop-out. It’s beyond a cliche, reminiscent of that grotesquely emotive and misleading phrase “What Israel is doing to the Palestinians.”
I want to hear someone from Ed’s party saying our open door policy was a mistake that had huge negative ramifications, and what’s more it was a deliberate megalomaniacal ploy to keep us in power.
David Cameron spoke well but he said very little. Yes, we know bringing down the deficit is his priority, and it seems like a worthy objective. Duh!
At least he didn’t stumble over the ‘accident-waiting-to-happen’ podium ‘Q’ shaped thingy that some lunatic from W1A had managed to dream up and get past the department of stupid.
The collapse of the Lib Dems has absolved Nick Clegg from serious electioneering. He went through the motions dutifully and came across as a nice bloke. One could almost forget the bitter toxicant within the party. But not quite.
Nigel Farage was relegated to past-my-bedtime hour. But there’s always iPlayer. Dealing him Jo Coburn, on the other hand, was a mean trick that can’t be rewound and undone. She can be unpleasant, can’t she? She was so witch-like and irritable that no-one could resist feeling a pang of sympathy for Nigel Farage. All that was achieved by her intrusive interruptions was more evidence that Ukip has been dealt a bad hand by the BBC.
There were a couple of strategic blunders in the area of general performance. The first miscalculation was producing that infamous ‘No money left’ note. Props are unpopular. Second one was asking the questioner’s name all the time. Some of them seemed irritated by this, and who wouldn’t be?
There were a few ‘Let me be clears’ and ‘right thing to dos’ and an awkwardly choreographed ‘walk towards the audience’ from Ed.
I notice these things, and I suspect many other viewers do too.
