The Sky News leadership debate between Tory candidates to be next PM has been cancelled. Not because of Covid, the heat wave or logistical concerns, but because it makes the Conservative Party look bad. What a complete and utter joke.
In a statement a Sky News spokeswoman said: "Two of the three candidates currently leading in the MPs ballots - Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss - have confirmed to Sky News that they do not want to take part. Conservative MPs are said to be concerned about the damage the debates are doing to the image of the Conservative Party, exposing disagreements and splits within the party. Both are very welcome to taking part in future Sky News televised debates.
Read more: What the Tory leadership candidates have said before about Wales and devolution
"Sky News has campaigned for an independent commission to organise the running of TV debates between leaders of Britain’s main parties. Sky News and other broadcasters worked successfully together on televised leadership debates ahead of the 2010 general election."
Really think about what this says about our democracy. These people are running to be leader of the Conservative Party and therefor the next Prime Minister. They will be taking over the country on the back of a few nominations from Tory MPs and a vote by party members.
When they enter office they will have over two years to implement their vison. But this is not a vison that anyone voted for. During this campaign several of the hopefuls have promised server cuts to services if they win. This is despite the fact that they ran for election and achieved their majority on the promise there would be no more austerity.
Despite this gaping accountability deficit, two of the leading candidates have decided they won't even give the public a chance to understand the polices of the people who will now be governing them with such a flimsy democratic madidate because they might look a bit s**t.
Now don't get me wrong, I totally understand why they made that decision. In the ITV leadership debate on Sunday, Sunak accused Liz Truss of peddling "something-for-nothing" economics after she said he was choking off growth by raising taxes to their highest level in 70 years. Whereas Truss attacked Mr Sunak's record telling him: "Rishi, you have raised taxes to the highest level in 70 years. That is not going to drive economic growth. You raised national insurance, even though people like me opposed it in cabinet at the time because we could have afforded to fund the NHS through general taxation. The fact is that raising taxes at this moment will choke off economic growth; it will prevent us getting the revenue we need to pay off the debt."
If I was making comms decisions for the Tories I would want to do anything to prevent this dirty laundry being aired in public again (and this is not just normal dirty laundry but some pants with a sizable skid inside). I get why they want the debates not to go ahead. But if you have any care for democracy in this country you have to be concerned about how little the public actually matters in how this country has governed. And this decision isn't set a backdrop of a function electoral system.
In the 2019 election the amount of votes per seat won varied wildly. For instance the Scottish National Party had a seat for every 26,000 votes they received. By contrast The Greens had 857,513 votes and only won one seat. Labour needed to win more than 50,000 votes to win a seat while the Conservatives only needed to win 38,000 votes to send a Tory to Parliament. To govern in the UK you don't need a wide cross section of support, you just need everyone who supports you to live near each other.
You shouldn't be surprised by Truss and Sunak's self interested cowardice. In the last election Boris Johnson avoided one on one interviews like the plague (though in a matter of months we would have an actual plague on our hands). He repeatedly refused to be interviewed by Andrew Neil with his advisor Dominic Cummings later saying: "why the fu*k would we put a gaffe machine clueless about policy & government up to be grilled for ages, upside=0 for what?! This is not a hard decision... pundits don't understand comms, power or management."
The fact that the party that has run the country for over a decade has decided that it is too risky for the person who is going to govern us to have a public debate shows how many underlying health conditions our country has.
Read more:
- Boris Johnson's successor must not treat Wales and devolution with such contempt
- Governance in Wales is a convoluted mess that needs to be fixed
- The cost of living payments you're entitled to as bills soar
- The richest candidates vying to be the next Conservative leader and Prime Minister
- The vast amounts of public money spent paying people to do nothing
