Smaller parties may be squeezed out of UK election TV leadership debates

I dont see how it is at all within the rules around media representation around election time to deliberately exclude all except Labour and the Tories. Or am I just naive as to how badly the rules are actually written and allowing the other parties into the debates has just been done on “convention” up until now?

Tories, Labour, Dems. those are the trio that should be prioritised for debates in England. Anything else is pandering.

Why can’t they just have passive-aggressive “party political broadcasts” like they used to have, at 9 o’clock on BBC2?

These TV debates are excruciating and embarrassing to watch. It’s just another American thing that we’ve copied. The American ones are sometimes interesting because they might have a mad or trainwreck candidate who might make a spectacle of himself or be funny. But our politicians are so unbelievably polished and rehearsed by media teams that it’s like watching automatons.

Who on earth wants to watch these two men talking about anything? They are such charisma-free zones, apparently believing in nothing, and having no values. You might as well have a debate between two of those cuddly toys where you pull a string in their back and they repeat a recorded phrase.

They shouldn’t have debates at all. Cameron wanted them in the 2010 election, then when he got power he wanted a ridiculous 7 way debate with weirdos from parties that had NO chance of winning just so he could get away with having to defend the Tories less on air and to divide the opposition, something which the Tories love to do so much.

Well that will be because we have a First Past The Post system, hence why ‘smaller parties’ are exculded because our system does not represent them.

‘Smaller parties’ (which may mean parties that have got millions of votes) are always removed from debates in the UK.

Welcome to a voting system that we only enjoy along with Belarus in Europe!