Dr Louise Thompson
Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester.
UK Election 2024
Section 8: Personality politics and popular culture
87. Ed Davey: Towards a Liberal Populism? (Dr Tom Sharkey, Dr Sophie Quirk)
88. Why Nigel Farage’s anti-media election interference claims are so dangerous (Dr Lone Sorensen)
89. Nigel Farage and the political circus (Dr Neil Ewen)
90. Binface, Beany and Beyond: humorous candidates in the 2024 General Election (Prof Scott Wright)
91. What Corbyn support reveals about how Starmer’s Labour won big (Prof Cornel Sandvoss, Dr Benjamin Litherland, Dr Joseph Andrew Smith)
92. “Well that was dignified, wasn’t it?”: floor apportionment and interaction in the televised debates (Dr Sylvia Shaw)
93. TV debates: beyond winners and losers (Prof Stephen Coleman)
94. Is our television debate coverage finally starting to match up to multi-party politics? (Dr Louise Thompson)
95. Tetchiness meets disenchantment: capturing the contrasting political energies of the campaign (Prof Beth Johnson, Prof Katy Parry)
96. “We’re just normal men”: football and the performance of authentic leadership (Dr Ellen Watts)
97. ‘Make the friendship bracelets’: gendered imagery in candidates’ self-presentations on the campaign trail (Dr Caroline Leicht)
98. Weeping in Wetherspoons: generative Al and the right/left image battle on X (Simon Popple)
99. An entertaining election? Popular culture as politics (Prof John Street)
100. Changing key, but keeping time: the music of Election 2024 (Dr Adam Behr)
101. Truth or dare: the political veracity game (Prof John Corner)
After a spate of elections between 2015 and 2024, televised general election debates now seem pretty standard fare. However, they are still bedding down in the UK having only been used for the first time during the 2010 General Election and having changed in scope and in frequency over the last five election campaigns. The 2024 television debates saw yet another change in format and continued to raise some questions about how best we can transition away from majoritarian media coverage to more multi-party coverage in future elections.
Political scientists have long talked about the impact of the majoritarian electoral system being one of alternation of power between the two largest political parties. During elections in the 1950s and 60s in the era of partisan alignment, the cumulative vote for Labour and the Conservatives was well over 80 % at each election. But there’s been a gradual decline since then and this has really plateaued in the last few years, reaching just 56% in 2024. It’s a far cry from the 65% they achieved in 2010, when the television debates were used for the first time.
During the 2024 campaign, we certainly saw progress in terms of who was invited to the debates. The leaders of the Conservative Party, Labour Party, Scottish National Party, Liberal Democrats, Greens, Reform and Plaid Cymru all received a slot on a national debate. Most of these leaders also took part in a detailed BBC Question Time special, while country specific coverage enabled parties like Plaid Cymru to have their say more directly to their own voting constituencies.
Yet we still seem to be grappling with two issues when it comes to these televised debates. Firstly, when we think about who is to be included, there is still a niggling remnant of majoritarianism which continues to reinforce the notion that a Labour or Conservative Prime Minister is the only option. We saw once again in this campaign that there was a ‘head-to-head’ debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer but no binary debates between any other parties. With some polls towards the end of June predicting that the Conservatives may not secure enough seats to be the Official Opposition, this decision may have seemed rash. National Question Time specials took place with six parties, but Reform UK and the Greens had initially been excluded, with the decision only being overturned following a complaint from Farage himself. Commenting on the decision to add an extra debate slot, the BBC said that it was important to ‘reflect the fact that it is clear from across a broad range of opinion polls that the support for Reform UK has been growing’. Their 14% share of the vote suggests that this was in hindsight the correct decision to make. It also suggests that in future elections, the schedule for TV debates will have to be more flexible and willing to bend to changes in polling dynamics during the campaign rather than being based solely on the current state of the House of Commons or a general election result which is now five years’ old.
There is also a question of how different parties should be included in the debates. Increased multi-partyism in the UK and the presence of so many national parties now contesting general elections, means that bringing every single party leader together to debate each other is not particularly elegant. The seven way debate between the parties on 13th June demonstrated this well. They also end up, inevitably, becoming something of a shouting match between the two largest parties which, as the Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer noted at the time, is not very dignified. The Question Time specials were an excellent way to offer voters a real insight into each party. We saw Adrian Ramsey for instance discuss the party’s immigration plans as well as more typically green issues such as electric cars. These sessions also put all parties on a level playing field, giving equal time and space for a detailed probing of their policy issues, even if Reform UK were not happy with the end result. The final issue that we should consider further for future elections is perhaps the terminology used to describe parties and debates. References to ‘small parties’ and ‘challenger parties’ reinforces the idea that they are somehow less worthy than the two largest parties when it comes to election debates. And with TV debates thought to be the ‘most influential’ thing for voters in previous elections, there is a responsibility on our broadcasters to be seen to treat all parties as equally worthy participants in future election campaigns.
