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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » What are defined as major parties: Ofcom rules make it quite difficult to exclude Nick Clegg from GE2015 TV debates
Thoe parties defined as “major” have a special status when it comes to radio and TV coverage. Currently LAB, CON and LDs are in this category. UKIP isn’t.
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Of course it is. The Cameroons problem is that it's going to be just a touch difficult to fight a set of EU elections without talking about it. The word impossible springs to mind.
If Cammie really does want to hide behind Clegg then perhaps he should take a moment to consider just how that's going to look to his own angry tory Eurosceptics by forcing Clegg to defend and praise all his EU policies for the coalition. Sometimes it's better to just bite the bullet than cower in fear behind a human shield like the fop chicken wants to.
I can dig up some stuff about it if people are particularly interested.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/02/face-face-enigma
twitter.com/Sunil_P2/status/436835419825520640
Even with UKIP's rise and the LD decline, if the LDs get more votes in GE2015 than UKIP, which to change would require something like the LDs lose half their vote (possible if current polls are correct, though I suspect they won't lose quite that much) and UKIP more than triple theirs (ambitious, though doubling seems a good bet), that would make reviewing what is and is not a major party difficult, even if UKIP don't maange to win a seat on those levels (several million votes is hard to ignore even with no MPs)
I've seen it said that the UK is kind of a two and half party system, with the LDs nationally and the regional parties in the devolved adminstrations messing with the two party formula, and with UKIP I'd say we're close to a 2 and three quarter system - only two parties have a chance of winning a majority, one other has a chance of being a coalition partner, and the other can't do either of those things yet, but unlike the Greens has genuine significance, and unlike the regional parties it has UK wide significance (by virtue of size that is - even if UKIP do really badly in Wales and Scotland, if they do well in England then numerically they have an impact on the national debate in a way the regional parties have no aspiration for)
Now, one can debate whether this is good or bad, but it is how things stand at present, and it's hardly conceivable that the ground rules will change in the next 15 months.
UKIP will be delighted to be excluded, of course. Equally the LibDems will be delighted to be included.
Does a party with 23% of the vote at the last election and 9% in the polls now with only 57 MP`s compared to the 250+ MP`s of the big two have the same right of coverage compared to them?
I can see atleast one debate in 2015 with only Cameron and Miliband as a straight-forward PM contenders contest.
I really don't see a way that would be reasonable to change anything until after the GE - until the 9% or so is replicated in the GE, for all we know they will rebound to the mid-high teens, which they achieved as recently as the 2001 election, and so be in the same probable sort of position MP and influence wise, as they were in 2010 when the rules said they deserved inclusion. If the consistent lows we have seen for them since 2010 are replicated, a review might well be appropriate. If UKIP get similar percentages and no MPs, that too would be cause for some sort of review I'd say.
I would suggest as the debates are for the current elections and not previous elections the rule should be simply along the lines of
Have consistently averaged above X% across a basket of polls in the 6 months preceding the decision of who is included.
This accounts nicely for
a) parties that were once large but have had such a huge scandal that they have fallen so low they are likely not to get a small fraction if the seats they held in the last election (example canada)
b) Parties that come from nowhere and suddenly catch the public mood (example italy)
It is ridiculous to think a party could be polling 50%+ in the run up to an election and not be included in the debates on the grounds they haven't done that well in previous elections.
(Sometimes that 50% will evaporate sometimes it will not but polls are based on what the electorate are saying and therefore in my view the electorate should have the ability to see who they say they want to vote for. I am happy to still include those that have previously been more successful in the last election. For example if tory went to 3% in the polls and ukip went to 33% I would still like to see the tory there. Currently however you would likely in that circumstance see cameron but not farage)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/21/chris-christie-drumthwacket_n_4826459.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
The guy's toast as a presidential candidate.
The OFCOM guidelines aren't designed to properly give voice to all the major voices in the debate. They're designed to protect the established parties from insurgents.
I noted that you have read Robert Chote's commentary on this month's ONS Public Sector Finances bulletin.
He appears not to have engaged at all with the impact of the Supplementary Estimates on this fiscal year's forecast postponing an analysis of their impact until next month's EFO.
See para 14.
A particular uncertainty is the degree to which central government departments will underspend against the plans for Departmental Expenditure Limits (DELs). Much depends on departments’ reductions in spending in their supplementary estimates, which form their final spending plans, and the extent to which they then underspend against those final plans. Departments supplementary estimates have now been published, and we will update our forecasts of departments underspends against their DELs in our March EFO forecast.
This gets increasingly strange by the day!
So unless we are going to refuse all other parties because they can't be PM then we should let in any party within reason. Yellow Pox for their MP count. Kippers for their vote share. Any other party want to run candidates nationally we should let them in too. Its a democracy - more debate shouild be better than less debate.
Given his propensity for self-reinvention at decadal intervals, perhaps it was change itself - the variety, the challenge, the novelty - that he desired. His strong sense of personal conviction weighs against the charge of "psychopathy" for me, even if it was accompanied neither by moral fortitude nor political consistency. This piece being in the New Statesman, the harshness of the final criticism might most likely have been provoked by the latter crime. That a former editor could shift in perspectives to become a diplomatic admirer of Nixon, a quasi-Thatcherite media exec, and live in regret of the outcomes of his own policies as a left-wing MP, must be institutionally unpalatable.
Depressingly the piece, or my take-aways from it, show how Britanically prurient I am. (I confess, only considerable self-discipline prevents me haunting the Mail's "sidebar of shame" instead of the convivial, anechoic chamber of PB.) I didn't know John Freeman had an affair with Barbara Castle. Nor that Aylmer Vallance was sacked from his job as editor of the News Chronicle for bonking one of his writers over his desk when the proprietor Lord Cadbury walked in.
Did Vallance do anything without scandal or intrigue? A fascinating, shadowy figure with links to the worlds of letters, politics, the military, diplomacy and spycraft, yet I have only come across in the biographies of others. He surely deserves a book of his own - his Dictionary of National Biography entry is rather coded: it terminates "After a lifetime of sexual adventures he died in London, on 24 November 1955, a happily married man." And if that doesn't want to make you read more, then God bless you for being less dissolute than I.
Is it any wonder people treat Westminster with contempt? I wonder what legal action can be taken against Ofcom for abusing our democracy?
Until the criteria for electoral coverage is based on the number of candidates put forward by a party (say inclusive for parties putting up candidates in the majority of seats) rather than based on the elitist parties prior glories/failures then the system of political communications as defined by Ofcom is corrupt.
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/guidance/major-parties.pdf
which states "This document sets out the definition of “major parties” as applies to Section Six of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code1 and the Ofcom rules on Party Political and Referendum Broadcast2"
which refers to a link which goes to this:
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/broadcast-codes/broadcast-code/elections/
which states "Meaning of "major party":
At present major parties for each nation in the United Kingdom are defined in the Ofcom List of Major Parties"
which contains a link which goes to this:
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/guidance/major-parties.pdf
In other words, it is a circular definition which does not in any way explain the criteria by which the existing main parties are defined to be "main parties" or explain the criteria by which any new candidate party might be assessed, or adjudged, or may apply to become so assessed or adjudged, as a "main party". It simply states, without explanation or definition, that the "main parties" are: A, B, C.