Free condoms and homeopathy

Conor Pope of LabourList wants to believe the Green Party are not a threat to Labour’s chances of winning in May and are not a major party.

In fact, Conor Pope thinks the Green Party are a joke and Labour shouldn’t be frightened of saying so.

He writes of the Green surge:

The latest Green surge, I would wager, comes largely from ex-Liberal Democrat voters. They are another party whose supporters are seen by too many within Labour as faithful who have lost their way, rather than actual opposition. A huge number, of course, ‘came home’ to Labour following Nick Clegg’s foray into the rose garden with Cameron five years ago. We have come to lose them because we have already treated them as though they are our voters by some divine right.

There are certainly left-wing voters who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 who will never be voting LibDem again – they voted Liberal Democrat because they believed this was a party that would push Labour from the left, not a party that would give us a Tory government most of us never voted for. Those left-wing voters were already lost to Labour because of the Iraq war, because of hospital PFI, because of tuition fees – for any of many reasons for rejecting Labour on the left. I think Conor Pope is right to say that Labour assumed that it could simply scoop up those votes as the only left-wing party remaining, without needing to change any of the right-wing policies which drove left-wing voters away from Labour.

I was a fairly consistent Labour voter: I plan to vote Green in May 2015. I am not alone.

Who should be in the leaders debates?

What are the leaders’ debates for?

Because the UK is run by representatives from elected from constituencies, most of us watching a leaders’ debate will never get to vote for the party leader we think made best showing, or whose views we most agree with.

The current plan for the leaders’ debates – one on the BBC, one on Channel 4, and one on ITV – is for them to include the four men who lead four parties in the UK – the Conservatives, Labour, the LibDems, and UKIP: but exclude the women who lead the Green Party, the SNP, and Plaid Cymru.

In 2010, three leaders’ debates were for the three men who led what would obviously be the three biggest parties in the next Parliament, and in the sense that we saw David Cameron and Nick Clegg bonding as the two younger, public school men, excluding Gordon Brown, they were illuminating – even if Nick Clegg managed to parlay his brief popularity into a five-year crash for his party.

Leaders debates: BBC bias

The BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 will be holding three four debates before the general election in May 2015.

One of them, reasonably enough, will be a head-to-head between David Cameron and Ed Miliband.

Another two, also reasonably enough, will include besides the Conservative Prime Minister and the leader of the Labour Party (still predicted to be Labour Prime Minister by a narrow majority), the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the LibDems, Nick Clegg – even though the LibDems appear likely to see their 57 seats drop to 18 after 7th May 2015.

The fourth debate will privilege a minor party above the SNP and the Greens: Nigel Farage, who is not an MP, whose party is still predicted to have no MPs after 7th May 2015, will get to take part in a four-way debate with Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg.