There has been a fair bit of chat in recent weeks about the prospect of a televised leaders’ debate in the run-up to the next general election. This sort of chat always comes up in the run-up to any election, but there appears to be an extra momentum this time round.

It seems as though the promise by Sky News to televise a debate come what may — even if the debate was between tubs of lard — has forced everyone’s hand, broadcasters and political parties alike. It seems as though now it is going to happen, with the involvement of all the major broadcasters. It also appears as though the three main party leaders are on board (albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm).

The end of the issue? Of course not. This is just the beginning of the matter. More details will need to be fleshed out. What format should such a debate take? Will there be a number of separate debates? And what about the role of smaller parties?

I am normally fairly ambivalent about calls for televised political debates. Those politicians who call for such a debate usually do so because they perceive that it would advantage them.

Someone like David Cameron will go for it because he is a confident performer, the momentum is behind him and the media appears to have declared him the winner already. Someone like Gordon Brown will reject it because he does not come across so well on television. This time he has been forced into it, partly because of Sky News’ promise to “empty chair” him if he didn’t, but also because refusing to appear would further the idea that Brown is a coward with poor leadership qualities.

The prospect of a televised political debate fills me with dread rather than excitement. I doubt it does much for democratic accountability. Part of me suspects that vain politicians just crave appearances on the television.

No doubt we will be served up a rather unedifying spectacle, like PMQs on steroids. I predict Punch and Judy politics a-plenty. Most likely, as with Question Time, it will be a platform for the most appalling demagoguery, complete with an audience that will clap like seals at any old nonsense.

Most of all, I think the idea of a leaders’ debate just misses the point. While it is useful to know what the major party leaders think, focusing on leaders too much is damaging to the health of our parliamentary democracy. Once again, there is a clamour to bring to Britain a feature of US politics which is a square peg in a round hole.

Televised debates are highly popular in the USA. But that is because the format is practically ready-made for the US political system. For one, the US system is a Presidential system, meaning that voters actually do elect the country’s leader. The US system is also a truly two-party system, with two Leviathans totally overshadowing any minority candidates. This makes it easy to adopt a one-on-one, head-to-head debating format.

Even though the televised debate is more-or-less a perfect fit for a US Presidential election, the format’s success is a matter for debate. In years gone by it may have provided some election-defining moments. But as I recall, the debates involving Barack Obama and John McCain, and Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, hardly set the world alight.

So what on earth makes anyone think that this gimmick will suit British politics? It seems like just another outcome of politicos’ obsession with America. It seems like the idea of someone who has mistaken his DVD box set of The West Wing for real pornography.

Our Parliamentary system doesn’t — or at least shouldn’t — place so much focus on party leaders. Very few voters will actually have any sort of say on who the Prime Minister is. I will have the option to vote for or against Gordon Brown, but only because I happen to live in his constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. I will have no say whatsoever on David Cameron or Nick Clegg.

And what of the smaller parties? In the UK, broadcasters are required to be impartial in the run-up to an election, meaning that legally broadcasters will find it difficult to lock out the small parties. Even if these other parties have little or no chance of forming the government. Even if most viewers will not be as interested in hearing from these parties.

The most noise is being made by the SNP. They are threatening legal action if an SNP representative is unable to play a part in a televised leaders’ debate.

The SNP may have a point. Even though they have only a handful of MPs, and are only contesting seats in a portion of the UK, they have a lot of support in that portion. They are not a loony fringe party. They are in fact in government in the UK. Viewers north of the border will certainly be interested to hear what the SNP have to say in the run-up to the election.

At the same time, their presence may be a distraction from the real purpose of the debate, which is basically to watch the potential future Prime Ministers partake in a spot of verbal mud-wrestling. It is, after all, a “leaders’ debate”. Despite all his ambition, Alex Salmond is highly unlikely to be the next Prime Minister, as is Angus Robertson.

Yet, what if there is the prospect of a hung Parliament? The collapse in Labour support has not been met with a real surge in support for the Conservatives. With so many parties having moderate levels of support, it is conceivable that a party like the SNP could play a king-maker role.

There is no easy answer. This is the core problem with the idea of a televised debate. It might be good for a simple, true two party system such as the USA’s. But for the UK’s more subtle and diverse politics, it won’t fit quite so well.

It was revealed yesterday that Gordon Brown will spend part of his summer doing voluntary work in Kirkcaldy, the town where he grew up which forms the major part of his constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. It is also my home town.

Some uncharitable people have suggested that his job may involve digging holes, something he has done quite enough of as Prime Minister. More cutting might be the observation that voluntary work is the only sort of work you’ll be able to find in Kirkcaldy.

A couple of weeks ago, The Times ran a piece about the economic woes which have hit Kirkcaldy which was a talking point among some of my friends. Aside from apparently inventing the demonym “Kirkcaldians” (I personally prefer “Langtonian”, named after the town’s old nickname, the Lang Toun), I think the article is largely a fair and accurate reflection of the town.

I have written before about the sorry state of the Mercat, the town’s main shopping centre which used to house my former workplace, Woolworths. Over the difficult Christmas period the Mercat went from bad to worse. But it gets just a passing mention in the Times piece, with its mere eight or more empty units.

Apparently there are thirty empty units in the High Street. There is a particularly dire section in the middle of the pedestrianised zone, where three shops in a row — which used to be the Link, Adams and Icon Clothing — now lie empty. What remains has been criticised for exhibiting the characteristics of a clone town (PDF link). Beyond that, particularly in the west end, what isn’t a chain store is most likely a pawn shop or a charity shop.

Perhaps this is not particularly unusual. The death of the High Street has been widely advertised, so this is not a problem unique to Kirkcaldy. The Times article briefly touches on the retail park. It sits on the north-western edge of the town, well away from the centre. But it is currently being expanded, a development which feels like a desperately-needed shot in the arm for Kirkcaldy.

The problem is that it just is not enough. Indeed, the clamour over the few new jobs that are available serve to bring into focus just how dire the situation is. I have lost count of the number of people that I know of applying for the same few jobs.

A new B&Q has opened, although the old one closed. A number of my former colleagues at Woolworths have ended up working there. PC World is another new store at the retail park. But so many people I know applied for jobs there. A friend who got an interview there was told that they had been bombarded with over 700 applications.

If you got rejected by PC World, you could always try applying for a job at the new Toys R Us. The only problem is that they apparently had 3,000 applications. Only a lucky 350 got an interview, with just 40 places going.

An Argos Extra has also opened up. They held an assessment day at the Jobcentre a couple of months ago. I saw it with my own eyes as I walked past it. There were two queues coming out of the Jobcentre, one in each direction. I have been told that the larger of the two queues stretched all the way to the police station, which sits at the opposite end of a street which is the best part of 200 yards long.

The store has been open for just over a week now. The good news on that front is that my friend, who transferred to work there from the existing High Street store, reports that sales have been very encouraging. Whether that is simply down to the excitement of something new opening in Kirkcaldy remains to be seen.

As for the Jobcentre itself, that continues to hire new people, including one of my friends. What they’ll do with the new staff when demand for the Jobecentre’s services is not so strong is unclear. But at the moment that feels like a distant possibility anyway. Whenever I went there I was often told they were short staffed.

In the Times article, there is a quote about the Jobcentre by a man called Tam Collins: “they expect you to stack shelves at Asda.” I got exactly that when I visited the Jobcentre. Going there is a fruitless task which I have now given up.

The Asda is a new store which has opened up in neighbouring Glenrothes. It is probably the most exciting thing in terms of employment to happen in Glenrothes for years. That is another place where a few of my former Woolworths colleagues have ended up. In a way they were lucky — Asda received over 7,000 applications for that one store.

Meanwhile, the town’s largest employer, a call centre called MGt, has recently shed 65 jobs as a result of the closure of Setanta. 65 looks like a small number compared to the amount that are already looking for work. But MGt has provided a lifeline to Kirkcaldy in terms of employment since it set up around a decade ago. Today it has around 1,000 people on its books. I dread to think what Kirkcaldy would be like if it wasn’t for MGt. That even MGt is downsizing is ominous.

But that sums up Kirkcaldy. It lost its way after the industrial decline of the previous fifty years. Now if you want a job in Kirkcaldy you need to either work in a call centre or in the precarious retail sector. And even then, good luck to you. After my previous experience of working in retail, I am avoiding it if at all possible.

Seven months since losing my job at Woolworths, and over a year since I graduated, I still haven’t found a full time job (although I’m lucky to have found bits and pieces of freelance work). I have well and truly hit the buffers, and I am now starting with a blank sheet of paper to decide on my next move.

One of my biggest mistakes was to focus my search too narrowly on a small geographical area. I certainly didn’t bet on finding a job in Kirkcaldy — it was bad enough before and clearly getting worse. But I planned on finding something in the eastern part of the central belt — somewhere within an area encompassing Fife, Dundee, Perth, Stirling or of course Edinburgh. No luck yet. I will have to broaden my search further and hope that something comes up, or hope that I will be able to rely on freelance work in the long term. I wouldn’t like to bet on relying on getting a job at a call centre in Kirkcaldy.

It is sad that Kirkcaldy is like this. This is the town of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics who looked out onto the bustling Firth of Forth, full of trade ships, and was thereby inspired to investigate sources of wealth. Today he would only be inspired to investigate the weed growth in the derelict former workplaces.

Sadder is the role of Gordon Brown. Surely, some people say, if there was one man who could save Kirkcaldy, it would be the Prime Minister and former Chancellor, who grew up here and depends on the residents’ votes. Some are truly furious about it.

Others, as the Times article notes, inexplicably give him and the government the benefit of the doubt. Talking to people, it is genuinely true that there are people in Kirkcaldy who believe that Gordon Brown is a competent leader who has somehow been stitched up. Even for failed leaders, the halo effect is still in evidence.

That is the irony. The people of Kirkcaldy are probably the one set of voters in the country that Gordon Brown can afford to take for granted. Could it be that having the local man as Prime Minister has exacerbated Kirkcaldy’s problems?

It would indeed be harsh to lay the blame wholly at Gordon Brown’s door. Kirkcaldy had problems before, and most of what has happened in the past year can be put down to the global recession.

But the Labour Party is supposed to look after the interests of people who live and work in towns just like Kirkcaldy — a former industrial town that slips ever-further into the mire, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. On the evidence I see with my own eyes, the Labour Party have failed us.

The shock is not so much that Labour won. I had a feeling in my water as long as a month ago that Labour might win, even when the bookies and the pundits were saying otherwise. But the scale of Labour’s victory must have shocked everyone.

Yesterday, the BBC’s coverage began on the premise that it was “too close to call” or that, if anything, the SNP had squeaked it. Jim Murphy was making his excuses early (and doing a fairly good job of it, it has to be said). Coming towards midnight, it became clearer that Labour had won. The SNP were saying they hoped to have halved Labour’s majority.

Even with that knowledge, the scale of Labour’s victory when it was finally announced amazed me. The SNP hadn’t even halved Labour’s majority. In fact, Labour’s vote actually went up from the 2005 General Election result. The only real consolation the SNP can have is that the swing was 5% from Labour to the SNP. Even so, that looks minuscule compared to the swing of 22.5% achieved just a few months ago in Glasgow East.

There are all sorts of reasons why the SNP will be disappointed with this result. First of all, Glenrothes must have been a target seat for them anyway, even before this by-election was announced, with the SNP having won the similar Fife Central seat in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election. When Labour was in its trough of popularity, the SNP must have thought Christmas had come early.

Labour’s campaign had seemed like a total shambles. I do not live in the constituency so I haven’t seen any of the literature, but I have heard some bad things about it. Sarah Brown’s well-publicised visit to Cardenden was a complete botch job, and Gordon Brown’s visit to a cafeteria wasn’t much better.

Labour did not need a superstar candidate either. Lindsay Roy is a very nervy and uncomfortable performer on the television. However, it looks as though that actually played into his hands. Labour emphasised the fact that Lindsay Roy is not a career politician, and his track record of being out in the “real world” helping out Fife’s schoolchildren must have gained him a few votes.

As an aside, I doubt that Lindsay Roy actually wanted to become MP. He certainly didn’t look overjoyed at having won, and even after it was clear that Labour had won his body language seemed pretty negative to me. I have heard it said that Lindsay Roy wanted to retire from headteaching anyway and that he saw this as the ideal opportunity to get an early retirement. He probably thought he had no chance of winning.

There is also the fact that the SNP Scottish Government was still in its honeymoon period. Some people are reluctant to say that the honeymoon is over, but there is no doubt that this is at least a slap in the face.

Let us not forget that one of the SNP’s flagship policies was designed to please Fifers in particular. The SNP must have thought that the abolition of bridge tolls would have secured a few votes in Fife. Glenrothes in particular is within comfortable commuting distance of both Edinburgh and Dundee, meaning that many residents will be frequent users of both the Forth and Tay Road Bridges. The fact that the voters of Glenrothes in particular have given the SNP the cold shoulder is a major snub.

Nationalists may counter that Fife is fertile territory for Labour. Time and again I saw pundits on the television saying that Labour benefited from a “halo effect” spilling over into Glenrothes. Fifers, apparently, are proud that Gordon Brown is Prime Minister.

Let me just say, as someone who has lived in Fife all my life, that this is a complete load of tosh. Since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, I have never heard anyone say that they are proud that the PM is a Fifer. In fact, I have sometimes heard people wonder out aloud how it could possibly be that Kirkcaldy can have such high unemployment when the Prime Minister represents the constituency. (I once heard someone say, referring to the perceived unwillingness of Gordon Brown to help his local area, that Kirkcaldy has the highest rate of unemployment in the country, although I doubt that.)

Fife is not Labour loopy. Yesterday there was the opportunity for three of the four constituencies in Fife to be represented by a party other than Labour, leaving just Gordon Brown’s seat in tact. That didn’t happen. But the fact is that the Kingdom of Fife has the capacity to elect any one of three parties. As such, Glenrothes’s decision to vote for Labour should not simply be batted away because it was supposedly as “safe seat”. According to Alex Salmond, there is no such thing as a safe Labour seat these days, and Glenrothes certainly wasn’t one for the reasons outlined above.

The SNP may complain about the negativity of Labour’s campaign. But they should be alarmed that it worked. In retrospect, the decision of the SNP to select Fife Council leader Peter Grant as candidate must be seen as a major tactical error. The Labour Party was able to tap into some real dissatisfaction that people have with Fife Council at the moment.

Because of the complexities of this situation, it is not exactly clear what message the voters were sending out. There is no doubt that there was a message of some sort. But was it a verdict on the Labour government in Westminster? Was it a vote of confidence in Gordon Brown? Was it about sending a message to Holyrood? Or was it about punishing the leader of Fife Council?

Whichever, the SNP should take this seriously. I have no reason to doubt that they will, and the reaction from SNP members’ blogs is sober and reflective (see, for instance, Richard Thomson). There was some real evidence that the SNP were becoming complacent with their position. In the run-up to the election it was looking as though the SNP was giddy on power.

Alex Salmond’s supreme confidence was completely misplaced. And his attempt to attach himself to Barack Obama’s election as US President was crass in the extreme. Voters can smell this sort of thing a mile off, and I’d be amazed if it didn’t cost the SNP votes.

It is no longer enough to rely on the dissatisfaction with the Labour Party that many people have. With Labour’s vote having gone up, it’s pretty clear that they benefited from some serious tactical voting, with the Conservatives and the Lib Dems being squeezed. If this election shows anything, it is that while Labour are unpopular among many voters, the SNP are also loathed among many others.

A word on the Lib Dems, who must be very disappointed. For the second Scottish by-election in a row, they have come in fourth and lost their deposit. Glenrothes is practically sandwiched in between two Lib Dem constituencies — Dunfermline and West Fife and North East Fife. While there is no reason to automatically assume that the Lib Dems should therefore win Glenrothes, they must be disappointed by their complete inertia just now.

It is tough for smaller parties in by-elections anyway. But the current political climate cannot be doing them many favours. Despite PR, Scotland is beginning to look a bit like a two party system. In the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections, one of the biggest changes was the almost complete disappearance of the small parties. Now it looks as though both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are wilting in a highly charged political atmosphere that pits the SNP versus Labour, leaving little room for much else.

Now that there has been some time to allow the result of the Glasgow East by-election, I feel like posting some thoughts that are less drunken and kneejerk than my previous post. Originally this was going to be one post, but I ended up blabbing for almost 3,000 words so I have split this into three separate posts which will appear one-by-one over the coming days.

First of all, I’ve spotted a few people south of the border wondering about the impact of the result on the union. For instance, Jennie at The Yorkeshire Gob, Jonathan Calder at Liberal England.

I might be on my own here, but my impression is that people in Scotland simply are not asking that same question. I must say that, as far as I can see it, the Glasgow East by-election result could hardly mean less for the union. Although the SNP are proud — and rightly so — of their victory last week, the reality is that this was much more of a Labour loss than an SNP win. Deep down, I think the SNP know that too.

I read (or heard, I can’t remember) a good analysis of Labour’s current woes. I have completely forgotten where I saw this, but the analysis was this. While the people of England and Wales have fallen out of love with Gordon Brown, the people of Scotland have fallen out of love of the Labour Party.

As regular readers may remember, I have from time to time been quite exasperated at how much people (perhaps particularly people south of the border) are still prepared to give the Labour Party the benefit of the doubt time and time again. I think now I understand why. The Labour Party in Scotland acts differently to the Labour Party in the rest of the UK. It’s certainly perceived differently.

Here in Scotland, voters smell the stench of corruption in the Labour Party. When you bear this in mind, as Holyrood Watcher points out, it’s not so difficult to understand why Labour lost in Glasgow East.

It is not just financial wrongdoings either — it’s a sense that Labour took its core voters for granted. There is a mega mega backlash against Labour in its core constituencies in Scotland.

Take my part of the world, Fife, as an example. Until recently, Fife was completely red apart from in the slightly more rural north-eastern part where Menzies Campbell enjoys a healthy majority.

That changed in 2006 when the Liberal Democrats took the Dunfermline and West Fife seat in a by-election, overturning a significant Labour majority. That was an election that Labour shouldn’t really have lost. But the loss was just blamed on Iraq, or whatever, and people shrugged their shoulders and carried on.

Then last year in the Scottish Parliamentary elections the SNP pulled off a surprise by winning Fife Central. It wasn’t the safest of Labour seats, but it was still a sign that Fife wasn’t quite the Labour heartland it used to be.

That was in the Scottish Parliamentary election. But if I remember correctly, the SNP are fairly confident that they will win the roughly corresponding Westminster constituency of Glenrothes. I have relatives in Glenrothes and apparently there is a lot of support for the SNP there.

Assuming the Lib Dems cling on to their two other seats in Fife, that would leave Labour with just one seat in Fife — Gordon Brown’s in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, where I live. Given the massive unpopularity of Gordon Brown at the moment, any “halo effect” there might have been will probably have vanished, and who is to say that the SNP cannot win here? Come the Westminster election I am planning to vote for the SNP to get rid of Labour.

And here is the thing. The SNP can probably count on much of its support for this reason. It is an anti-Labour thing rather than a pro-SNP thing. That can be seen from the fact that (according to my line of events anyway — your mileage may vary!) the ball was started rolling by the Lib Dems.

For a while I thought that the significant anti-Labour vote would mean that whichever party was in the best position to beat Labour in a particular constituency would grab the votes. Come the Scottish Parliamentary election it didn’t quite work out that way and the only real beneficiaries were the SNP.

I guess in the end the Lib Dems were unable to gain in the same way for a number of reasons. First of all, the media coverage made the election into a Labour vs. SNP battle pretty early on. Also, the Lib Dems did not run a great campaign from what I could see, and I never thought Nicol Stephen was up to much as leader.

Also, the Lib Dems were tainted by association. It was difficult for them to capitalise on the anti-Labour vote when they were having to spend the election campaign defending their record as part of a coalition partnership with Labour. That’s why the SNP capitalised on the Labour backlash and the Lib Dems didn’t.

If you want to experience a proper rollercoaster of emotions, just watch an election in which you despise both of the main parties to hell.

Firstly, I apologise to the voters of Glasgow East for doubting their ability to vote for someone who wasn’t wearing a red rosette.

I was just flabbergasted to come in from a night out to hear them talking on the radio as if Labour had lost. And then came the declaration and it turned out that they had lost. Just unbelievable. If Labour lose a seat like Glasgow East then they really are in serious trouble. There really is no such thing as a safe Labour seat any more. You can forget it.

But will the SNP people stop saying that this was a contest between the Scottish Government and the UK Government. It was not. In Wesminster elections you vote on Westminster issues. People might have thought they were voting for the SNP Government, but only because people from the SNP and other politicos keep on misleading voters about it.

And if any London-types are calling this “Gordon Brown’s backyard” when I wake up in the morning, I am going to kick a brick wall. I know Scotland has plenty of wealthy lairds, but none of them are rich enough for the WHOLE COUNTRY to be their back yard.

I’m just watching the BBC’s coverage and Alex Salmond is actually unbearable. I have been actually shaking with rage (I swear the shaking is not to do with the drink) at the sheer smugness of that man. It amazes me that the SNP only ever do well when he is in charge of that party. What on earth do people see in him? Gordon Brown might be dour, but at least he is not a total arsehole!!

Final thought. I’d like Labour’s woes to continue until the General Election. I’d love for this to happen in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, even if it means the SNP winning. If nothing else, it would enable me to use the heading “They’ll be dancing in the streets of Raith tonight.”