i Editor's Letter: iDebate finds democracy lives at Silicon Beach

We headed to Bournemouth to stage our fifth debate

Oliver Duff
Tuesday 28 April 2015 21:54 BST
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Bournemouth used to be a place people went to holiday or to retire. Now it’s somewhere they go to code, with the fastest growing digital economy in Britain and a population that’s getting younger – unlike the rest of the UK.

The i team took our buckets and spades to the south coast to stage our fifth iDebate (after Cardiff, Manchester, Edinburgh and Leeds). We arrived in glorious sunshine to find a town still hungover from the Premier League promotion party the night before. I like a few of the parallels between AFC Bournemouth and i: both founded from the ashes of struggling regimes, both confounding sceptics, both benefiting from generous British-Russian investment and both trying to punch above their weight!

“Political chaos on 8 May would be good for British democracy” – that was our motion at Talbot Heath School. A lively, engaged audience interrogated our panelists Steve Richards, Jane Merrick and Simon O’Hagan, chaired provocatively by Whitehall editor Oliver Wright. Steve argued against chaos; Jane and Simon want chaos next week to shake up our politics.

Chaos is usually talked about negatively: mayhem, bedlam, madness, havoc… The economy will suffer, the three established Westminster parties warn, if we see no clear result; parliament would be at the mercy of minority interests; the future of the UK would be jeopardised if the SNP holds the balance of power in a country it has vowed to break up. That’s their argument.

But the case for chaos – or at the very least a radical shock to the system – is that our politics no longer represents the people. Fewer than one in every four of our MPs is a woman, for example. Britain’s first-past-the-post system is a steam-powered democracy for a digital age.

At the end of the evening, we told the crowd that their vote would be binding on the rest of the United Kingdom. In an omen for next week’s general election, we had a hung audience – divided smack down the middle.

Twitter.com/@olyduff

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