Nick Clegg says the media's obsession with SNP/Labour coalition handed Tories victory in the general election
Nick Clegg has hit out at the media’s focus on a possible SNP/Labour coalition in the general election arguing that it allowed the Tories to evade scrutiny and slip into power.
The former Liberal Democrat leader said the media’s coverage leading up to the election was the equivalent of “hundreds of millions of pounds of attack advertising funding” for David Cameron.
In pursing this circumstance, Glegg said the Conservatives escaped any detailed questioning about the policies they planned to implement if in power. Instead the media helped Cameron by amplifying the Tories “attack message” on the dangers of a partnership between Ed Miliband and Nicola Sturgeon which pushed “terrified” voters towards Conservative.
Speaking to the Royal Television Society conference, Glegg said that "it had a determining effect on the outcome, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind about that”. He summed up the media’s coverage as “giving the richest party in British politics, the Conservatives, hundreds of millions of pounds of additional attack advertising funding”.
He added “the second perhaps even more serious consequence is that we now have a government in power which was not subject to any meaningful scrutiny at all about what they might do if they were in power on their own.
Clegg went on to point out that the right-wing print media had “big vested interests” and accused broadcasters of failing to rise “beyond and above” that come election time. He warned that the media was leading people into an “echo chamber where politics is becoming entertainment and most of it totally doesn’t impinge on millions of people’s ordinary lives at all.”
As a means of circumventing this Glegg suggested creating a US-style independent commission which would govern and oversee the party leader TV debates in the next election in 2020.