Yes

Politics is abstract, and politics is confusing. We are bombarded daily by political statements from politicians. The views to which we are constantly subjected are usually loose, intangible, and transient. People – especially young people – complain that they do not know what politicians and the parties they represent stand for. The more we are pandered to by precisely formulated and isolated statements, the more alienated we feel. In short, politicians try to appear to be everything for everybody, and consequently don’t really become anything for anyone.

Such is the nature of our political system that politicians often need to be slippery. But this has led many of us to feel alienated. The Office for National Statistics reports that 42 per cent of young people have no interest in politics. What is needed is a definite yet accessible way to solidify in our minds who and what our politicians are, so that we can begin to understand them, accept them, and, if necessary, reject them. By themselves, they can be who they want to be. But brought together, battle lines are drawn, contrasts are made; our politicians become defined for who they are.

TV debates are the best way of doing this. Very rarely do we see the leaders of the parties go head to head and tackle an issue. The jeering and point-scoring of Prime Minister’s Questions doesn’t come close; watch any two from this Parliament and the pattern that emerges is one of pedestrianised questions and answers, interspersed with some animated name calling. Such debates are unfocused and often irrelevant to the concerns of the voting public.

Those in powerful positions are forced to define themselves when brought together with their opponents. In the same way, politicians of minor political standing, but growing political influence, such as the Greens, are also challenged. They have the opportunity to debate on equal terms with those of a more established standing and get to prove their worth where they would have previously been unable. The Green Party has not been heard properly in the political forum, yet is gaining traction, especially with the young demographic. Thanks to the recent changes to the TV debates, the Greens will be joining the fray. The voices of their leaders will finally be heard in a fair and proper setting. Let’s see them debate their ideas and prove their worth. Will David beat Goliath, or is David not as cunning as we think he is? TV debates provide us with the opportunity to find out.

I am not arguing that TV debates are the perfect answer to our fraught political system. They are by no means conducive to political involvement and will not revitalise our political system overnight. No one thing can completely cure the political malaise from which we seem to be suffering, but refusing to do this one thing because it is not enough is better than doing nothing at all. We have had to drag some politicians to agree to the current format, and we should keep on pressuring them to do the things some of them are obviously reluctant to do. Their reluctance is a good sign: it means that they fear their proposals being transparently presented to the public.

TV debates provide a valuable forum and opportunity to force our politicians to be forthright and consistent in their positions. Keeping the debates is a step towards pressuring politicians to be clearer and more accountable. In a confusing and abstracted political world, who could possibly argue with that?

No

I do not attempt to deny for one moment that political discourse, debate, and discussion are essential ingredients of a democratic society. Yet the proposed re-run of the 2010 party leader debates is not the best recipe for this. Nor is it a particularly good way for voters to decide how to cast their vote.

Ostensibly, the 2010 televised debates were a roaring success. Yet the forthcoming General Election promises to be quite different to the last. In particular, there are many more parties attempting to challenge the hegemony of Labour and the Conservatives. Since the war, it has been only the Liberal Party and, since their 1988 merger, the Liberal Democrats who have had the de facto capability to threaten the ascendancy of the two main parties. Now the Lib Dems have been joined, even usurped, by UKIP and the Greens. The SNP and Plaid Cymru are regionally based movements and do not field candidates across the UK, but they too should not be forgotten. Indeed, the SNP may find itself in coalition government with Labour should the electorate not give a clear mandate for either of the two largest parties to rule alone.

The existence of so many parties poses a problem for the broadcasters. It is almost impossible to draw a fair line between parties which are important enough to be included in the televised debates and parties which are of insufficient importance. Indeed, there has been considerable controversy regarding the selection of party leaders to take part.

The present plan it to include seven of the UK’s political parties in at least one of the proposed instalments. This will hardly be conducive to a constructive debate. Debates are best held between two opposing sides, not seven. The proposed format is likely to lead to point-scoring rhetoric and pie-in-the-sky promises rather than mature and informed debate. Voters, many of whom are already disillusioned with politics, will struggle to make sense of the seven different opinions being offered on every issue.

There is also a danger that TV debates will once again undermine the remainder of the election campaign. In 2010, the attention of voters and political commentators focused on the oratory skills of each of the party leaders above anything else. The rest of the election campaign, such as the canvassing carried out by committed local politicians, was rendered somewhat meaningless.

Indeed, having televised party leader debates just does not fit squarely with the nature of the democracy that we have here in the UK. In the US, where there is a two-party race for the presidency, the adversarial style of a televised debate between two candidates has been popular and constructive. Yet in the UK, with a voting system which requires citizens to vote for a candidate standing for election in their constituency, rather than for a Prime Minister, debates between party leaders are somehow less relevant. Voters may like a party leader, but dislike the party’s candidate for election in their constituency. The inherent contradiction between having party leader debates and having the electoral system that we do divorces us from having a direct say in who the Prime Minister will be.

Of course we need to ensure that voters are adequately engaged with politics and have sufficient access to information regarding policy on both a national and local level. A few short televised debates between point-scoring party leaders, however, cannot achieve this.

First of all, I would like to congratulate all those involved in the Oxford Living Wage and Accreditation campaigns. It simply cannot be right that the hardworking, University staff are not sufficiently compensated. However, work remains to be done and questions need to be asked about whether our lecturers and tutors are sufficiently rewarded.

And yet, while I appreciate the achievements of this democratic activism, I do not approve of the campaign, largely orchestrated on social media, to pressure Andrew Hamilton, our Vice-Chancellor, into a pay cut. This campaign has been lazily and erroneously merged with the admirable Living Wage campaign, to allege a causal relationship between the Vice-Chancellor’s pay and the low pay of many other staff. In my opinion, this ‘pay-day’ campaign has been run on shaky evidential and moral grounds.

The evidence supplied by Oxford Defend Education (ODE) in this campaign needs to be examined. The group urges the Vice-Chancellor to forgo £305,000 of his £380,000 salary (according to the Oxford University financial statement 2012-13) to bring University pay down to a ratio of 5:1 between the highest and lowest paid workers. They suggest that this would reduce social inequality and allow the money to be distributed to the other staff.

While the motivation is sound, there is no basis for such a claim. Even this radical, and surely unrealistic, pay cut would only free up enough money to give £29 to each of the 10,442 university staff. Andrew Hamilton’s salary, despite perhaps being too large, does not cause the University to pay below the Living Wage. The issue of low pay is far more complex than ODE allows when it scapegoats Hamilton in their social media witch-hunt.

Furthermore, those attacking Andrew Hamilton for taking home such a large salary are on shaky moral grounds. I do not condone such a discrepancy in pay; the University’s justification of Hamilton’s salary does lack of transparency. He is spoken of like a CEO, who is responsible for the day-to-day running of his business, yet information is
scarce about his actual responsibilities. Thus, it is difficult to assess whether he deserves his salary.

However, since I myself have been attracted to graduate jobs with lucrative salaries, my conscience does not permit me to criticise the Vice-Chancellor. The numbers may be different, but the motivation is the same. 
I do not believe
that earning that money is inherently wrong, and, if I felt I was rightly earning it, I too would have no qualms about receiving it.

I am not alone in being partly motivated by money: Oxford students will earn an average of £54,000 a year according to a survey by Emolument. From 2009-2012, 19.6 per cent of Oxford graduates worked in either investment and banking, accounting and financial services, or law and consultancy six months after graduating, according to University data. Many of us will become ‘the rich’ that ODE resents. I would feel better placed to admonish Hamilton for his salary if I myself forgoed money to which I was entitled me. I applaud the decision of Raymond Burse (the President of Kentucky State University who took a pay-cut), but I will not pressure someone into doing so without having the moral high ground that Mr Burse does.

In short, we must commemorate the successes of the Living Wage campaign, but it is not right to sentence our Vice-Chancellor in the hysterical, precipitous, and unjust court of social media. He should be innocent until proven guilty. Let’s continue these positive campaigns, but let’s go no further with this medieval witch-hunt.

I arrive at my interview with Xavier Rolet to find him talking about the Rwandan genocide and the role imperial powers played in creating internal divisions within the country. While the topic is sombre, it is a pleasant surprise that the man I am about to interview is not the stereotypical ex-banker I expected, but a man with a genuine interest in the world around him. Breathing a (very) deep sigh of relief, I realise I wouldn’t have to ‘talk finance’ the entire interview.

Xavier Rolet is the Chief Executive Officer of the London Stock Exchange (LSE), a financial infrastructure firm headquartered in London, best known for facilitating the trading of stocks and shares in the financial market. But, Rolet is keen to point out, “The UK equities business is a very small economic part of our overall business. We run clearing houses and settlement houses; we run indices, a whole range of infrastructure with large amounts of balance sheets, payment systems, and many other things.”

Rolet is obviously very proud of the institution he has led for the past six years. The London Stock Exchange may be an unassuming cog in the financial machine, with comparatively little attention paid to it in the mainstream press, but it provides vital services.

Throughout our interview, it is clear that Rolet thinks on a very macro level. Talking about the business he heads up, he is keen to mention the global scale of its operations, the diversification that he has pursued, and the forecasting of events through complex chains of interdependence. Xavier Rolet is an internationally-minded man who deals in big ideas.

And it is easy to see why this is the case. Born to parents who were both in the military, Rolet spent his early childhood in a suburb of Algiers, while his father “was out in the Algerian bush”. He then moved back to Paris, to a north-eastern suburb called Seine-Saint, which he describes as being more “more akin to, say, Tower Hamlets or Stratford… it was a sink-estate for many years.”

I get the impression, talking to Rolet, that he was not fond of his time in Paris. Indeed, in the talk he gave after our interview, he described London as the best city in the world, with New York a close second. But nowhere was there any mention of France or Paris. On leaving his homeland, Rolet notes, “I managed to, frankly, avail myself of the opportunity through the education system, through scholarships, to eventually emigrate to the U.S. to pursue my education and I started my career there.” There is little sadness in Rolet’s voice as he describes leaving France. It is a country renowned for a population that is immensely proud of its national identity, and it is odd to meet a Frenchman with little to say about his own country.

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Part of this detachment, perhaps, stems from Rolet’s deep commitment to internationalism and his awareness of how interdependent we all are as global citizens. His particular interest, he tells me, is in global security and defence. Having served as an instructor at the Air Force Academy as part of his national service, Rolet returned to education in 2007-2008, and graduated from the Institute of Advanced Studies in National Defence.

He recalls his time there, saying, “It was sort of continuing education if you want, centred more on global issues, economic intelligence, geopolitics, broader strategic issues related to defence.”

It is not surprising for a man brought up by parents in the military, living overseas due to France’s involvement in Algeria and serving in the Air Force, to pick up an interest in defence and security matters. But Rolet does surprise me by just how much he believes in internationalism.

“I happen to believe the world will continue to evolve towards what I believe will be a global governance mechanism. I know that when you listen to Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen who are looking towards retrenchment and putting up the borders it may not feel like this, but I’m convinced we eventually will get to [some form of global governance].”

“It may start with finance, given the outcome of the crash of 2008. We are, I believe, slowly and reasonably steadily moving towards global financial governance, both in terms of conduct but also prudential regulation.”

I sense I’ve stumbled onto a topic particularly close to Xavier Rolet’s heart; these are the big ideas that evidently occupy his attention. He points me towards several emerging imbalances in geopolitics and economics about which we should be concerned. He tells me to look at “what is happening with Russia and the Ukraine, Japan going off in a bit of a strategic surprise in terms of reflating its economy and the rivalry with China, North Korea trying to chart a separate course, the tensions in the Middle East with Isis.

“These are not unrelated. I think its obviously coming out of the crisis of 2008 – where the financial crisis was very severe – that no single nation on its own has the power or balance sheet to fix the problems when they erupt on the global scene.”

Rolet seems to be warning me of what is to come. “We are right about the time when these things are going to be tested,” he says. “Whilst periods of stress usually lead to a retrenchment, the natural sort of atavistic reaction – you know, ‘no foreigners’, ‘the problems are coming from overseas’, ‘let’s not import them anymore’ – the reality is that the imbrication is so deep that I believe we will see a test soon.”

Rolet is frank about our situation. “We’ll either keel over and go into a disaster area, as Europe, frankly, has seen many times before, or we’ll be able to evolve into a more integrated global structure.”

Sometimes, it is hard to distinguish between the times Rolet is interested in external affairs for its own sake, and when he is interested because they affect his business. He manages to translate the crises of today fairly seamlessly into how the London Stock Exchange tries to anticipate them to protect itself. “We can be right, we can be wrong. But if you can correctly anticipate the trend – even if there are severe speed bumps on the way – if you predict the correct medium to long term trend, you can gain substantial competitive advantage,” he tells me.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. Rolet is obviously a man with insatiable curiosity, concerned with both finance and global affairs. He certainly has important insights to share on the interdependence of participants on the global stage.

Although Rolet is unquestionably a capitalist, even here he occupies a more nuanced position than a simple characterisation of him as a free-marketeer type of capitalist would allow. There is a human side to his economics, a recognition of the need for regulation and guidance, a need for capitalism to work for people. Maybe he places too much faith in the mechanics of capitalism, but I cannot fault him for his desire to subsume and address social issues within his framework.

Rolet explains why companies, including financial institutions, should employ people with “a mixture of liberal arts, history, languages, experiences overseas”. He even suggests, “Maybe having a tough youth, where you’ve got to struggle to make it, can be useful in some respects.” In his talk, he tells us that some of the most entrepreneurial individuals can be found in the rough, deprived neighbourhoods of our cities.

Rolet himself is someone who has struggled and risen from what he describes as a “sinkestate” to become a very successful businessman. He has been fortunate to ride the surf of capitalism and truly believes, I think, in its positive impact on society. But at the heart of Rolet’s philosophy is a recognition that we are imperfect: states, organisations, and individuals can never know or control everything. Diversity and a breadth of study, he argues, can “help you adjust to an environment where you simply do not have all the elements necessary to make a decision”.

His views are somewhat refreshing. Rolet and the London Stock Exchange do not make the aggressive trading decisions that characterise much of the banking sector. His industry relies on neutrality, making efficient the exchange of goods and laying down the financial infrastructure for others. Unsurprisingly, Rolet has a lot to say on how we can avoid some of the mistakes we have made in the past.

I ask him whether the complexities of the financial system, and the type of securities being traded in the run up to 2008, had any bearing on the crash itself. Will we ever return to a situation where such instruments are traded again? “If you go back through the last 300 years,” he tells me, “you see a multitude of crises. The products can change, it can be U.S. savings and loans, it can be Latin American debt, you can have extreme amounts of complexity, but at the core it is still the same problem and we haven’t fixed that. It is our extreme addiction, through regulatory and fiscal subsidies, to debt.”

Rolet is not your ordinary capitalist. He is nuanced and engaged, excited and concerned simultaneously.

He also recognises that capitalism needs to do more for the ordinary citizen to trust finance again. His ideas are certainly big and exciting, but we’ll have to see if they ever come to fruition.