Another American export to arrive in Brtiain

In the past five year, the US has exported to the UK in droves restaurant brands, High School Musical, obnoxiously expensive school dances, baseball jargon, Premier League goalies, The Apprentice, yours truly, and now the crème de la crème: Prime Minister's Election Debates.

Long discussed but never agreed to until now, the three major Westminster parties have agreed to have their leaders participate in three 90-minute debates, set to take place on ITV, Sky News and BBC. Regional debates for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland will also take place. Three potential problems will crop up when these debates debut, perhaps as early as February.

First, nationalist parties (Scottish National Party and Wales' Plaid Cymru) are threatening to take all three networks to court and sue their way onto the nationwide debates. While they have the chance to make their case against the Labour, LibDem and Tory leaders from their respective devolved legislatures, they also argue that having nationwide debates doubles the publicity of the Westminster Three. This brings about another tangent to the West Lothian Question, which asks why Scottish MPs have an opportunity to weigh in on affairs in England when they and English MPs aren't able to weigh in on Scottish affairs. Why would voters in Kent or Cornwall care what Alex Salmond says about a domestic issue when the SNP or Plaid Cymru have no desire to run candidates in England? If either party want in the debates, then it would be to their advantage to campaign to put their leader in 10 Downing, rather than pursuing independence.

However, both parties can point to Canada for support, as Canadian broadcasters have had televised leaders' debates since the election of 1968. Their qualifications are that a party must have one MP in order for the party leader to appear. This ensures the place of le Bloc Québécois, the nationalist party who only runs candidates in Quebec, and thus a debate exclusively in French. Indeed the SNP & Plaid Cymru can potentially push for debates to occur in Scots Gaelic and Cymraeg, and potentially as many as 11 parties on a leaders' debate in the UK, including the Irish republican Sinn Féin party and one-member parties Independent Kidderminster Hospital & Health Concern and Respect - The Unity Coalition. Factoring in the European Parliament, UKIP and the BNP could both make claims to become part of the leadership debate, which by then might as well be turned into a game show called "Westminster Squares" or a farcical school cafeteria food fight. The fear of this, however, could bring about a worse response and put it down to two parties, shutting out the third that could easily become the figurative kingmaker in future elections.

Second, as it stands, each debate will be televised on only one network at a time. This leaves out Channel 4 and Five. Worse, should the election occur in May or June, ITV could pull a devious stunt and run "Britain's Got Talent" against the broadcast of the remaining two debates on Sky and BBC. For these debates to gain enough traction and be seen not as a ratings ploy but instead a worthy tool of informing voters, they should be operated by a multi-network commission and allowed to be broadcast on every network that wants to allot time for it.

Third, critics of the debates argue that placing the party leader on a nationwide televised debate puts more emphasis on the leader and party brand, detracting from the individual running in each constituency for his or her party. This criticism, however, can be levelled against any function involving the role of a party leader—Prime Minister's Questions, Question Time, election party broadcasts, the party manifesto—and is mostly a reaction to the evolution of the role of Prime Minister the past 200 years, and by extension party leaders. The debates, however, would harden the role of the Prime Minister as an executive, whereas the position remains in the legislative branch with powers delegated by the monarchical executive. By debates being televised to millions, several of whom won't bother to read the manifestos or even push the Red Button to review the party broadcasts, individual candidates could find themselves in a more narrow definition of their party, and deviating from that image could cost both them and their party.

While this is a major step forward in bringing election processes to the masses of today, the potential changes it may make to how elections play out could be few and minimal or quite drastic.