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It was the Conservatives, after all, whose refusal to participate blew open the Consortium, with all its combined money, experience and market reach. Think how much harder it would be for an individual media organization, new to the game and betting considerable funds on its success, to say no.

We are not condemned to the status quo, as if that were the only possible system, or the most perfect that could be devised

It is always open to parties to decide whether they wish to participate in a given debate, and to that extent each always has a certain amount of leverage to hold out for more advantageous terms. But there is no reason to think that they would have equal bargaining power, and to the degree that they do not, the final result will be skewed in one party’s favour or another’s.

Between the dictatorship of the Consortium and the Wild West, there is surely some middle ground. It is not inevitable that the debates must be consigned to these sorts of last-minute power games among the parties and the media. As I’ve written before, we don’t do that with any other aspect of our election laws — for example, what sort of spending limits we should have. There is no reason the debates should be any different.

We are not condemned to the status quo, as if that were the only possible system, or the most perfect that could be devised. It is not beyond our ingenuity to come up with a fairer system, and better debates. We are not necessarily reinventing the wheel here. We can take a page from the social sciences, and some previous thinking about fairness.

The parties will always have interests, of course, and will always wish to advance them; perhaps you will say that this dooms any attempt to come up with a fair system. But does it? In A Theory of Justice, the political philosopher John Rawls grappled with the same issue, as it applied to questions of social justice: given the self-interest of the participants, was it even possible to come up with a definition of fairness, let alone get everyone to sign onto it?