Our party should welcome a debate with Farage – and we can win it

By James Dray and Lewis Iwu

Should UKIP be part of the televised election debates? Forget for a minute the question of whether or not Farage should be entitled to be there; instead, let’s look at the real question; can we beat him? A man who significant numbers of people see the rather obvious faults of but still really rather like? A man who decimated Nick Clegg in the European debates?

We think that we can, and more importantly, we think we have to.

We’ve both been fortunate enough to have had successful debating careers, winning two World Debating Championships between us in the process, but none of that would have happened if it wasn’t for careful, meticulous preparation, which saw us treat every opponent as if they had been hired on a retainer by the devil himself. In a debate situation, an arena of direct verbal jujitsu, Nigel Farage is without doubt a potent threat, with the potential to inflict a deadly blow on all involved, not least Ed Miliband. And yet we both believe that this is the best opportunity for the voices of reason to inflict a deadly blow on Farage.

First, Ed Miliband has a duty to call Farage out in a forum where he cannot just run away from what he and his party believe; to identify Farage’s pressure points and exploit them mercilessly. At the heart of UKIP is a deeply racist, parochial, and ultimately nasty view of the world. A world of random HIV tests, casual misogyny and homophobia. Farage must be called out. As one of us wrote back in 2009 before Nick Griffin was first invited on Question Time, the best way to tackle demagogues like the former commodities trader is to force them into discarding the masks that they hide behind, revealing the dark, regressive, xenophobic views they hold. Force them also to make the hard choices; to say how they would run the NHS, what type of school curriculums they want, and how exactly they would deal with the deficit.

Ed should then go further and frame the debate as a choice between a positive future and a return to a negative past. UKIP isn’t just a party of protest; it does present an alternate, vision of a proud, plucky, British people who can get things done on their own. A country that looks in the rear view mirror and wonders how it can be great again.

Ed Milliband needs to show that that vision of Britain is nowhere near as positive, prosperous, and indeed British as the vision that Labour have for this country. The Labour leader needs to use the right combination of language, imagery and tone (without any distracting gimmicks) that speaks to a positive future that lies ahead for a fully integrated, involved, internationalist United Kingdom – the potential for us to have a world class education system envied by all, the prospect of the UK leading the way in green technology, medical research and tech start-ups.He should argue that the British are and should be a proud people; a people proud of the NHS, the minimum wage, progressive taxation, and equal rights for those who identify as LGBT, ethnic minorities, the disabled, and the unemployed. This needs to be juxtaposed with a march from the right that is willing to play roulette with our children’s future job prospects by gambling with our political and economic influence on the world stage.

Such positivity isn’t just designed to reverse the flow of Labour voters to Farage’s Ukip. It’s also intended to galvanise a progressive coalition of people (many of whom currently don’t turn out) to defend the Britain of today not yesterday.

Third, Ed needs to understand that he can’t outflank Farage on immigration; that Labour can’t give just a little and hope to bring those people who’ve gone to UKIP back. It’s inauthentic, it’s not who we are, and it adds to the widely held sense of established politicians as being snakes in the grass. In the debate, Ed Miliband must offer a clear and defined position on immigration and not fall into the trap that Clegg fell into of debating-by-statistic. He needs to return to the strong, urgent message, that immigrants have been an overwhelmingly positive part of our society and continue to be so.

He needs to get beyond debating the effects and get to the heart of the matter. If working class people are being undercut by people willing to work for less than the minimum wage that’s not the fault of immigrants, it’s the fault of British businesses and British people who break the law and undercut wages – prosecute them. If British people can’t afford a mortgage it’s not because immigrants (who if they are massively undercutting British wages surely can’t afford a mortgage) are taking all the houses, it’s because of a systematic underinvestment in housing by successive governments – change that. When seaside towns crumble and are left with no opportunities for young people, it’s not immigrants stealing away the youth in the night, it’s the lack of any industrial plan to revitalise those communities – put one in place.

Finally, Labour need to embrace the debate taking place online; they should be ready to win the social media war as soon as the debate begins, with every member empowered to provide Ed with air support in the aftermath. Each claim made by Farage should be fact checked and turned into an easily shareable infographic, disseminated in real time. Thanks to Nick Clegg, we know what Farage’s key messages will be so this shouldn’t be too difficult to plan in advance.

Some of our Labour friends have greeted the proposal to include Nigel Farage on the stage with trepidation. We couldn’t disagree more. Ed Miliband has what it takes to grab victory at that podium. Sun Tzu famously penned the phrase “in the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”. If Labour can’t defeat our opponents in a debate, that shouldn’t lead to a rethink of the appropriateness of the debate format, it should lead to a rethink of the appropriateness of our claim to govern.

James Dray and Lewis Iwu are both former World Debating Champions and currently serve as trustees of Debate Mate, an educational charity.