Hustings

Posted By: Wera Hobhouse
Date Posted: 30/03/2010

 I went on my first hustings last week. John Leech, the Liberal Democrat MP for Manchester Withington, asked me to stand in for him in a debate called ‘Ask the Climate Question’ organised by the RSPB and Friends of the Earth.
The audience was largely young and green leaning.

My advantage was, I think, that I had a few years experience in Local Government trying to implement changes in Rochdale Council to combat Climate Change at a local level. I also wasn’t politically in direct competition with the other three panellists, all PPC s for Manchester Withington from Labour, Conservatives and the Green Party.

On the whole the PPC from the Green Party and I agreed on the most fundamental statements: that Climate Change is happening; that we need urgent action; that the worry about the state of our economy should not overshadow the Environment debate and that so far the British government has been agonisingly slow to make a real impact to combat Climate Change. However his solution that we should just all save a bit more energy doesn’t in my view quite stand up to the reality of life in the 21st century.

The Labour candidate, a very confident woman in her early thirties, demonstrated to me everything that is wrong with Labour today: arrogant, full of herself, forever saying ‘I have just been saying this to ‘Ed’ this morning’ and proclaiming that Britain was leading on Climate Change in Europe.

And then the Conservative candidate. I honestly didn’t expect that these people still exist in real life. A young man, but old before his time. A man, who believed that caps on bonuses was political suicide, advocating a continuation of the market free- for- all, and a climate change sceptic, who was trying to divert the debate to mere percentages of how much of global warming was man made.

The Conservatives are not in the race in Manchester Withington, so it could be argued that the Conservative Candidate was an irrelevance.
However it speaks volumes if a local Conservative party selects a candidate who is so out of touch. It seems to demonstrate that at a local level the Conservatives have not changed at all despite massive efforts from the national party to portray themselves as modern, tolerant, green and appealing to a new generation of voters. From what I saw with my own eyes the Tory candidate in Manchester failed dismally, he didn’t persuade even the more mature members of the audience.
Bring on some more hustings!