Photo: Ephraim |
Our candidate Pat Marsh spoke on the wide range of issues that were put to the panel from the floor. Jane Glover sends the following report of the event:
Pat Marsh gave an excellent
account of Green Party principles at a 'question time' style panel at Canterbury 's Simon
Langton Boys
School on 28th
March. The panel was composed of five
parliamentary candidates for next year's general election, one each from the
five main parties, and was organised by the school's politics society.
Gay Marriage, 'Fracking',
Foreign Aid, Immigration, Council Tax Charges and the West's response to
Russian military action in the Ukraine
were the main subjects covered.
Unfortunately for Julian
Brazier (Conservative MP), he managed to isolate himself on the two subjects
that most united the rest of the panel, fracking and gay marriage. He demonstrated how his conscience alienated
him from the progressive views in his own party and on the rest of the panel,
by attempting to explain why he was against Gay Marriage, while not being
anti-gay. His views on fracking
similarly led him into murky waters when, agreeing with the panel that it
shouldn't take place in the Kent
area (his own backyard), he called on us all to keep an open mind about the
suitability of doing it elsewhere (someone else's backyard).
In contrast, Pat provided an
informed summary of the arguments against fracking - the controversial method
of extracting shale gas from underground with the now well-publicised concerns
about unavoidable outcomes, such as water contamination. She was equally confident on the subject of
supporting current levels of Foreign Aid, mentioning the legacy of past
generations in exploiting other parts of the world as one of the good reasons
why we should not now scrimp in our continuing financial support of developing
areas. This argument elicited a
nationalistic outburst from one of the young men in the audience, who
listed 'advances' Britain had given the world. Nobody
else was moved to take this up.
James Flanagan (Lib Dem)
with his affable liberalism and Hugh Lanning (Labour) with his 'one-nation'
socialism answered questions with ease, their input generally going down well
with the audience. Not one to be left
out, David Hirst (UKIP) gained fleeting popularity by resorting to comic
brevity when his extreme views failed to win him friends.
JG