Herefordshire's parliamentary candidates given a grilling by students at Hereford Sixth Form College (From Hereford Times)

Herefordshire's parliamentary candidates given a grilling by students at Hereford Sixth Form College

8:00am Friday 12th March 2010 in

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SPIRITED students gave Herefordshire’s parliamentary candidates a run for their money during a special Question Time-style debate.

Jesse Norman, would-be Conservative MP, faced particular criticism when one teen in an audience of more than 200 demanded to know why a “man who isn’t from this county, who is privately educated, who sends his kids to Eton and who is a millionaire” expected to represent Herefordshire.

Another student at Hereford Sixth Form College also asked him if he was a career politician who “just wanted to get into parliament”.

Mr Norman said he had been brought up to believe in the ethics of public service “all his life” and reminded them that instead of going into a “fat cat job” after school he had chosen teaching and charity work instead.

“We should not be playing class politics or any of that nonsense because we have a serious problem in this country,” he added.

And Liberal Democrat Sarah Carr didn’t get off lightly either. The mother- of-one was asked how she felt about current party MP Paul Keetch given that “he rarely speaks, he rarely turns up and he rarely votes”.

She hit back with various achievements that Mr Keetch had been involved with, including the revocation of President Robert Mugabe’s knighthood and improved flood defences in the county.

Before that, all five party representatives had been given three minutes to state their case by politics lecturer Marco Martinelli.

UKIP’s Valentine Smith said he “didn’t have horns or a tail” and that, although his party’s manifesto was “fairly radical”, it was actually “clever, simple and will actually work”.

Leominster Green Party candidate Felicity Norman spoke about economic investment and was later applauded by the audience for diffusing a heated conversation between Ms Carr and Mr Norman by reminding everyone that “it doesn’t matter where you come from or what sort of privilege you come from, it matters what you are doing now and where you are going”.

Labour’s Philippa Roberts also won favour from the students for talking about “urban bias” in politics today and said Parliament sometimes needed reminding that “we actually exist in Herefordshire”.