Last Thursday Warrington Friends of the Earth hosted a “Question Time” style debate which kicked off the local General Election campaign. The event was skilfully chaired by Gareth Dunning of the Warrington Guardian. It attracted a lively audience, including councillors from all three parties and packed out the Friends Meeting House. It was particularly nice to see so many school and college students there showing both a political and an environmental awareness. Warrington’s recently elected member of the Youth Parliament, Melissa Hannon, made a good statement to get the event started.

The panel included David Mowat, Conservative; Nick Bent, Labour; Dr Jo Crotty, Liberal Democrat and Dave Coleman a Friends of the Earth spokesman. Unfortunately the Green Party were unable to take part.

All the panel members were given an opportunity to make an opening statement. These were, on the whole, non-partisan, setting a dignified and serious tone for the evening. All three political panel members stated their strongly held green views.

It was reassuring to find that David Mowat does not the share the climate change denying tendencies of some more extreme members of his party. He was modest about his environmental expertise, but gave clear answers most of the time. If he didn’t know an answer he said so, but he had a clear grasp of his party’s policies. His manner was slightly disengaged except when subject to a partisan attack, which sounded personal, from Nick Bent

Boyish and bright Nick Bent was disappointing. He was the only one of the candidates to stray from environmental issues onto partisan attacks, which didn’t go down well with the audience. At every opportunity he raised the Omega Incinerator scare story, which has no basis in fact, or claimed to have single-handedly campaigned to save two threatened re-cycling sites from the budget cuts. It was, in fact the public consultation that raised concern from established Warrington citizens which led to the budget being amended to keep these sites; not Bent’s bandwagon jumping. For an experienced lobbyist Bent was surprisingly poor at debate.

Jo Crotty was at an advantage because she is an environmental economist by training and profession. However she gave clear and understandable answers and engaged fully in the debate. Jo surprised some members of her own party by making clear her support for the local nuclear industry, in opposition to national LibDem policy. However, her views are in line with a North West LibDem motion passed at the Regional Conference in 2008. Jo also expressed concern about the amount the Council intends to spend on Waste management consultancy to explore energy from waste strategies over the next seven years.

The event was greatly assisted by the presence of Dave Coleman, an expert adviser to Friends of the Earth, on the panel. Without being patronising he was able to explain in plain English why many environmental choices are not as simple as they may at first seem. The event avoided emotional reactions to the trigger words “nuclear” and “incinerator” which some participants wanted to use as scare stories. There are committed members of Friends of the Earth who will not tolerate either of those technologies under any circumstances; however most of the discussion was far more balanced.

Richard Pearce from Low Carbon Lymm contributed a helpful brief review of the range of industrial scale recycling and energy recovery plants that are being built in the region and may potentially be used to process some of Warrington’s waste.

The evening ended with universal acclaim for the organisers for putting on such an informative event, for Gareth Dunning’s skilful chairmanship and to the candidates, all of whom made a valuable contribution to the meeting. It is a shame that there will not be many opportunities to see our parliamentary candidates for Warrington South in open debate during the campaign.