Last night, Gi Grimsby News held a Q&A event to allow constituents in Grimsby and Cleethorpes to ask questions to the candidates looking to represent the area.
With a studio audience at Franklin College and a simultaneous live broadcast on Facebook that has been viewed by over 8,000 people, the Q&A covered topics including immigration, free school meals, SEN support, and the Corporation Bridge fiasco.
Each candidate was given a few minutes to give an opening statement. Lia Nici took the stand first, saying that she was just an “ordinary resident of the Grimsby area” and stood as an MP in the first place after spending time as a lecturer at Grimsby Institute as she felt she could be “a good MP and work hard for the area”. She is quoted further as claiming she has “done everything I can in the last four years to raise the profile of Grimsby and make sure we are getting the sight from central government that I think we deserve.”
Next on the podium was Labour candidate Melanie Onn, who said that she did not want to be seen as “the other side of the same coin” when discussing the Conservative Party and wanted to reinforce the point that “your priorities are my priorities”. Onn said, “I’m very clear that people want to see change on their high street; they want to see basic things like the A180 fixed; they want to see NHS waiting lists brought down; they want to see things like the Laurel Ward, which has just been closed down in our hospital, retained so that local people can get the services that they need on their doorstep.”
The last member of the panel was Oliver Freeston, the councillor who recently defected from a Conservative background to the Reform UK party. He began, “I believe that, at my age, I am able to resonate with many of you in this room. I know that for many of you in here, you’re proud of your country, and you’re proud of your town, but you are looking towards your future.
“The way that we look towards our future is by securing good jobs, having a good personal economy, and being able to make a family and to be proud of ourselves in the future.”
With introductions out of the way, the questions submitted from our wider audience were delivered by the chair of the debate, Rhys Childs.
The first question of the evening was directed towards Melanie Onn and was, “Do you still want wolf-whistling to be a crime?”
After a few moments of skating around the question initially, our debate chair challenged Onn. She responded, “I think that there is a load of work that needs to be done around violence against women and girls; does that necessarily need to be part of it? I don’t think that it does.”
Freeston then joined the discussion, adding that he was interested in seeing how the policing aspect of the crime would be applied, inquiring that if “somebody whistled to you from out of a van window, would you call the police?” Onn then offered her response with, “the idea behind it was much more about people feeling that if there were things that were inappropriate, things that were threatening, then they could be reported and recorded, so that if there was a pattern then police were able to involve themselves in that.”
With that matter concluded, the next question was served to Oliver Freeston. He was asked, “when you were a Conservative councillor, you were quoted as saying that you couldn’t deal with certain issues because of the party. Now that you’ve joined Reform UK, you say you can. Is this a case of putting your party before the town?”
Freeston responded, “No, absolutely not. I put the town and country before any political party. That’s why I left the Conservative Party because they no longer represented the values I believed would benefit this country.”
This response led to the first clash of the night, with Nici and Freeston locking horns on the “whipping system”, by which a member is compelled to vote in accordance with their party. As Freeston tried to explain this situation to our live audience, Nici interrupted to explain with “all due respect” that “if you don’t believe in something, then you vote independently, regardless of any whip.” As manners were restored and composure regained, the questioning continued.
Lia Nici was asked, “You routinely speak about the amount of funding you have brought in for the town, but when you look around, we have a closed bridge and dozens of empty shop units; this place is in a state. How has the money that’s been brought in benefited local people?”
Nici responded by explaining that one of her proclaimed achievements was bringing in hundreds of millions of pounds, some of which she achieved through acting as a “broker” in negotiations with the central government and our local council in the purchase of Freshney Place shopping centre in order to “save it”. Another was how they obtained seafood processing funding and community funding for places like the old Royal Bank of Scotland building in the town centre, which is due to be taken over by a charity called “Care”. She continued saying that her job is to “go to ministers and say that this is what people in my town want to do, this is what I want you to have a look at, to lobby with them and to work with them, and to make sure it’s coming into Grimsby”. Perhaps this is why she has obtained the moniker of the ‘invisible MP’, despite claiming to do plenty for the town, many claim that she has made it worse and that it is difficult to get a hold of to raise complaints about the current situation.
Upon being pressed on the specifics of her monetary obtainments, Nici explained how regeneration is taking place in the town centre, repeated how she helped “save” Freshney Place, and claimed a “Labour-controlled Council” helped to ruin a bus station in our town, adding that she is working with the current Council to construct a new one starting next year.
Tensions began to flare later in the evening, however, as topics like Brexit and gang crime came to pass, with Freeston taking a significant hit when he said that people would be more at ease if gangs spoke English rather than a foreign language.
Gi Grimsby News spoke with a few of the live audience members after the event concluded, who revealed that their unanimous “winner” was Melanie Onn who viewers said conveyed her views clearly and put across good points, The consensus was that Oliver Freeston was also a good representative but lacked experience and knowledge, and that the “loser” of the proceedings was undeniably Nici, as she seemed to bury her head in the sand, dodge questions, and give shallow responses.
You can watch the full broadcast via this link to our Facebook page.
