Medway candidates help Kent Decide at election hustings

KentOnline / KMTV

Candidates for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and Reform UK all took part, with only the Conservative choosing not to attend.

Transcript

00:00Do they have to have a custodial sentence?

00:03Could they go back into the community?

00:05People should not be paying the level of taxes that they're paying.

00:07This happens by working with Europe.

00:10There are enough dentists.

00:11It's just that they're not paid correctly.

00:14What I hear time and time again is that people want stability.

00:16We do not believe that weapons are the answer.

00:19Every vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote for a local champion.

00:23Support the students first.

00:24I'm on track to deliver a thousand new jobs.

00:26We would like to actually abolish the Police Crime Commissioner.

00:30We would take the water companies back into private ownership.

00:32We would leave the ECHR.

00:34Fiery discussion, tough questions and four distinct visions for the future of Medway.

00:40Last night, candidates from all the major parties in the three different seats for the

00:44area came together for the KMTV and Kent Messenger hostings.

00:49Only the Conservative Party turned down offers to debate their rivals and win over voters.

00:55With questions from the audience, the evening was fierce from the offset.

00:59There's a building company in the world that can build the GPs, doctors, the hospitals

01:03for 2.4 million people in two years to keep up with that flow of people.

01:08With respect, you can't manage doctors out of thin air.

01:12Community cohesion was a big sticking point for all the parties for the highly contested

01:16seat.

01:17I think we need to celebrate our multicultural community that we have here, celebrate the

01:22diversity.

01:23There's much more that unites us than divides us and I think sometimes where cohesion and

01:30integration needs to happen is that people perhaps feel fearful of one another because

01:35they don't know each other.

01:36The state of Kent's rivers and coastal areas came to the forefront at the Gillingham and

01:41Raynham hostings which followed after.

01:44Labour want to introduce, first of all, tougher, quicker fines on the water companies that

01:49are doing this, but also for persistent offenders, make it a criminal offence because frankly

01:54what's happening at the minute isn't working.

01:56Yes, we have to address that issue carefully because, as I mentioned, the water quality

02:02is so bad it affects the health, so that has to be addressed too.

02:06We need it to be under public ownership where we have got a say in how it's run, where reservoirs

02:13are put and we don't want poo in our rivers.

02:17We can use money that we get from water companies to fund local journalists because we think

02:22in those areas these issues are not missed because there's a lot of good local journalists

02:26in there following up these stories and pressuring the water companies.

02:30And when it came to Medway's most rural constituency, Chatham and Ellsford, public health services

02:35dominated the discussion.

02:37This has all happened intentionally by the Conservatives who have changed the way that

02:42the budgets are managed for GPs, so they are having to manage these, they're bogged down

02:46by a lot of admin, we will change that.

02:48The NHS is something that Labour created and yes, we absolutely need to invest in it and

02:53we've made a commitment in our manifesto to 40,000 extra appointments every week.

02:57What we've got is a problem with doctors, nurses, skilled care staff leaving the NHS

03:03system, moving abroad, going to America, Australia.

03:07We'll do a cross-party debate to get an honest system whereby NHS and social care are combined

03:13together so that we get the best health care system in the world.

03:17While Medway's potential MPs may not agree on much, no one will be doubting that they

03:22were passionate about their politics.

03:25Oliver Leeds of the Sats for KNTV in Medway.

03:28And for a full list of candidates for all three seats, just go to Kentonline.

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