General Election Hustings!
Do make a date for Wednesday 31st May 7:30-9:30pm in the Main Hall of Warblington School for the General Election Hustings. Address: Southleigh Rd, Havant PO9 2RR. Warblington & Denvilles Residents' Association will host this Hustings. In view of the very short notice for this Election, it was felt that candidates may be pressed to attend what could be at least 4 Residents' Associations' Hustings - including Hayling Island's - as well as all their meetings around our Constituency. Therefore Warblington & Denvilles RA (WDRA) in central Havant invited other Residents' Associations to attend.
To encourage as many as possible to be able to attend, may I urge you to lift share and encourage others to attend so that we can learn about all the candidates and of course ask our questions. We are all well aware that this is a particularly 'focussed' Election and it is important that as many of us as possible are seen and heard by the candidates, one of whom will become our MP. The following are WDRA's 'rules of engagement' for the evening:
As we have over many years, we shall run the event as a public service from our position as a neutral community association with no party political affiliation and all members of the public are invited to attend. We provide a neutral chair for such debates – last time, Commander Ian Crabtree was in the chair (he is a member of the WDRA Committee and Chair of the Board of Governors of Warblington School)
There will be rules of engagement to promote fair, reasonable debate and to allow as much time as possible for questions from the floor. The rules for the last general election debate, as agreed with the parliamentary candidates, were as follows:
Candidates to draw lots before the start of the debate to determine the order in which they make introductory presentations and give initial responses to questions from the floor:
Each candidate to be invited to speak for two minutes by way of introduction;
Each candidate to have an opportunity to respond to the questions from the floor; candidates will be asked to give succinct answers and the chairman will use his discretion to maintain equal time for contributions
Supplementary questions/debate will take place at the discretion of the Chairman, who will keep an eye so that, overall, candidates have equality of coverage during the evening.
