Wycombe’s general election candidates were quizzed on Gaza, buses and new housing in a feisty debate at Buckinghamshire New University last night ahead of next week’s July 4 vote.

The nine MP hopefuls answered questions in front of an audience of more than 100 people that included residents, Buckinghamshire councillors and members of the ‘Steve Baker Watch’ campaign group.

Former BBC executive Tim Marshall chaired the hustings, which saw heckles from those watching and at times descended into a shouting match between candidates.

Khalil Ahmed of the Workers Party of Britain was the first candidate to speak, using his opening statement to present himself as a local ‘family man’ who is ‘not a politician’.

The Ex-Wycombe mayor and councillor said his co-founding of the Wycombe Food Hub reflected his work to address food poverty and other pressures on residents.

READ MORE: In-depth profiles of Wycombe candidates Steve Baker (Conservative), Emma Reynolds (Labour), Toni Brodelle (Lib Dems), Catherine Bunting (Green Party) Khalil Ahmed (Workers Party of Britain), Richard Phoenix (Reform UK), Ed Gemmell (Climate Party), Ajaz Rehman (Independent) and Mark Smallwood (Independent).

Next up, Liberal Democrat Toni Brodelle and the Conservative incumbent Steve Baker both hailed their commitment to the NHS in Wycombe.

Reform UK’s Richard Phoenix and independent Ajaz Rehman claimed in their introductions that the country had been ‘let down’ by the main parties, while independent pro-life campaigner Mark Smallwood called abortion an a ‘humanitarian catastrophe on an unprecedented scale’.

Meanwhile, the Green Party’s Catherine Bunting and Climate Party’s Ed Gemmell warned of the impacts of global warming and criticised the legacies of decades of previous Labour and Tory governments.

Labour’s Emma Reynolds spoke of her ‘upbringing in a council flat’ and pledged to tackle food poverty during her opening, which received the loudest applause and cheers of any candidate.

The former MP for Wolverhampton North East then took the first question of the night from former Wycombe parliamentary candidate Vijay Srao in the audience who asked about Labour allegedly failing to represent women and minorities.

Reynolds said she was proud of her party’s record on gender equality, pointing to the ‘highest number of female MPs ever elected’ during Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide victory.

READ MORE: Buckinghamshire boundary changes at July 4 election

She also responded to a second question about whether Labour had ‘blood on its hands’ over the current conflict in Gaza, with Srao claiming that the Clement Atlee government in the 1940s allowed the ‘division’ of Palestine, and separately Kashmir.

The Labour candidate said she was ‘working with Labour MPs’ to highlight human rights violations in Kashmir and claimed Labour had called for an end to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas attacks of October 7.

But Rehman rebuked Reynolds’ answer on Gaza, pointing to the Labour leader Keir Starmer’s comments to LBC in October that Israel ‘has the right’ to withhold power and water from Palestinian civilians in a siege, to which he added that ‘everything should be done within international law’.

The Labour candidate initially denied Starmer made the comments before saying, ‘he doesn’t believe that’ and adding, ‘he is a renowned human rights lawyer’, which drew laughs from the audience.

Ahmed – who ran for Labour in 2019 but later quit the party – also weighed in on Starmer’s comments about Israeli tactics in Gaza.

The Workers Party candidate said Reynolds ‘could not defend’ the remarks and accused the Labour leader of ‘utter hypocrisy’ for explicitly condemning Russian President Vladmir Putin as a war criminal over the invasion of Ukraine but not Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Gaza.

After a lengthy debate about Palestine, a former student asked how the nine candidates would resolve Wycombe’s ‘horrific’ public transport issues, noting that some bus routes had been cancelled while existing services were ‘up to two hours late’.

Baker replied first, saying that he has worked closely with operator Carousel to ensure that bus services recently axed by Arriva were replaced.

Phoenix said he was ‘surprised’ there were ‘such great issues’ with transport in Wycombe, before Gemmell, Smallwood and Ahmed confirmed that they all used the bus services.

Gemmell called for more cycle lanes to be introduced in Wycombe and said the forthcoming ‘Buckinghamshire plan’ and a potential local ‘neighbourhood plan’ were opportunities to get rid of some of the area’s ‘problematic bus services’.

Bunting said she agreed with Ahmed, Gemmell and Reynolds that the Conservative-run Buckinghamshire Council and the county’s Tory MPs ‘did not work’ for transport.

She said: “We have all been taken for granted. Our environment is also taken for granted by these people. It is completely broken, and it all needs to change.”

Another member of the audience asked the candidates how they would support more social housing.

Reynolds said the council needed to ‘holds housing associations to account more’, while Bunting called for the UK to ‘do away with the people who have multiple homes in the UK’.

Phoenix said large housing developers who own lots of land should be ‘under obligation’ to release the sites.

Baker replied by saying he would love to see the renewal, redevelopment and expansion of social housing on brownfield sites under the ‘Olympic Way’ model ‘rolled out across Wycombe’.

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