Sussex Uni Question Time: The highlights

We headed down to the uni Question Time to cover for those of you who weren’t committed enough to make it last week. Here’s the lowdown on what went on.

In attendence were Lib Dem’s Christopher Bowes, Labour’s Purna Sen, Conservative’s Clarence Mitchell, UKIP’s Nigel Carter, and Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion (who got a standing ovation almost every time she opened her mouth).

The Badger conducted a poll just before the debate started, asking which candidate students would currently vote for, and ran it again after the debate was over to see who had changed their mind, if at all. UKIP’s Nigel proceeded to vote for himself on his phone.

A number of controversial issues were brought up, with questions including “What is the future of tuition fees in the UK?” to which Nigel (after saying how much he loved tuition fees and that we deserved them) warned against the imminent danger of “spending millions training up ballerinas”, supposedly in favour of more classically academic subjects. Caroline Lucas went on to ask the audience to “give it up for ballerinas!” which was met with a tirade of enthusiastic clapping and yells.

Nigel went on to describe the 60s in which there were “hundreds of sociologists” when no one needed them, to which an outraged student in the audience shouted ‘SOCIOLOGY!!’

The question “Should the EU bail out Greece?” brought out a more serious tone in the debate, raising questions on immigration in which Conservative’s Clarence Mitchell turned to UKIP’s Nigel and told him his scaremongering tactics surrounding the issue of immigration were at times “overtly racist”.

When asked “what do you think is Brighton’s biggest issue? How would you resolve this as an MP?” the panel had varied responses – UKIP’s Nigel identified housing as being the biggest issue, and suggested Brighton needed to be “spruced up” to improve the situation. A student in the audience responded to this by telling Nigel “we don’t need to turn the city into San Francisco, it’s not Star Trek”. Oh Nigel.

Possibly the most memorable moment of the evening was when a girl in the 2^nd row of the audience deftly lobbed a wettened loo roll at Nigel, which unfortunately bounced off him and landed on a disgruntled Clarence. After a moment of deliberation the girl was asked to leave the lecture theatre as she had violated the safe space policy that’s been put in place to regulate debate held on university campuses.

On a more positive note, Nigel was invited to Pryzm, which confused him slightly, and when he asked if it was a good or bad thing, the chair replied it was “hard to say”. Maybe we’ll see him there grabbing a WKD.