Watch: General Election candidates answer questions from Echo readers at live hustings

The debate, chaired by The Northern Echo’s Chris Lloyd, was screened live on Facebook and featured UKIP’s Kevin Brack (KB), Labour’s Jenny Chapman (JC), Anne-Marie Currie (AMC), of the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives’ Peter Cuthbertson (PC), and Matthew Snedker (MS), of the Green Party.

The panel answered questions from Echo readers – who also posted comments on Facebook – and were allowed to make a short speech on why the public should vote for them. Here the Echo rounds up the best of the debate.

Q: How did you vote in last year’s EU referendum and what is your view on Brexit?

JC: I voted remain, but I made a very serious and sincere promise that I would abide by whatever the town decided. If Brexit is approached in the right way we can get a deal that works well for the North-East. No deal would be terrible for the North-East because we rely so much on exports to the European Union.

AMC: I voted remain. I have great concerns with the Government’s current stance going for a hard Brexit. We need to be part of the single market and need to be able to keep the European Arrest Warrant agreement which keeps us safe. Europe has been good to the North-East and we need to protect jobs.

PC: I voted leave. The biggest issue was immigration and I saw no way we could bring under control the number one issue in people’s lives unless we left the EU. I have never been afraid of the notion that we could make our laws, we could never do that with the European Commission. We have the right person [Theresa May] to lead the Brexit negotiations. She has said she will walk away from a bad deal and she is right to.

MS: I voted remain, but it required a lot of thought. The Green Party are internationalists and we are pro being collaborative with partners in Europe. Brexit threatens us with becoming less important and less influential in the world.

KB: From working as an agricultural engineer I have seen farming slowly deteriorate with subsidies being taken off the small farmers and left with the big farmers who didn’t really need it. In Europe they seemed to look after the farmers more. All our manufacturing over the years has been taken away and we have lost the fishing industry because of Europe. Things [within the EU] don’t seem to be getting any better. I voted leave.

Q: Let’s drill down into immigration, how will that work?

KB: We need to control it and have a points based system.

JC: The people you encourage to come into the country, it needs to be based on some rules and have an understood framework around it. That’s so the country is able to access the workforce that it needs for certain occupations.

PC: We need to bring down immigration to tens of thousands [a year]. That was the level we had until Tony Blair came in. We need a target and will work to bring it down. But there is room for more skilled immigration and bringing in the most talented people from around the world. I wonder about Labour’s credibility on this issue when last year they were talking about no immigration controls at all.

AMC: I am not sure we need to set a cap on immigration. At the peak of the Polish population coming to Darlington we had 7,500 here and we have only just over 4,000 now and they are in full employment. People will come over and see if they can get work and if they can’t they go back home. The problem is with the big cities where you get serious criminals who are coming over from Europe, those that are begging and thieving.

MS: I wouldn’t set a target, the Tories have set a target and missed it year after year. Migration is part of the world economy. We have always had people coming and going across our borders. We need skilled workers if we are looking to get the best people in to do the best job.

Q: If you are elected what will happen to Darlington Library?

AMC: As chair of the Friends of Darlington Library I will continue to fight to keep the library in the building it was purposely built for. It needs a bit of modernisation and some other activities. We have community groups that want to help on that and we should be listening to them and getting them involved. The library should stay where it is and I will do my best to keep it there. If the council move the library into the Dolphin Centre and the Tories continue with their austerity cuts, what happens if we don’t have the money to keep the Dolphin open? We lose both services, it’s not worth it.

PC: I have worked on this for over a year and brought a legal challenge and found a barrister who threatened to take the council to court and delayed the closure for at least a year. I would be very keen to continue that fight as an MP. Two weeks ago I sat down with the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport and talked about the library. One of my first acts as MP would be to talk to her about calling in the decision [of the council]. There is a relatively new power for a cabinet minister to look at where library provision is poor and ask whether a particular council is doing its statutory duty. I would be interested in sitting down with the council and working together to see if we can save it in its current location.

AMC: We are third worst in the country in terms of provision per head and if we move it to the Dolphin we become the worst. We are excluding people crossing Tubwell Row with the bus issues and people with other disabilities. A community hub proposal was put forward, it would be nice if the [council] would allow people to come back and discuss it.

MS: I was there at the big demonstration which was amazing, the outpouring of love for the building. I am also though painfully aware that as MP I wouldn’t run the town, it isn’t my job to run the library service. It would be the Green Party way to work with anyone who has an input or way of helping. We need to revisit the plans that Darlington Culture and the Friends have produced for this building. Darlington Borough Council have committed to a huge amount of borrowing to move the library and reconfigure the Dolphin Centre. I would rather see some repurposing of the building, which is a heritage building and which was gifted to the town.

KB: The library in Crown Street is viable, they want to save the Dolphin Centre by shoehorning it into there.

JC: I love the library, I have been going in there since I was a child. I don’t want it close or move, but when I spoke to the council and campaigners it seemed to me that there wasn’t a way of plugging that funding gap. What is going to happen is there will be a new service at the Dolphin Centre, some things will be better such as easier access for people with pushchairs and mobility problems. I understand the attachment to the library building and there should be a plan now which means that it stays within the ownership of the Darlington people and is open to the community. We need to find a way of getting income and making money, we can have a café bar in there and a small performance building, and we can repurpose the building.

Q: What measures should be we taking to combat terrorism?

PC: Getting foreign policy right is essential and we need to be so careful about intervening in the Middle East where we have made some big mistakes. However it is incredibly dangerous to attribute these evil acts to our foreign policy. The biggest thing is to make sure that people cannot come into this country if they have fought or been involved with Isis.

JC: The Tories scrapped control orders, which were critical in managing the kind of people we are concerned about, sacked hundreds of border guards and 20,000 police officers. In the last seven years the situation has got much worse. People are being exploited and manipulated, often young vulnerable men, and we really need to be able to spot what is happening to them. These acts are evil and disgusting and we need to take every possible strand of intervention that is needed in order to prevent them.

MS: No one party has all the solutions. What happened in Manchester can never be excused. But there is no doubt that our intervention in the Middle East has left us vulnerable because it has fostered antagonism between the West and the Middle East. We need to stop funding and arming aggressive countries and think where the next wave of terrorists may come from.

KB: Foreign policy needs looking at. Theresa May cutting 20,000 police officers has had a big impact. We have learnt nothing over the last 50 years, you only have to look over to Northern Ireland where people were segregated and never mixing and then they got radicalised. It is the same situation with the Muslims. You need to integrate people and bring them together.

AMC: We need to be talking to local communities and getting their confidence and listening to the intelligence coming from them. We cannot close down our borders, but we need international co-operation to identify these people before they come into the country if we can.

Q: Isn’t Darlington best served by having the best possible equipped A&E department in the town itself and if the hospital is downgraded will you as the MP resign?

MS: We are a growing town, planning another 10,000 houses which we need, and the STP needs to be scrapped. We would fund the NHS properly so it wouldn’t need to close so I wouldn’t have to resign.

KB: We would like to keep the A&E open. The money that we can save from not giving international aid to foreign governments we would put into the NHS. There is only way to save the A&E in Darlington by getting rid of the PFI contracts.

JC: If our party decided to close the A&E I would resign. I have been running a campaign to keep the A&E here. We are a town of 100,000 people and that hospital serves communities right over to the border in Cumbria and includes the Army families in Catterick. Those people deserve the best services. These are not clinically led plans, the number of clinicians I have coming to see me on a weekly basis about this is really quite startling. They are plans solely designed around saving money. We have an appropriate service for the town we are and it must be saved.

AC: The Liberal Democrats don’t want the pressure on the NHS to continue and have said we will put a penny on income tax to try and fund the NHS and social care. Our A&E is absolutely crucially placed to serve a far wider area than any other hospital. It does not make sense to close it down.

PC: I wouldn’t resign if clinicians decided to move it [the A&E], but we have an excellent case as a town to keep it and I would be making that case very strongly.

Q: Why should you be the next MP for Darlington?

KB: I will bring in direct democracy and if you don’t like the job I am doing I will resign and you can have another by election.

JC: I have worked incredibly hard for Darlington, I am not perfect and I do get things wrong from time to time and when I do I hold my hands up. But I have done some important things, from campaigning to get rid of Albert Hill Skip Hire, to keeping the breast clinic in Darlington and keeping the 400 jobs at the Department of Education in Darlington. I genuinely live in Darlington, the children are at school here, this is my home and I am genuinely proud of it.

AMC: I listen to and hear people, I will always represent the people of Darlington and I really do care about it.

PC: This is the most important election for decades, if we get Brexit right, and Theresa May is the person to do that, we can have a great future as a country. Locally Labour have been in power for too long, they are complacent and we need some change. I have already achieved for this town with the library so give me a chance to see what I can achieve for the next five years.

MS: The Green Party do politics different, we do it for the common good. We would properly fund education and health and provide safe, warm housing, a transport system that works for people and a democracy that makes every vote matter.