A chance to reflect on the hustings this morning at the ACE Centre in Nelson in front of an audience of bright young things from Nelson and Colne College and local schools.

Lyn Surgeon, the College Principal, keeps us all in good order using the same format as the TV debates. If we go on too long, she blows the whistle.

The UKIPPER, Graham Cannon, isn’t on the platform. Only Afzal “13 years” Anwar and Andrew Stephenson, age 29. I feel totally ancient when I realise Andrew wasn’t even in secondary school when I was first elected.

As usual, Anwar wanders all over the shop as he struggles to answer questions coherently.

He endlessly repeats the fact that the Government has been in power for 13 years. This is programmed into his brain. Even when I warn him to stop, because he is boring people, he continues.

I don’t think he says anything memorable.

He reminds the young people that he chained himself to the railings at Burnley General to protest about the relocation of the Children’s Ward to Blackburn. I am trying to read their faces. Are they impressed?  Difficult to say.

We respond to a series of excellent and insightful questions. What about local drug crime? I ask Afzal for the statistics. He is, after all, a criminal barrister but he can’t help.

Overall, there has been a huge fall in crime in the Pennine Division over the past year. This undercuts the Conservative case to abolish Police Authorities and have “directly elected individuals who will set policing priorities for local communities.”

Bad medicine.

We get questions on A&E, higher education, employment opportunities, state funding of political parties, social networking and the new media, immigration, the BNP, terrorism and Afghanistan. Youth councils and more. Phew! It is hard work.

Andrew Stephenson is not a man to lose his cool but I have one last go at needling him about his paymaster, Lord Ashcroft.

I ask him to tell the students how he felt on 1 March 2010 when Ashcroft was forced to admit that he was a non dom and was not paying full UK taxes as he promised to do a decade ago as a condition of getting his peerage.

Andrew. Did you feel angry? Upset? Embarrassed? Let down?

Nothing.

I put the very same question to him at the Barnoldswick hustings and he gave me the Ronald Reagan reply which goes something like: “There you go again, always on about Lord Ashcroft.”

He does not engage with the question. He gets off the toxic Ashcroft before you can utter the words tax cheat.

Instead, he is back on to MPs’ expenses again.

I tell him that all my expenses are up on the internet for all to see. Going back five years.

Will he put the bills and invoices for all the “Pendle Matters” up on the net showing who paid what?

Fat chance!

Cut to last night….  A great round of applause to the Rev Ed Saville and all the people from Building Bridges who hosted the hustings in Barnoldswick.

Some heckling from Jack Butterworth who had his motorcycle helmet on his lap. He was angry and upset about pensions and when the earnings link was going to be reinstated.

And that was it.