The hustings at the Granville Community kitchen

THE Conservative candidate looking to unseat Labour’s Tulip Siddiq warned that some people would never negotiate after being asked if the “war on terror” was working in the wake of the Manchester attack.

Claire-Louise Leyland, a former reservist, said the United Kingdom had to act “realistically” to the threat from people who “hate our way of life”. She was speaking at the only hustings event in the Hampstead and Kilburn constituency ahead of next week’s general election, and just over a week since 22 people died in the Manchester Arena bomb explosion.

All of the candidates expressed their dismay at the loss of life. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn suggested late last week that the roots of the atrocity could in some way be linked to past UK foreign policy of military action overseas.

Ms Leyland told the South Kilburn hustings at the Granville Community Kitchen in Carlton Vale: “It made me absolutely determined to make sure we have a Prime Minister who understands that, while we need to talk and negotiate, we also need to have proper defences. It would be lovely if we could all sit down and talk but there are some people who don’t want to talk. We need to be realistic – we live in the world that we live in and there are people who just hate our way of life, people who hate us because of our liberal values. In those places we need to make sure we are responding realistically to the threat that people in our communities are facing.”

Ms Leyland is in a showdown with Ms Siddiq in a constituency where Labour and the Tories were divided by just 1,138 votes in 2015.

Ms Siddiq told an audience of around 70 that the bombing risked increasing Islamophobia and said the community needed to make sure there was no backlash against young Muslim men in north London. “I marched against the war in Iraq, I think everybody knows that, but this is also about what drives these people to commit these crimes,” she said. “How do they feel so disenfranchised that they grow up here, live here and then they feel they have to commit some sort of atrocity. One of the major mistakes that has been made by successive governments is not cracking down on online grooming.”

Liberal Democrat candidate Kirsty Allan said the UK had repeatedly made the same mistake over foreign policy, warning that the “war overseas has comprehensively failed”. She added: “We need to come together as a community to make sure people aren’t in a situation where they feel chronically isolated and feel they have no investment in society.”

John Mansook, from the Greens, told the hustings: “We have to take responsibility and understand that we’ve contributed to some instability across the world and not just to say, ‘you’re bad and we’re good’, and leave it at that.” He said it was time for community cohesion to stop judging people by the way they look or if they fitted a certain profile.

Independent candidate Rainbow George recited a biblical prophecy, while Hugh Easterbrook, who is standing on a “smarter Brexit” ticket, warned that “we have a lot to answer for in our approach [to foreign policy] over two decades and I do not think violence is the way”. He added: “I don’t think the military have the solution here.”