'You can cut the air with a knife at St Pancras,' says Green Party leader Natalie Bennett

 
Long trip: Green Party leader Natalie Bennett Picture: Alex Lentati
28 February 2014
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Natalie Bennett is not like other party leaders. She promises to put up taxes, stop people jetting off abroad for weekend jollies and to get them eating less meat.

Oh yes, and she’s also prepared to say what Downing Street got into a terrible tangle trying to avoid acknowledging: that it makes perfect sense to put on a jumper at home to cut fuel bills.

“I normally wear a jumper through most of the winter,” she said told the Evening Standard cheerfully. “There are people who complain it’s cold in January when they are wearing a short-sleeved, lightweight, summer T-shirt. I’m one of those people who expect to wear two layers in the office.”

Meet the refreshingly candid leader of the Green Party, who opens her annual spring conference in Liverpool this afternoon.

The Camden activist’s message is that Greens are winning the arguments, helped by the floods. “The weather in Britain and around the world is giving us a clear wake-up call, that we have taken our eye off the ball and we need to get back to adopting policies to deal with climate change,” she said.

Bennett, who took over as leader in August 2012, is a 47-year-old former journalist with the accent and can-do attitude of a native Australian who knows how to shear a sheep.

Although her party has made major gains in the last five years, it faces a resurgent Ukip and a recovering Labour party and May’s European and local elections will be the first critical test of her leadership.

“We are very much on a rising curve,” she said. “We only need a swing of 1.6 per cent to treble our number of MEPs.” Gleefully, she said Ed Miliband was “following my lead” when on Wednesday he called for a purge of climate change sceptics from the Government.

Bennett’s policies break all the mainstream party rules. She plans, for example, to impose 20mph zones on most of London’s roads to improve “shockingly bad” air pollution. “You would add 90 seconds to the average driver’s journey but create a much healthier environment,” she said. Another plan is to ban drivers from running their engines while parked. “I often walk past the taxi rank at St Pancras and you could cut the air with a knife, it’s so thick,” said Bennett, pointing out that 7,000 people a year die prematurely from air pollution.

She cycles but has joined a car club for when she has piles of leaflets to shift. She said motorists should pay tolls to encourage walking and cycling in the rush hour. “If you want to drive peak time on a peak-hour road it will cost more,” she said.

Casual flying would also end, priced out by the removal of tax breaks. “If Britain is going to do one-planet living, people cannot be flying to stag weekends in Prague,” she said.

Bennett has been “basically vegetarian” for five years, on health and environment grounds. She said people should cut down on meat. “I really don’t miss meat,” she said. “We should not be feeding grain to livestock in large bulk. We should be making that grain available to people to eat.”

With Jenny Jones in the Lords and the London Assembly, Caroline Lucas an MP, the biggest party in Brighton council and two MEPs, the past five years have been successful for the Greens.

But won’t voters be horrified that Green-run Brighton is raising council tax by 4.75 per cent, in contrast to the freezes across London? She replied that people will pay for a clean conscience. “When people are asked, ‘Do you want to pay 60p a week to make sure older people are properly looked after?’, they might well say ‘Yes’,” she said.

The Greens are polling at just three per cent, but Bennett is keen to point out that the European elections are fought on proportional representation.

“We know there are lots of people who will vote Green in the European election who might hesitate in a first-past-the-post election, even if they’d like to.” The next two months will see if she is right.

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