As Green party members, we were sorry to see the letter from Natalie Bennett (17 July), in which she creates the "vicious rhetoric" of which she complains. Many of her party's supporters are as concerned as the rest of the public about a high level of net immigration, mainly because it is a major contributor to population growth. This adds to the uphill task of protecting our environment and moving the economy to an ecologically sustainable one. According to opinion polls, this is a concern shared by the majority of the public. It is, no doubt, this wider public concern that has brought about the political consensus of which Natalie complains. This has nothing to do with hostility to immigrants. Most people know the vast majority of immigrants are here legally, intending only to be good citizens and neighbours, and most achieve it. We must distinguish between the rights of immigrants as individuals, and the issue of overall immigration.

Natalie's language implicitly dismisses the reasonable concerns of the majority as if they were the same as those of the objectionable minority hostile to the individual immigrant. This is just the kind of rhetoric that poisons debate. Even to honestly present the bare mathematical fact that immigration has added to the pressures on public services is, in her words, to "scapegoat immigrants". Is it really? In the Green party we used to believe in reading the statistics, not blaming the messenger, but this is far worse, for by using these words Natalie implicitly accepts that if overall net immigration is a problem, then somehow individual immigrants must be "to blame". In a mistaken haste to run away from the facts she actually reinforces the false logic of blame.

None of this is to defend the clumsy, inept, and unjust way in which the present government is addressing the public's concern over immigration. But if we in the Green party are to provide an alternative, we must remove the mote from our own eyes, stop our scapegoating, stop our own poisonous rhetoric, and get back to being the party that prided itself on facing up to environmental realities, and the party that sought to introduce a new style of open and honest debate into politics.

Chris Padley, Nicola Watson and Sandy Irvine

Lincoln