Live web chat at the Guardian

11 February 2013

I was answering questions at the Guardian today at the environment blog here. Feel free to pop in and take a look.

A few people have said that they've struggled with the format of the pages so I'll post here the questions that I've answered for easy access - I promise I've not only answered the easy ones but obviously it's not humanly possible to do them all justice.

Hi everyone – thanks for tuning in. Thanks for all of the questions – looking forward to engaging in the discussion! I got here a little early, so I’ll answer some of the already lodged questions to get started, then I’ll be trying to keep up with new questions and responses as fast as I can. I think this is the first “chat” with nested comments; I’m going to generally answer the first comment in a thread and hope that will allow the discussion to flow.

@planktonmath asks Natalie Bennett has previously given her support for the attempted destruction of the publicly funded GM trial at Rothamsted in May 2012. The overwhelming majority of the scientific community viewed the attempt to destroy the trial as a disgrace. Can Natalie Bennett outline how she can expect scientists to trust her given her support for the destruction of the research of some of their colleagues?

I’m very happy for scientists to look at our policies – you can find them at http://policy.greenparty.org.uk . I think most independent observers would agree that we back evidence-based policymaking – and on issues ranging from climate change to drugs policy to agriculture and food to prostitution, we have a strong evidence base for our policies. And we also back increasing public spending on R&D to at least 1% of GDP.

Specifically on GMOs, our policy supports increased funding for scientific research generally and allows for further research in the laboratory at this stage. But this isn’t just a scientific issue, it’s very much a political and economic one. GM seed technology is dominated by large corporations who are can use their technology to control over farmers. It promotes an agricultural system dominated by large monocultures and a dependence on their products, not just seeds but also agrichemicals. There was good cause for concern about what was happening at Rotherham – and scientists backing the campaign against outdoor trials – there’s a lot more about the arguments here: http://carolineallengreenlondon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/gm-more-balanced-view.html It’s great that the Rothamstead scientists don’t want to patent their research and propose to make it widely available, especially as it is taxpayer-funded, but we have no guarantees this will happen, nor that it will not be tweaked slightly by a private firm and then patented. The regulatory framework needs to take much better account of these issues, and support individual scientists who are seeking to ensure their work is used in a socially responsible way.

@onthefence asks 1) Does Prof. Busby still have any formal role within the Green Party (as an adviser, potential candidate, or whatever) ?

2) Several Greens distanced themselves from Prof. Busby over his Fukushima claims and his pill-selling activities.

Presumably Natalie Bennett doesn't support Busby's entrepreneurial efforts, but what are her views on Busby's radiation claims?

Dr Busby no longer holds any formal position within the party and has not been the Science and Technology spokesperson for the Green Party for several years. Regarding the scientific claims put forward by Dr Busby, the Green Party believes that it is not for a political party to decide whether or not a particular treatment is effective or not; we think that independent peer review provides the best assessment.

@Mark Williams asks Why do the Greens oppose conventional nuclear? Would the Greens oppose investment into emerging nuclear technologies?

There are lots of questions on nuclear energy here; I’m going to try to wrap it all up in this answer, also responding to Composing, Guzica and others- in short, the Green Party has long regarded the safety issues around nuclear and the fact that no long term storage solution for waste has been found as powerful arguments against, plus the fact that nuclear is tied to a centralised, rigid, fragile electricity system, when what we need is a decentralised, flexible, resilient system. But we don’t really now even need to get to those arguments – the fact is the economics of nuclear no longer adds up. As Caroline Lucas set out last week, the government, despite the “no subsidy for nuclear” pledge in the Coalition agreement, is working towards handing £30billion over 30 years to EDF.

@ARebours asks Do you also believe that electricity/energy consumption can be reduced by 'demand management'?

Energy conservation is the huge missing part of the Energy Bill now being considered by parliament. Large amounts of the energy we use now is wasted, has no benefit or even does harm. The need to improve our housing stock – with insulation and draftproofing, to greatly reduce our heating bills and fuel poverty is clear. There’s also the huge waste of office blocks with their lights blazing usefulessly through the night. Yet as the House of Lords scrutiny of the Bill highlighted, energy conservation is entirely missing. And reducing the demand would also reduce the costs for everyone.

@VoiceofReason08 asks I have a question? How do you win the public over? How do you sell to them giving up flying, private motoring, significant changes in diet, how many children they can have, control on where they live, where they work? Is this something that a Green government would want to implement? If it isn't as extreme as that, how can you justify it fair as taxation is a control? How the poorest members of the electorate would have to give up flying through increased taxation, yet the wealthiest would carry on? Unless of course you are planning some sort of Soviet system whereupon everyone is equal?

The Green Party isn’t concerned about individual choices – we’re not lobbying individuals to change their behaviour. If people individually switch their choices to more environmentally friendly options that’s great – but we’re involved in politics because we want to change the way our economy and society are structured so that the “green” choice is always the cheapest, simplest, most convenient choice. That requires political action, whether it is cutting rail fares and restoring decent bus services so people have alternatives to the private car and can afford to use transport, or insulating homes to end fuel poverty and cut carbon emissions, or taking action to bring manufacturing and food production back to Britain, so that supply chains are greatly shortened. And the need to deal with inequality and poverty is absolutely central to our message. That’s why we’re campaigning to make the minimum wage a living wage, to ensure stable, secure jobs (we’d particularly like to tackle the obscenity of zero hours contracts), for decent levels of benefits available to all who need them – far too many people in our society today aren’t sure where tomorrow’s dinner, next week’s rent or next month’s mortgage payment is coming from. You can’t say to the millions in situations like that “you must cut back”.

@ratherbered What is Natalie's position on building a tidal generation barrage across the Severn Estuary, which can supply approximately 5% of the current UK electricity demand as well as provide a valuable predictable base load generation to balance other renewable energy forms such as solar and wind that have intermittency issues?

There are two concerns here – conservation and climate change, both of which are critically important. Green Party policy is opposed to the Severn barrage project as currently conceived as too large and damaging, but we are in favour of a less damaging system, which might be a series of smaller lagoons, to harness the tidal energy.

@35years Can Natalie give us her thoughts on Growth as one of the main aims of businesses and governments?

Much of the debate around growth is I think hopelessly sterile – anyone who has looked into GDP knows that it is a measure that tells us very little about the wellbeing of developed states: to take the old feminist example from a time of different cultural mores, if a man marries his housekeeper GDP goes down, since she’s no longer paid for her work; or to quote Caroline Lucas’s favourite example, if a father buys his child doughnuts for dinner that’s good for GDP, but if he cooks a healthy stew, that has no impact.

What we need to do is do the things that need doing, whether it is insulating homes, improving public transport or providing essential public services such as libraries and childcare, and stop doing the things that are damaging and don’t have real benefits, whether it is building new roads that we know only move traffic jams around and even generate more traffic, moving food and goods vast distances without acknowledging the externalised costs of pollution, noise, exploitation of workers etc … i.e. we need to think far more intelligently about what the way forward is.

@GiulioSica asks How will you and the Green party co-ordinate a campaign to tackle the nuclear and GM lobbying in politics and the media, that will challenge the many outlandish scientifically unsupported comments about future technologies that are currently being made?

The power and influence of lobbyists – and individuals seconded from private firms to work in government departments – is something that the Green Party is very concerned about, and Green MP Caroline Lucas has done a great deal to highlight. It’s something action is clearly needed on. I think we can use the focus on lobbying in the Leveson report as a lever to push further on this issue.

@VenusianVan asks Dear Natalie, Are you aware of the website Vote For Policies? It shows that when people choose policies they like without knowing which political party they belong to, the majority of people choose the Green Party. How can this seemingly strong support for the party be translated in to votes? I think part of the answer lies in a far more aggressive response to the continual distortion and lies that are directed at the Green Party online, which tries to portray it as "anti-science". Would you agree with that? Thanks for your dedication and work.

Thanks for pointing that out - It's something I talk about often! We're looking to significantly grow the number of county councillors in May, then significantly increase, hopefully treble, our number of MEPs in 2014, from two to six. That will mean many more people will have two local Green Party representatives. Going into the 2015 general election, after five years of Caroline Lucas as a highly effective Green MP, it's going to be obvious to many more people that a Green vote in a general election is a real alternative. If Brighton Pavilion can elect a Green MP, anywhere else in the country can choose to do it too!

@ergolargo asks Would it be possible for Natalie to clarify the Green Party's current position towards the proliferation of cruel practices associated with the increase of industrial factory farming of animals over the last couple of decades, e.g., debeaking of chickens, long-distance transport of live animals to slaughter, inadequate regulation of downed animal slaughter. Does she agree that farm animal welfare is an issue of increasing importance to many progressive voters, especially in the light of intensive mega-dairy proposals, and the increasing evidence of unregulated trade in horsemeat?

As an agricultural science graduate, these are issues close to my heart, and something the Green Party does a huge amount of work on. Industrial factory farming is a huge animal welfare issue - and a huge human health issue.

More broadly, I think the horsemeat scandal is going to shine new light on our whole industrial food system. What we need to do is encourage local food production at the heart of strong local economies - not shipping large anonymous frozen slabs of meat around Europe and beyond.

@frostedw asks Is Natalie Bennett as outraged as I am (which is very) about the use of undercover police officers against environmental protestors, especially those who have formed intimate relationships?

Very much so. And both Caroline Lucas MP and London Assembly member Jenny Jones have done a huge amount to highlight these issues.

@ObserverofUkpolitics asks I would also like to ask Natalie, what she feels that the Green Party can offer the UK electorate that no other political party can.

The Green Party understands that we need to entirely reshape our economy and society, that decades of neoliberal economics and globalisation have left us with a low-wage, jobs-poor, extraordinarily unequal society that is living as though we had three planet Earths, when of course there is only one. We are offering a new way forward - bringing food production and manufacturing back to Britain, building strong local economies based around small businesses and cooperatives, with a minimum wage that is a living wage and secure jobs that people can build a life around - within the environmental limits of our one planet.

@AlbertStubbins asks My family has long voted Liberal, then Liberal Democrat in the Southport Constituency, primarily to keep the Tories out. (The seat had historically gone Conservative.) The coalition agreement disappointed them greatly, but they were resigned to voting Lib Dem in the next election out of respect to the long serving local MP, John Pugh. However, Pugh just burned his bridges with his inexplicable vote against Gay Marriage last week. The whole family is agreement about wanting to vote for Green Party at the next election. Labour's is non starter because of the Iraq War. Can you give a commitment that the Green Party will have candidates in most every constituency at the next election?

Thanks for wanting to vote Green!

In 2010 we for the first time stood in more than half of the general election constituencies, and in the past four years the membership of the Green Party has doubled, with new parties forming in many areas, so we're moving forward very fast.

But there's still the big, undemocratic block of the £500 deposit in each constituency, and we need to grow further and faster.

We'd love your vote - but also any more support you can give us to help make a full slate possible!

@frostedw Having just been to the Green Party's website, I just wanted to say that I support there being a referendum on the EU.

Thanks! We believe in democracy and self-determination; if a referendum is good enough for Scotland it's good enough for everyone! And no one under the age of 55 has had the chance to have a vote on the EU.

@thesnufkin asks The trajectory of European Green Parties seems to be that they grow and grow unitl they are large enough to join a coalition government, at which point they crash and burn and aren't heard of again for a decade. How will the UK Green Party avoid that fate? If we were in a balance of power situation, we’d be looking to win policy outcomes, not ministerial cars. The Scottish Greens made considerable impact with a confidence and supply agreement - able to win policy outcomes while still able to vote on issues according to their merits and conscience. @miked453 asks The UK is in a housing crisis which is impacting on many areas of society and the economy. We need more new homes. How would the party meet the conflicting needs of development and protection of the natural environment? Does the party support increasing density targets in urban ares to create greener towns and cities and reduce urban sprawl? We do need more new homes, but we also need to consider the huge number of empty and unused homes, the number of homes approved but on which construction hasn't started, and the fact that there are now more bedrooms per person in Britain than ever before. We shouldn't be building on greenfield sites, we should be looking at brownfield sites, located generally close to already existing facilities such as public transport; we should be looking at regional development policy so people can build lives in parts of the country where there's currently empty homes, and we need to look at ways in which we build communities where work-home-school-leisure facilities are within walking or cycling distance. @ruaridhw asks Social justice and a successful green economy would depend for the most part on people owning the means of production. D you feel that the Green Party prepared to look at alternatives to capitalism ? Building our economy around giant multinational corporations, wiith their low-wage insecure jobs and tax-avoiding ways, has clearly not delivered for Britain. What we need to do is build strong local economies around small businesses and cooperatives, bringing manufacturing and food production back to Britain - that means an economy structured very differently to that we have today. And it means a very different kind of finance sector - built around credit unions, mutuals and local banks that understand and are prepared to invest in their local communities. Thanks everyone for all of your questions - I'm out of time now, so apologies to those whose questions I didn't get to. Thanks to Guardian environment for providing the opportunity - and for everyone who read and partcipated. Natalie





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