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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, it’s not just Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats who are holding their conferences this month, the smaller parties meet as well and their appeal in some cases is growing. I’m joined now from Brighton by the leader of the Green Party for England and Wales, Natalie Bennett. A very good morning to you. Let me ask you that about smaller parties, I bet you don’t often hear this question but do you share something in common with the UK Independent Party in that people are increasingly disenchanted with the big parties and are wanting to hear what you’ve got to say?

NATALIE BENNETT: I think that’s very true. It’s clear that the two party system in Britain, or the two and a half party perhaps, is entirely broken. Those three largest parties are trying to occupy a very, very narrow piece of political ground and are not representing huge numbers of people. If you take for example supporting publish ownership of the railways, bringing them back into public ownership, that’s our policy which we are very strongly reiterating at this conference and that’s backed by 75% of people but it is not the policy of any of the three largest parties.

DM: One of the flagship policies, and it’s not just a policy, it’s a whole range of them, is of course standing out as green on the environment. I posed in my introduction that the tide was turning but is it turning against you that in times of economic difficulty, people are less keen to discuss about making sacrifices for the environment?

NB: Well first of all I think it is important to acknowledge that you don’t have to make sacrifices for the environment and the sorts of things we need to do is insulate our homes, invest in renewable energy, things that create jobs, give people better lives and tackle fuel poverty but more broadly, focus on the environment. Understandably immediately after the economic crash people were focused on how they are going to pay tomorrow’s lunch money, next week’s rent money and it was, people did focus on the economy but when they are seen both in terms of the climate, the situation around the world, we are seeing horrific floods in Colorado at the moment, the focus is coming back onto the environment, specifically on to climate change and as I said in my speech, we should have been acting much earlier but now is absolutely the time to act and make sure that climate change is at the centre of our decision making.

DM: But Ms Bennett, people are making sacrifices for the environment, are they not, when they see their energy bills going up in part because of the environmental agenda and people are very focused on the bottom line at the moment for obvious reasons. Is that something that the Greens are saying to them, well if you do have to take a small hit in living standards that is a price worth paying for the planet?

NB: No, what we are very much saying is the reason why people are finding their energy bills are so hard to pay is that wages are not keeping up with inflation and one of our big policies which we find is very popular is we want to make the minimum wage a living wage. If you earn full time you should earn enough money to live on and one of the problems is that we have very low pay, insecure jobs, zero hour contracts which we are absolutely opposed to and we have a government that is slashing at benefits which means the poorest in our society are struggling to basically get by and that’s a huge problem.

DM: But I’m thinking of your native Australia, we just saw the Labour party get thrown out of power there and wasn’t one of the reasons that they over-concentrated on the environment? People wanted more of a focus on those bread and butter economic issues.

NB: I think you’ll find the main reason why the Labour party got thrown out there was that they couldn’t quite decide who to have as leader and kept swapping around but it is interesting that Adam Bandt, the Green Party MP in Australia, kept his seat and the Greens did very well in the Senate vote which is of course a PR vote, proportional representation vote, like we’re seeing in Britain next year in the European elections. We have got a recent poll out that puts us on 12% for those European elections next year and that’s a situation that would see us trebling our number of MEPs in Brussels which would be a sign of how much our agenda is going forward.

DM: Why are you so dead set against fracking, when we’re talking about energy bills? There may be, and it’s a big if of course, there may be huge supplies of cheaper energy under the soils and rock of the United Kingdom but you are four square set against it. Don’t you think we should at least explore the options?

NB: I think first of all I need to tackle that cheaper claim. It’s interesting that David Cameron has made that claim but the Department for Energy and Climate Change is resolutely refusing to back him and a whole lot of economists like Lord Stern have said we are part of the global gas market. Certainly America has fracked and got cheaper gas but they are not connected to the global market, we are. Any gas that would be fracked in Britain would be at the global price and the International Energy Agency is predicting that price will rise by 40% by 2020. So what we’d be looking at if we go the gas route is a very expensive and volatile energy price future.

DM: And how strongly do you feel about this? We saw your friend and colleague, the MP Caroline Lucas, get arrested at a fracking protest, are you going to be chaining yourself to the bulldozers or whatever it is, the drilling rig, any time soon?

NB: I think the Green Party conference yesterday unanimously passed a resolution expressing our very strong opposition to fracking. The other much broader point about fracking is that the Carbon Tracker, a very respected NGO, has done the figures and said that we have to leave more than half of our fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we are going to avoid catastrophic climate change and that means we shouldn’t be going out looking for more fossil fuel reserves, we need to be working out, dealing with the carbon bubble that we need to deal with and how we’re going to deal with that great economic challenge.

DM: I get the theory but my previous question was a roundabout way of asking are you going to encourage your members to engage in direct action?

NB: Well we believe in non-violent direct action and sometimes that’s necessary to get the message across in terms of when the government isn’t listening and it’s interesting, I was down visiting the Balcombe camp and there were quite a number of local Tory party members who were actually supporting that camp, supporting the protest because the people of Balcombe really do feel that they are not being listened to by the government. They have exhausted all the channels of petitions and writing to their MP and writing to other MPs and writing to the Lords etc and non-violent direct action, sometimes people find it’s necessary to get listened to and, as we saw with the coverage, it does get listened to.

DM: Okay, well great to talk to you again and thank you very much indeed, Natalie Bennett there, leader of the Green party at their conference in Brighton.