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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: First the local elections in England and Wales are a challenge for all the three main parties of course but they also provide an opportunity for smaller parties to get a hearing. Well the Green Party already have 138 council seats all told and they’ll be hoping to improve on that this week. I’m joined now by the leader of the Green Party, Natalie Bennett, a very good morning to you. What are your hopes for the local elections? Is it expressed in terms of numbers of seats?

NATALIE BENNETT: What we are hoping to significantly … we are confident that we will significant grow our number of seats but particularly we are looking at spreading much more broadly around the country so we are confident we are going to win our first seats in Cornwall, in Essex and in Surrey, we are confident of growing our numbers in Bristol, in the West Midlands which is an area where we have been doing particularly well, in Hereford, in Devon, in Suffolk. So around the country we are becoming much more of a national party, we have had traditional strongholds in places like Brighton where we run the council and Caroline Lucas is the Green MP but we’re spreading out much more from places like Oxford and Lancaster and Norwich where we’re very strong to much more across the country.

DM: But does that pose difficulties for you as the Green Party? You talk about becoming a national party, one thinks about a line from the centre if we look at other parties but if anything the Green Party is about localism, is about adapting to the circumstances that your candidates face.

NB: And that’s very much the case. Our candidates in Cornwall, our candidates in Essex are embedded very much in their local community. For example I was visiting Rochford in Essex, an area that has a lot of power cones, what many people would call mobile phones in parks, there are some very particular issues round there that the candidate, who is a district councillor, who is embedded in the community, is working on those issues so what we’re finding is that there are more places where they are stronger in parties working on local issues but we do have issues across the country. It is very clear that our current economic model is broken, we need to relocalise our economy, bring manufacturing and food production back to Britain and build our economy around small businesses, co-operatives, local shops and not around big multinational companies. And of course to reform our banks is a big issue so all of those things apply very much across the country.

DM: It all sounds great but that is swimming against a vast tide and a tide that has been flowing for decades, the tide of globalism. I mean is there an element of Luddism about the Green Party’s appeal?

NB: Very much not. When I say I want to bring food production back to Britain, it doesn’t mean I want to entirely rely on local food, I do personally like my coffee in the morning and we’re never going to grow our coffee here but Britain used to be famous for its apple orchards, its pear orchards, every town and city was surrounded by a ring of market gardens. Now those kind of things, we need jobs, we need manufacturing jobs, we need local shops, if you get one big supermarket that replaces a whole row of local shops what you end up doing is you lose jobs and your local economy suffers, your local accountant no longer has enough work so what we need to do is build an economy where you have jobs you can build a life on.

DM: But what about big companies? It’s interesting you raised that because we’ve just had Justin King from Sainsbury’s in here, what if that big company tries to source a vast amount of its food locally, is very careful about the food chain, looks after local providers and then crucially provides its goods at a very competitive cost to the consumer?

NB: I think the problem we have got to ask the question, is the rhetoric versus the action and also what kind of deal is that big company providing for the small producer? We’ve seen, there’s a lot of work, a push on at the moment to make sure that big companies pay their invoices on time. I used to work, when I was a teenager I worked for a small business and it was doing very well but nearly going broke every month because he supplied big suppliers who paid him on 120 day terms and every month they wanted more supplies and every month his overdraft got bigger. So if you have an economy built around a whole lot of small businesses all working together that’s much stronger. The other question that I’d like to ask Sainsbury’s is what conditions are they employing their workers under? Are they all paid a living wage, do they use zero hours contracts which are absolutely unconscionable and we believe should be banned. Zero hours contracts mean that workers don’t know at the start of the week whether they are going to get zero hours or forty hours or anything in between and you can’t build a life on that. You don’t know if you can pay your rent, pay your food bill, any of those things, simply the large companies are relying on those zero hours contracts, the casual work, the low pay and that’s simply not working for the British economy and for British society.

DM: It would be worthwhile having you two back together to debate that. The issue though of the elections, let me ask you this, it seems there is a tide – you talk about tides flowing – towards smaller parties but it’s UKIP, people are sick of the big parties, a protest vote or whatever you want to call it but they seem to be talking about UKIP. Why shouldn’t a party like yours be gaining from that kind of dissatisfaction?

NB: Well I think we are gaining very much so, as I say we’re confident of gaining in our number of seats and I think what we’re seeing in UKIP is a very populist right wing party with some rhetoric that very sadly, particularly anti-immigration rhetoric that the three largest parties are utterly failing to challenge and that’s really leaving them a very big space and I think that’s a pity. It would be really nice to see the Labour party coming out much more strongly against UKIP and some of the things that it says.

DM: What is your position on immigration? UKIP is saying a lot of things about Romanians and Bulgarians who will be free to come here from 2014, they are members of the European Union, is that something that we just have to say well that’s part of the price we pay for being in the EU?

NB: Well I don’t think that’s the price, that’s the fact that British people are free to move to Spain, to France, to Italy, wherever they might like and other members of the European Union come here, that’s not a price, that’s the way the European Union works and as I was saying on Question Time last week, if you go to an NHS hospital, go to a local school, there will be immigrants there working, providing essential services for our community and there is an absolute demonization of immigrants. I think Mr Farage’s rhetoric about Romanians and Bulgarians is deeply disturbing and really needs to be challenged.

DM: Let me ask you about the economy because obviously when you look at people’s concerns about politics at the moment, a lot of it, most of it is about the inability it seems of any politicians at the moment to change things, to get us back to growth. Does the Green Party feel that growth has become something of an obsession, an obsession we have to wean ourselves away from in that basic mathematics tells you you can’t have continual growth forever?

NB: Well that of course is a fact but it is a much broader question than that because growth is usually measured by GDP and GDP as many people are well aware, if you have a big crash on the motorway that increases your GDP because you have smashed up a whole lot of cars, you have got to repair them, people buy new cars, you’ve got to repair the motorway. Another classic one, Caroline Lucas’s favourite is if a father goes out and buys his child Dunkin’ Donuts for diner that’s good for GDP, if he cooks a nice home cooked meal from vegetables from the back garden, that’s bad for GDP. So what we need to do instead of looking at that really quite nonsense GDP figure is ask ourselves what are the good things that we need to do? We need to insulate homes so that we can cut fuel poverty, provide jobs and cut carbon emissions; we need to improve public transport, we need to provide essential services, do things like keep libraries open and we need to stop doing things like Trident nuclear weapons, stop doing things like thinking about building new nuclear power plants and stop doing things like building zombie roads that are just going to move …

DM: And something I am asking all the politicians on the show today, do we have to keep giving money to countries overseas through the Department for International Development?

NB: Very much so. We are part of the global community, this is our world, it’s the one world that we have and there are a lot of people in this world who are suffering very badly and we need to improve their quality of life.

DM: Do you think we give enough, should we give more of a percentage of GDP?

NB: We should give more, we should give 1% and if we look at what happened, the very sad events in Bangladesh a couple of days ago, we also have to look at what impact our economic activities, that £5 t-shirt on the high street has been paid for with hundreds of people’s lives in Bangladesh and we really have to ask questions about that kind of economy.

DM: Okay, Natalie Bennett, thank you very much indeed, very good to see you.

NB: Thank you.

DM: Natalie Bennett of the Green Party there.