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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well we posed that question, do you have to be left to be Green?  The Green Party of England and Wales have their annual conference this week and are targeting disaffected Labour and Lib Dem voters, so is it a winning strategy?  Let’s talk to the leader of the Greens, Natalie Bennett, who joins me now from Birmingham and a very good morning to you.  I want to ask you that question, looking at your manifesto, the issues you are discussing there, do you not think that some Conservatives are there to be approached by the Green party?  Are some of them not environmentally aware?

NATALIE BENNETT: Oh very much so and the fact is that what we are attracting are voters from all round the political spectrum who understand that we need real change.   Our current economic, social and environmental arrangements cannot continue so what we need to do, the sort of proposals we are putting forward, is saying rich individuals and multinational companies have to pay their taxes and have to pay fair wages, workers have to be fairly rewarded, we have to give benefits, decent benefits, to everyone who needs them and we have to fit that all under the cap of our one planet because that’s the only planet we’ve got. 

DM: But are you still a Green party?  As I say, there are a raft of policies being discussed at the conference there, are you still the Green party where that is your lead issue or are you just a party of the left? 

NATALIE BENNETT: We’re a party of real change and environment and social justice issues have always been inextricably intertwined.  If you think about fracking for example, opposition to fracking was something I made a very big part of my speech, it’s been a very big part of Green party campaign and that is an issue – I spoke to a voter in Chester before the European election and she said she had voted Tory all her life but she was voting Green now because she understood that fracking was a real threat to her countryside, her way of life but fracking is also an issue in terms of the fact that it’s taking the government focus away from the renewable energy we need to invest in and the energy conservation.  People need warm comfortable homes that are affordable to heat and this government simply isn’t delivering that.

DM: You are very critical of Ed Miliband and Labour aren’t you, you do think that they have dropped the ball on a lot of issues – social inequality, civil liberties, justice, things like that, you believe there are Labour votes there for the Greens?

NATALIE BENNETT: Very much so, there are lots of Labour people who are very, very fed up with the fact that Ed Miliband, despite the fact that even a majority of Tory voters and a strong majority of British voters want to see the railways renationalised, now Caroline Lucas has a private member’s bill before Parliament to do just that, but Labour’s offering is to create a company, a publicly owned company, to bid into our failed, privatised, fragmented system.  The question I’ve got to ask is what happens if this company spends public money and loses the bid? 

DM: You’re going to be asking that question, aren’t you, you’re going to stand against the Labour candidate in St. Pancras in London?

NATALIE BENNETT: In the Holborn and St. Pancras seat which is where I live and where I stood in 2010, that’s right. 

DM: Do you think you’ve got a chance of winning?

NATALIE BENNETT: I think I’ve certainly got a better chance than the Lib Dem or Tory of winning the seat and I think Camden is a very special place, a very different place with a long radical history so it is very like Brighton Pavilion where we won our first MP Caroline Lucas in 2010 and holding on to Brighton Pavilion is of course going to be our first priority but around the country are lots of very different seats where we’ve got very strong opportunities – Bristol West where we’ve actually won more votes in the last two years of council elections in the seat of Bristol West than any other party, Norwich South where we’ve been strong for a very long time, here in the West Midlands, Solihull where we are now the official opposition on the council, Liverpool Riverside where we are also the official opposition on the council.   The Green party is growing up and down the country.  

DM: Do you think you can push the Lib Dems down in the pecking order? 

NATALIE BENNETT: Well I think we’ve beaten the Lib Dems in the last two major elections, we got more votes and three times as many as MEPs as them in the European Election, we got our first MEP in the south-west and we also finished ahead of them in both the Mayoral and London Assembly election votes, so the track record is there and we are currently polling around the same as them.  The Independent did a poll of polls and that put us on 6.6%, higher than we’ve ever been on general election before, so it is very clear that people are looking around for alternatives, recognising that the three business as usual parties just haven’t got any answers for the many problems that we face. 

DM: We are asking everyone today of course about the Scottish independence referendum and this poll that shows, one of the polls that shows the yes campaign slightly in the lead.  Of course the Greens, you are already separate parties aren’t you, you support Scottish independence strongly.  Why is that?  Why do you think we’re better apart when it comes to environmental policies?

NATALIE BENNETT: I think for Scotland, and I was actually up in Edinburgh speaking at a Green Yes meeting on Tuesday, very exciting, very strong turnout, a lot of enthusiasm in the room and the fact is that the Scots have a chance there, the Scots have never been sold on Thatcher ideology, the kind of political discussion that’s dominated our national political debate over the last three decades and so they have got a chance, if they choose to take their own destiny in their own hands, to build a different kind of society, a society that works for the common good.  I’m not going to tell the Scots how to vote, we believe in self-determination, it’s up to them to decide, but from the perspective of the rest of the UK it’s very exciting what an independent Scotland could become and also there is a very exciting possibility that it would open up the possibility for change.  Constitutionally speaking, the pressure for a written constitution for the rest of the UK would become much stronger and many of the really quirks, the undemocratic elements of our current constitution would really come under question.

DM: Of course an interesting dimension of that poll is that 16 and 17 year olds are getting the vote in that Scottish independence campaign, I wanted to ask you something relating to young people and one would have thought your party would have a great appeal for them.  We have got, I don't know if you were aware, a Stand Up and Be Counted campaign to get young people more engaged with politics and we have been doing some polling and our poll for that campaign on your party shows only 8% of people aged between 16 and 25 intend to vote Green. Do you think you’re failing there?

NATALIE BENNETT: I haven’t actually looked at the detail of that poll, I’ve looked at other polls which have put  us on as much as 18% in terms of votes for young people and I also know the fact that our Young Greens membership is up 70% in the past year, we have got double the number of Young Green groups we have had around the country than ever before and here at conference there is a great deal of youthful energy and enthusiasm and I’m told there were some really great parties last night!  

DM: Okay, I don't know if you were at any of them or not.  Natalie Bennett, very good to talk to you, thank you very much indeed, the Green party leader there in Birmingham.