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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, the Green Party had a strong start to the year, they were touted as an insurgent socialist force, some even called them the UKIP of the left but following Natalie Bennett’s famous brain fade, heavy criticism of some of their policies, has the wind gone out of the Green Party sails?  Well I am joined now by the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, Natalie Bennett and a very good morning to you.  Let’s stay with that wind analogy, has the turbine stopped turning for the Green Party?

NATALIE BENNETT:  Well not to take this metaphor too far, I was in Bristol West yesterday and we had just had an excellent poll courtesy of Lord Ashcroft where we’ve got more than 100 activists gathered with great enthusiasm ready to go on the streets, so very much not so.  Bristol West is looking great, we’ve got a very strong campaign in Norwich South, Sheffield Central and of course we are very much focusing also on Brighton Pavilion where we are looking to re-elect Caroline Lucas.  

DM: We know our system, we’ve talked about it an awful lot, it’s first past the post.  You may pile up a large number of votes but how many MPs would you be pleased to get?

NATALIE BENNETT:  Well I think this is the most unpredictable election since the Second World War, it’s not just me saying that, everybody is saying that and there is also, we’ve seen in the last week a focus on a lot of undecided voters out there.  I have a very simple message which is vote for what you believe in.  You are electing your local MP so look at the candidates, look at the parties, look at their policies and you can’t really gain this election so what you should do in this election is vote for what you believe in and every vote for the Greens is going to add power to a strong group of Green MPs in the parliament which, as you have been discussing this morning, could have a very influential place.  

DM: But the specific question, what is a good result for the Greens?  

NATALIE BENNETT:  As I said …

DM: Numbers.  

NATALIE BENNETT: Well because it is so unpredictable it is very hard to tell.  

DM: One is a start.  

NATALIE BENNETT: Well if you look at the situation of where we are already, in the last election in 2010 one in a hundred people voted Green, we are looking now towards at least one in twenty people voting Green.  That’s a huge change.  If you look at our membership, we have just passed 62,000 members, that makes us more than four times as big as we were a year ago, that makes us much bigger than the Lib Dems and UKIP.  This has been a huge election campaign for us, a huge advance and of course I was there in the Leader debates presenting the Green case on an almost level playing field.  That’s very new territory, very exciting territory.

DM: As you described there, even one MP can make a difference but you have got to get that one or more as you hope MPs because there is an opportunity here, is there not, as you talked about, for this grand anti-austerity alliance to take place, you may be shut out of that.  

NATALIE BENNETT:  Well I think if you look at Bristol West for example, it is interesting just how fast things have changed.  Even a week ago I had a lot of political journalists scoffing at me going oh, look at what you got last time, three or four percent, you can’t possibly …

DM: I’m not scoffing, I’m just making the point about the polling.  

NATALIE BENNETT:  But the point is, Lord Ashcroft had a poll which put us on 25%, we’re up 21% in Bristol West and that’s still with a week to go, all to play for and the momentum very much running our way so there is still a lot of potential change in this election and a lot of people who are saying to me still, I really want to vote for you, I like your policies, I like your ideas, I love the living wage, I want to renationalise the railways but I’m still …

DM: And I want to free those rabbits.    

NATALIE BENNETT:  I can safely say that no voter has mentioned rabbits to me.  They have mentioned to me about a publicly owned and publicly run NHS, zero percent profit in the NHS, they have very much talked about the railways and a £10 an hour minimum wage by 2020.      

DM: What about this endorsement of your candidate, Caroline Lucas, by Russell Brand?  Are you pleased about that?  You have of course been interviewed by him haven’t you?  

NATALIE BENNETT:  Very much so and I think Caroline as an individual was an absolutely brilliant lone MP in the last parliament.  It is out there to the option of the voters to elect more Green MPs like her in the next parliament and that is something that I am confident whether it is Sheffield Central, whether it’s Bristol West or Norwich South or some place in the country that I’ve never visited and never heard of that just pops up there.  

DM: But just on Russell Brand, some people think, a lot of people think he talks ill-informed gobbledegook, do you think he makes a lot of sense?

NATALIE BENNETT:   I think what we need to do is make sure we are reaching out to all kinds of different people.  We have really got to up the election turnout, that’s a critically important thing, particularly among young people and I’ve been asked a lot in this election should we introduce compulsory voting and I don’t think so.  What we should be doing as politicians is inspiring particularly young people, non-voters right across the age spectrum.  We need to be inspiring exciting and we need to talk to a whole range of different people who those young people and other people listen to.   

DM: And the last question about the new Royal baby, the new as yet unnamed princess, you must have been delighted by that Natalie Bennett but you’d like to see her growing up in a caravan or a council house?

NATALIE BENNETT:   Well that’s a misquote of what I said.  In the Green party we feel that hereditary principle should have no place in our constitution.  We want to get an elected House of Lords as well as proportional representation in both the lower house and the upper house.  That kind of constitutional reform is what we are focused on.  In terms of the Royal Family, Sweden in 1975 kept the ceremonial aspects but removed the constitutional aspects, that’s the kind of angle we’d be looking at.

DM: And what about the financial aspects?   

NATALIE BENNETT:  I think we’d have to look at that at the time but the focus really on constitutional reform, first past the post is going to be the certain loser from this election.  We’re calling for a People’s Constitutional Convention, across the road in Westminster hasn’t been reformed significantly since women got the vote in 1918.  It’s past time that we really started again and redrew our constitution for the 21st century.  

DM: Natalie Bennett, thank you very much indeed, the Green leader there.