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ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO STAND UP AND BE COUNTED, SKY NEWS

FAISAL ISLAM: This is Sky News, live from central London with an unprecedented day of programming.  Over the course of the day we’ll hear from Labour leader, Ed Miliband, the Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg and the leader of the Green party, Natalie Bennett. They’ll be answering questions put to them from a live audience of young people.  We’ll be live on Sky News, on social media, online and on mobile.  I’m Faisal Islam and this is Stand Up and Be Counted: Ask the Leaders.  And our first guest is Natalie Bennett from the Green Party, welcome Natalie, thank you very much.
NATALIE BENNETT: Great to be here.
FI: Okay, thanks for coming Natalie and let’s get to our first question which comes from Sam Duffy, Sam.
SAM DUFFY: How do you think abolishing the monarchy which brings so much to the UK in terms of tourism which is also an historic part of British history and identity will benefit the nation?
NATALIE BENNETT: Well thanks very much for that question and I want to sort of clarify something that was being reported widely around on the papers.  I was talking about, people were asking if we didn’t have the monarchy where would the Queen live and I wanted to make what was a very serious and important point with that which is I don't think anybody, anyone in Britain at all, should fear being homeless but in terms of Green Party policy on the constitution, the fact is we’ve got just over there in Westminster an institution of Parliament that hasn’t been reformed in nearly a hundred years.  The last big change was women getting the vote and we’re nearly coming up to a century of that so what the Green Party believes is that we need to start again, what we’re actually calling for is a People’s Constitutional Convention.  There could be some people in this room who could actually be members of a Constitutional Convention, starting with a blank sheet of paper, saying how we want to govern ourselves for the 21st century.  Now in the Green Party we’ve got lots of ideas about what that should look like, we certainly don’t believe there should be an elected House of Lords, we certainly think that we need proportional representation in our elections and we don’t think that the hereditary principle should have any place in our government but what we’re saying is, rather than us saying what should happen, we’re saying that the people should decide.
FI: Sam, does that answer your question?
SAM: Yes, I suppose so, it does but I’m still not quite sure would you keep the monarch, the Queen, right now?
NATALIE BENNETT: What we’re saying is we would give it, we are calling for a People’s Constitutional Convention, start from scratch, say we think we need a new constitutional settlement for Britain, all the issues we’ve seen around Scottish devolution, there’s been lots of change but Westminster hasn’t moved, our whole main structures haven’t moved.  Let’s start again, ask the people and say what should it look like?  So we have views but we are saying that the people should decide.
FI: Okay, well let’s move on to the next question, it’s Adam Ward.  Adam.
ADAM WARD: Hi, and so in the first past the post electoral system there are many marginal seats where your party is unlikely to win and I’d be interested to know in those seats which party do you advise your supporters to vote for?
NATALIE BENNETT: I would say vote Green, we are going to be standing in as many seat … yes, you’re probably not very surprised by that, I can understand that!  But the thing is we’ve been in Britain trained by the first past the post electoral system to actually vote very often for the personal party we dislike the second most to stop the people we really hate getting in and that has actually given us the kind of politics that we have now.  What we’ve done is people, we’ve seen particularly the two largest parties focus all of their policies on the swing voters in the swing seats.  They’ve ignored their core vote, they’ve ignored the whole issue of what’s best for the country but thought what do we say to get those swing voters?  If voters keep voting the same way you’ll keep getting the same kind of politics so what we really need to do is actually, what I would urge everyone to do and obviously I’d like you to vote Green, but what I’d like you to do is vote for the person, party or policies in your constituency who best represents your views, those policies that really feel like that’s the person who I’d like to represent me.  And if we do that, and there’s a real possibility that what we could see in this election, the Scots showed us the way in the referendum, an 85% turnout, young people voting in almost the same proportion as the over 60s when usually we see 60, 65% turnout and young people in much lower proportions.  If people did that, went out and voted, voted for what they believe in whatever that is, we could actually have a peaceful political revolution so it is actually in all of your hands as voters to deliver that.
FI: Is that question answered?  Are you thinking of tactical voting?
ADAM: Well I’m doing a blog following 50 marginal constituencies across the country and I hope we’re not ignoring anyone but I was just interested because we meet a lot of candidates, particularly like Green ones, in seats where they may be unlikely to win and I was interested to hear your thoughts on what they should vote for?
NATALIE BENNETT: Well the take home message that I want to get in now because it’s so important is for everybody but particularly young people to make sure that they are registered to vote.  The system has changed and particularly people at universities who used to be registered automatically aren’t being registered anymore.  You just need to Google ‘Register to Vote’, you’ll find it there, there is a bit of barrier in that if you register online you need your National Insurance number but you can get that from the Student Loan Company if you’re at university but please do register to vote and have your say.  One of the things I say is I’d like you to vote Green, I’d like you to vote for someone you believe in but if there is no one on the ballot paper who you think represents your views, still go to the polling station and if you want to, write a rude word on the ballot paper because if you don’t vote, if you just don’t turn up, you don’t register, you’re counted with the ‘I’m happy enough with how things are’ part of the group and I don't think most people actually are.
FI: I’m tempted to ask which rude word that is but let’s move on to the next question.
NATALIE BENNETT: We’ll allow for choice!
FI: I’m not allowed to ask any questions but anyway, let’s move on to a question from social media which has come in.  So this has come from Discorus Bolt, ‘How can you consider making membership of AQ, Al Qaeda and IS, so-called Islamic State, legal?’
NATALIE BENNETT: Well thank you to this Twitter user for giving me the chance to clarify this. Obviously IS and Al Qaeda are hideous terrorist organisations which advocate and support violence.  If you are involved in them, support them in any way, then you are participating in inciting violence, that’s a crime – rightly, entirely rightly and should be pursued to the full extent of the law.  
FI: Okay, anyone want to follow up on that from the floor?  No, okay, so we’ll move on the Molly Malone.  Molly.
MOLLY MALONE: Hi, with respect to the fact that we’re all growing up in a competitive job market, to what extent do you think that unpaid internships are justifiable?
NATALIE BENNETT: I think that unpaid internships are absolutely unjustifiable and the Green Party calls for them to be banned.  What we have actually seen is a situation of what used to be first jobs, the job you’d expect to go into and be paid a reasonable salary for after you left university or after you left school or college, that’s now become an unpaid internship and that is both deeply unfair in terms of, and you find this particularly in jobs that are particularly sought after, I used to be a journalist, I used to editor of the Guardian Weekly and I’d get people ringing me up begging to come and work for me for nothing and that’s just not right and the only people who can afford to do that are those who have some sort of financial support behind them so it just perpetuates inequality in our society.  I think what we’ve got to do is draw a real line between volunteering, we all know what a volunteering role and an unpaid internship looks like – sometimes it’s hard to draw a line but if you are going to walk the dogs down at the local dog’s home on a Sunday that’s volunteering, absolutely fine, brilliant, I want to encourage it everywhere but if you are working for six months for a multi-national company, have to go in at certain hours, expect to not be paid anything but you’re doing a heap of work, that is unfair and unreasonable and simply shouldn’t happen.
FI: How does that sound to you, Molly?
MOLLY: Yes but with the state of the job market at the moment, how easy do you think it would be to ban them completely?
NATALIE BENNETT: I think what we have to do is simply say we want to enforce, at the moment we have a minimum wage which is not enforced.  If you have effectively a contract with a company that says you are going to turn up nine to five for six months, that’s a job and it should be covered under minimum wage legislation and you might know that we think the current minimum wage is really inadequate and we think the minimum wage should be a living wage as a basic standard.  So if you work full time you should earn enough money to live on.
FI: I am going to spread this out, I know you’ve all got strong opinions about this, internships, work experience, who wants to come in on this, whether internships should be banned?  The lady here.
WOMAN: I agree that unpaid internships should be banned and at least a minimum wage should be enforced. The other thing I wanted to say is that some people actually do end up doing unpaid internships because it’s a way to get a foot in the door, a way to get experience, a way to hopefully get a job which usually isn’t a guarantee so I think maybe what we should be looking at is the job market much wider for young people who are graduating and unable to get jobs and are then forced to go into internships, yes.
NATALIE BENNETT: Well I think that’s an important point.  I would in no way blame anyone who takes one of these because you’re doing what you have to do, the problem is the companies and organisations that are making this happen.  I was talking about the minimum wage being a living wage but we also need to go much broader than that.  I talk about jobs that you can build a life on and that means not zero hours contracts, not being forced to work part time when you want to work full time and it needs some sense of security and some sense that you might be able to progress because one of the other problems that we haven’t generally as a society talked about much is the fact that the minimum wage has all too often become pretty well where most of the wages are at.  You get whole organisations where lots of people are on, you know, the supervisor is on 50p an hour more than everyone else who is on the minimum wage and people can’t build a life, can’t build a career on that.
FI: So just the reason why we’re having this type of debate, an issue that’s not in the political sphere generally but very keenly felt by young people, so the fourth question now, Joy and Lauren, I think Joy you’re going to ask the fourth question.
JOY: Yes, so my question to you is, do you think that politics should be taught in schools so that young people actually know what the point of voting is and maybe it would encourage them to vote more?  Do you think it is something that should be inbuilt in the education system?
NATALIE BENNETT: I think very much so.  I was actually down at Bournemouth University a few, a couple of years ago now and one of the undergraduates had done a study and quite a lot of people speaking to her said they didn’t vote because they really didn’t know what would happen when you went into the polling booth, you didn’t know what it would look like, there hadn’t been much rehearsal, much sense of knowing what you were going into and I think we need education about politics in schools but what we also need is actually democracy in schools.  We actually need school councils, school organisations that have some kind of real say and I’m not just talking about what colour the jumper is or something like that but to have a real say.  If you start from an early age at school, start voting, then you can move on from there but it also raises a much broader point about the whole education system.  At the moment what we’ve really got is an education system that is treating all of you, all the people younger than you, like they’re in a sausage machine, rammed through exam after exam after exam, in a very narrow range of subjects and things like cultural subjects aren’t being valued as they should be.  Also we are not getting what I call education for life, things like education about personal finance, about first aid, about sex and relationship education, about the whole sorts of things that actually make sure you can go out into the world ready to face whatever the world’s going to throw at you.
FI: Lauren, I think you’ve got a follow up to that haven’t you?
LAUREN: As for going to a polling station and voting and for the ballot paper, for blind and partially sighted people it is quite difficult because we have to trust someone to go and write the cross on our paper.  What do you think you could do to make it more accessible for people like myself or Joy to actually go and be independent about our vote and not have to trust someone else to do it for us?
NATALIE BENNETT: I don't know about the exact technical arrangements but what we need is a principle that says that everyone is able to exercise their vote themselves and I actually, I think it was a council election down in Lewisham a couple of years ago, it was in a demountable cabin and there were steps up to it and there was no disabled access for wheelchairs and that’s just absolutely unacceptable and we have to be saying that democracy is for everyone, accessible to everybody.
FI: I think we’re going to go to Hope with the fifth question.
HOPE: What measures would you put in place to help solve the housing crisis our generation are facing with more and more young people moving back home even when there is the introduction of the housing schemes?
NATALIE BENNETT: Okay, I think this is the one issue that people come to me most often about and I know people involved with the Green Party who say I’ve got a job but I can still only get a shared room in London.  What we have to do, the sort of underlying principle is we have to get away from the idea of housing as a financial asset and get back to them being homes.  One of the keys to that is to build much more council housing, genuinely affordable housing and not so-called affordable housing in London which is 80% of market rents.  What we want to do also is put a cap on private rents, give tenants security of tenure which also means they can’t be thrown out in revenge evictions, so if they ask the landlord to fix the boiler and the landlord says oh go away, I’ll find someone who doesn’t care if they don’t have a working boiler.  And we also want to make sure we protect the council housing that we have now so that means ending right to buy.
FI: Is that convincing you, Hope?  It is. Well housing is a big issue and I’m going to spread this out, some of you must have some thoughts. This gentleman here.
MAN: Hi, I’m a graduate just out of university and I’ve literally had to move back home after going to university in the north of England.  The big problem I’ve had is I’ve just got a job in a city near to me which is about twenty miles away and I’m having to travel in every single day to get there.  My job doesn’t pay enough to get me a house there, I can’t look at renting because I have already money to pay off so I’m in this perpetual loop and I’m also a computer science graduate  and there’s the problem with that in that I live in the middle of nowhere and I can’t move to any of the bigger cities to get a job in the field that I’m actually qualified in.  How would you see helping with that?
FI: Okay, there’s a whole lot in there.  Low wages, housing costs to some extent I’ve already covered so I think one thing that I’d like to focus on there is transport and the cost of transport.  We have some of the most expensive train fares in Western Europe.  We have a system where the railways are run for shareholders, not for passengers so one of the things with the Green Party, what we want to do is bring the railways back into public hands and Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, has a Bill before Parliament to do just that now and what we’ve also announced is funding that would see train and bus fares cut by 10% in the next parliament.  What we’re going to do is take the money that the government is planning to spend on building new roads and we actually know that a lot of these were schemes that were abandoned decades ago and they simple generate new traffic or move traffic jams around, so instead of building new roads we put the money into public transport.  One of the big things I find going up and down the country that people talk to me about again and again is local buses and we’ve seen local bus services just absolutely slashed and the funding for those disappear.  I quite often go into towns and cities and people say to me, during the day they meet me and say I’d love to come to your public meeting in the evening but the last bus is at 5.30 to my village.  
MAN: It is physically impossible for me to get down there in one day from where I live, I had to take a train down the day beforehand in order to do that so that’s an issue that is quite close to me as well.
NATALIE BENNETT:  Yes and I think two thirds of job seekers don’t have access to a car and some of them can’t even physically get to job interviews.
FI: Do people feel that?  Not having cars, is transport an issue?  So transport doesn’t rate as a very high issue nationally but it does for you.  Anything more on housing, house building?  Yes.
MAN: There’s about a million derelict houses in the UK and there has been programmes recently to fix up the houses with unemployed people, what would the Green Party do to use these houses in a more efficient way than to just leave them derelict?
NATALIE BENNETT: That’s something that we will actually be making an announcement on soon in terms of the details of how we want to do that but I think that one of the things that it’s really worth focusing on is where a lot of those homes are and a lot of them are in the north and some parts of the Midlands.  The situation is because of our imbalanced regional development, money, resources, people have all be focused on London and so consequently what we’ve seen is those good houses – I walk down streets on the Wirral with perfectly good houses boarded up and so one of the things we need to do is to rebalance regional development so people can actually live and have jobs, like you, if you had a job near your home or even were able to work from home, we need the infrastructure for that.  One of the things that we’re opposed to is the proposed HS2, the proposed high speed railway because we think that will actually focus money and resources and people even more on London when what we need to do is invest in infrastructure and transport across the regions, across the north, the sort of bus services I was talking about, all kinds of different investment.
FI: Do chip in if you disagree with any of that, now’s your chance or forever hold your silence.  Yes, go on.
MAN: Just on High Speed 2, do you not think in getting rid of High Speed 2 you are actually neglecting the regions that are distant away from London, that won’t grow because you don’t have a fast connection there?
NATALIE BENNETT: Well I think the thing is what we need to do is develop strong regional economies, a situation where money goes round and round in local economies, where if you are a business person and you need a new service you don’t whiz down to London and talk to someone in one of the offices somewhere round here but maybe it’s easier, you can perhaps cross the Pennines and go to someone in a city or town actually much closer, get the service there and that gives you the job closer to home potentially, creates a more balanced economy.
MAN: But doesn’t that work vice versa for people going from London out to a different place to get a service there and then coming back, do you not think it works like that as well?
NATALIE BENNETT: I saw some figures from HS2 saying 72% of the journeys would be people coming in to London, that’s their own figures and I think what we’ve got is a very powerful pull effect from London and we really need to work to balance that out and that means getting investment in east-west rail lines, local buses, local trains and also make sure we get a more balanced economy, get away from the focus on finance and services.  We really need to get back to making more things, to growing more of our own food, to having an economy that creates all kinds of different jobs built around particularly small businesses, co-operatives rather than necessarily big business, multi nationals.  
FI: Thank you Ms Bennett, let’s change the subject.  Joshua, I think you’ve got a question.  
JOSHUA: Hi, I come from an area in London with a large Jewish population and as I’m sure you’ll be aware there has been a rise in anti-Semitism lately so what I wanted to ask is, bearing in mind people like Maureen Lipman recently saying she would consider leaving Europe due to the rise in anti-Semitism and the news of an exodus of Jews from Europe after the Paris attacks for example, what would you do as leader to ensure that Jews feel safe and welcomed in the UK?
NATALIE BENNETT:  I think that what we have, particularly after the Paris attacks and that horror, is a real sense of fear in many different communities and I think what we need to do is lots of work to bring communities together, to help them to understand each other, to speak together, communities across inter-generational work, all of those kind of things.  We have to actually make sure that people feel included and not pushed out and that people feel safe and there is a balance to be struck but we need to do both of those things.  What we really need to do is really understanding.  
JOSHUA: I appreciate the sentiment of that and I agree with the idea of that but what would you actually do to make sure that happens but, and I mean this in the politest way possible, it’s quite a vague answer.
NATALIE BENNETT: Well what we need to do is to fund those kind of projects, get people together.  It’s a broad thing but we need to make sure people don’t feel excluded from our society and we’ve got to balance obviously basic safety kind of precautions but we also need to make sure people feel included, educated, supported and that’s really the key.
FI: Does anyone else want to come in on issues of race and religious tolerance?
WOMAN: Hi, I’ve been in Wales for the past week working with an organisation called Women Making a Difference and a lot of women that I spoke to mentioned that the United Kingdom flag doesn’t represent any part of Wales but it does Ireland, it does a bit of Scotland.  Would you, if you became leader, would you also look at making sure that the whole of the UK feel part of the UK?  Because as you say, it’s very focused on not just London but just …
NATALIE BENNETT: I think what you’re raising is an issue much broader than the flag and I was actually up in Carlisle when there was lot of talks about the English parliament and English votes for English laws.  People in Carlisle were saying to me, but Glasgow is closer to us than Westminster is and Westminster feels very different, very far away, very distant and doesn’t really understand us so I think what we need to do and the sort of underlying principle of Green political philosophy is localism, is decisions being made locally and that starts at level even below Wales, it’s the local community level, even local parish level and at the moment we have a system where power is concentrated at the centre, at Westminster, and it allows sometimes some power to trickle down and also of course the money is concentrated there and sometimes the money does or doesn’t, we’ve seen it increasingly cut off, trickle down.  We think, I talked before about the People’s Constitutional Convention, one of the other things we’d be saying to that would be that power has to rest locally, the money and resources have to rest locally and that starts at a very local level and only gets referred up when it needs to be.
FI: Okay, we’re going to move on to Hernanda’s question.
HERNANDA: Hello, I’ve been through my experiences as a young person growing up, I’ve come across a lot of young people and a lot of politicians who focus a lot on issues and my main point is that young people want to feel inspired, we want to feel like our leader not only has a vision that lasts four years but a vision that lasts long term, someone that’s able to move us and someone that’s able to shake us.  For example me personally, I’ve been inspired by youth workers and young people that go to Youth Councils such as Wolverhampton Youth Council, twice a week, no pay, who actually go to represent their fellow citizens and I wanted to know what moves you, what inspires you as a person?
NATALIE BENNETT: I think I’m going to go back to the very start of my politics which I became a feminist at age five.  I didn’t actually know the word then but at age five I was told because you’re a girl, you’re not allowed to have a bicycle and at the time I thought, that’s not fair or reasonable, why should because I’m a girl stop me doing that?  That sense of fairness and a sense that so many people are stopped from realising their potential, doing what they want to do because of unfair rules, society putting restrictions on them, that to me is what drives me in the sense that I want everyone to have a chance for a decent quality of life.  Nobody, if you are thinking about next week I might have to go to the food bank or next week I can’t pay the rent, you can’t live your life to the full, you can’t go out and do things with energy and enthusiasm if that worry is there in your head so we need to give everyone a sense of security and stability so that they can then go and do whatever they want with their life and not put barriers in their way because of some kind of artificial restriction and I do now get round London by bicycle!
FI: A follow up on a personal question to Natalie, just behind, if you want to come to the front.
WOMAN: So you’ve spoken about sexism so I was just wondering what you would do if elected to encourage young girls and women to want to be politicians because there is a large under representation of women in parliament?
NATALIE BENNETT: Very much so, it is an absolute disgrace that only 23% of MPs are female and in the Green Party we are aiming to have 50% of our candidates being female.  I don't think we are quite going to get there but we’re aiming and if any of you are interested there are still slots available.  But what we need to do is also change politics because if you look at Prime Minister’s Questions and that argy-bargy yelling across the chamber, making all kind of noises, chicken noises, I don't think that’s … that’s the kind of quality of debate that most people 10 year olds in the playground would be a bit embarrassed by.  So we really need to try and make politics about issues, about ideas, about the inspiration that you were talking about and not about trying to score some points off the other person in a narrow kind of way that is not about the  issue but just because oh I got a joke in and my joke was better than his joke.
FI: Thanks for that.  Tim Jones.
TIM JONES: This question follows on from that quite nicely. Because there are 650 MPs as far as my research goes, 27 of them I think are from ethnic minorities, just over a hundred I think are women, how are we ever going to achieve true representation unless we make voting compulsory?
NATALIE BENNETT: Compulsory voting, I think the problem is that turns the problem round the wrong way.  It suggests that voters are the problem and I think actually politics is the problem so it’s up to the politicians to make politics as exciting and involving and make it feel like it’s worth voting rather than just making people trudge down and go, yes, I’ve done that, right, I’m not going to get fined.  The pressure, the focus should be on the politicians and not the voters.
FI: Let’s move on to a question from social media, from Sally Roberts, how do you plan to control immigration and those who claim benefits for children who do not live in the UK?
NATALIE BENNETT: Okay, well to start off with I really want to lay it very clearly on the table that I think we’ve seen a hideous damaging divisive debate on immigration and we need to stop blaming immigrants for a whole range …[applause] … and the thing is we’re standing now in the Holborn and St Pancras, the seat that I’m standing in and when I knock on doors around here a lot of people say to me oh I’m concerned about immigration and I say what do you really mean by that?  What they usually say is one of three things: I‘m concerned about low wages, I’m concerned about housing and all the issues we’ve been talking about and I’m concerned about crowded schools and hospitals. The thing is, all of those things are actually caused not by immigrants but by failures of government policy.  We have a low wage economy because we have a minimum wage that’s too low and inadequately enforced, we have housing problems for all the reasons I’ve talked about, we have crowded schools and hospitals partly because of a failure to invest in terms of the NHS because we’ve got the disastrous privatisation that’s expensive and reorganisations that have taken up huge amounts of resources.  And then we’ve got schools which I’ll really say just Michael Gove.  
FI: Well I think that’s all we’ve got time for with Natalie Bennett right now.  We’ve heard about a lot, we’ve heard about rude words on ballots, we’ve heard about banning internships, we’ve heard about five year old feminism or feminism for a five year old I think probably but thank you for addressing the questions from this audience.  Later we’ll be joined by the other political leaders including the Labour party and the Lib Dems.  If you still have questions for Ms Bennett, she’ll be answering those in a live Facebook Q&A as soon as she comes off set and you can join the debate on social media, just use the hashtag #asktheleaders, that’s all for now.
NATALIE BENNETT: Thank you.