Webchat with Green Party leader, Natalie Bennett, Weds March 4th, at 1pm

[JustineMumsnet]

I'm very pleased to say that the leader of the Green Party England and Wales, Natalie Bennett, will be joining us for a webchat this Wednesday, March 4, at 1pm.

The Greens have been under the spotlight over the last few months, with a surge in membership, and controversy about whether they should be included in the pre-election TV debates.

Now's your chance to ask Natalie about leadership structures, the record of the Green council in Brighton and Hove and Brighton Pavilion MP Caroline Lucas, whether there's a long-term movement towards smaller parties in national politics, Green policies on housing, benefits, health, the economy and the environment - and what it's like to be at the eye of a media storm. Plus anything else that takes your fancy of course.

Natalie was born in Australia and worked as a journalist there and in Thailand before settling in the UK in 1999. She worked for The Guardian, among other UK newspapers, before becoming Green Party leader in 2012. She's standing for Parliament in the 2015 General Election in the constituency of Holborn and St Pancras.

PuffinsAreFictitious, nothing to do with being on the European mainland then? Last time I checked, we were still an island.

Thanks all - afraid I have to go now, but thanks for all of the questions and comments.

And a final thought: please make sure you and your friends and family can have your say on May 7, however you're planning to vote! www.gov.uk/register-to-vote

Regards,
Natalie

Thank you Natalie - great webchat.

And MNHQ!

Thank you Natalie.

Hi Isitmebut

It was sold very very cheaply, considering the national debt is now 1.4trillion and growing! Why is George Osborne selling the Eurostar for only 757million - it's just a drop in the ocean! What is going to be next 'up for the chop'?

Privatising other assets can do more harm than good when you considering the future. I do agree with Natalies point of view and i'm pleased I asked.

I thought NB did well there

The criminalisation/decriminalisation is all about non-ideal choices I think.

I’m pretty convinced that decriminalisation would make it safer for women who are already involved in sex work, particularly those who currently work on the streets. Surely they're less likely to get raped and beaten in fully legal socially acceptable brothels. I completely get this argument and think it's fair enough.

But what decriminalisation ALSO does is:

1. set a societal norm that it's AOK to fuck people who, at a very basic level, have no wish to fuck you. This is immensely problematic when so many men already don't understand (or choose to ignore) the basic principle of consent.

2. set a societal norm that women's bodies exist to be used sexually by men, and that so long as money changes hands this is also AOK. Women are orifices to be ejaculated into and their humanity is irrelevant

3. make sex work a socially mandated career choice that will inevitably be most attractive to the most vulnerable, most abused, most fucked-up and most addicted very young girls and women - and then leave them at the mercy of 'punters', who are surely one of the most troubling, abusive groups in any society

4. give a broad social mandate/approval to skeevy dickhead men who get off on pimping out vulnerable women and making money from the process

So do we better protect women who are on the streets NOW, or do we work towards much more comprehensive protection of endless generations of women to come? Because you can't do both.

Sex work is not like any other profession or job. It requires huge physical vulnerability and trust, and the correlation between 'men who hate women' and 'men who like paying to fuck women' is immense. Do we want to give a broad societal mandate to that?

How would you go about dismantling the 'cosy relationship' with the USA. With another of the Bush dynasty looking to come to power over there I foresee more trouble in the future.
Thank you.

Some good points there Soccer which add to the strength of the Nordic model I would think? I'm sure Green Party could re-visit this in future? Possibly Natalie gave tiny hint towards not everyone shares the same view on this within Greens, or indeed generally

Thanks for the links Gibbering - very useful explanation.

I've only seen two web chats, this one and the previous one. Natalie Bennett was so MUCH better at answering the questions. Thanks!

doh! i should have paid attention instead of making more cakes.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but countries such as Germany and Denmark with legalised prostitution have higher rates of trafficking and of prostitutes being murdered. Is not concerning enough to put the breaks on legalisation?

www.spiegel.de/international/germany/human-trafficking-persists-despite-legality-of-prostitution-in-germany-a-902533.html

Didn't want to derail too much, but Natalie Bennett couldn't go into detail on everything, glad it was useful...
Another thing about the Royal Mail sell-off is that it only got pushed once the government had taken liability for historic pensions. Soooo... doesn't that mean, as with all privatizations, that we gave the money-making arm to the private sector but kept its debts in the public domain? Par for the course with privatization: no wonder the public purse is introuble while the rich get richer and richer.

PandOraslunchbOx ..... the size of the National Debt is all about a UK annual overspend (budget deficit) that was £157 billion in 2010 and around £90 billion now, selling state assets (especially insolvent ones like the Royal mail whose pension shortfall was only going to get larger) has never been flagged by the coalition as THE way to reduce the national debt still growing.

If that was anyones concern, they should have suggested the coalition cut £157 billion from the budget, from Day 1 after the General Election, which few people wanted.

Do governments want to spend all their time 'getting around tables' with trade union officials until the unions get what they want no matter HOW the business is doing in non core government services like education and the NHS, and taxpayers foot the bill when they then go boobs up?

Similar with RBS and Lloyds, surely the Co-op has told us we don't want to own banks, will you shed a tear when they go as well?

My problem with a State Sale was this one, having said we needed a 'push for nuclear' in 2004 as our energy 'balance' in nuclear was far lower than other main European countries - leading to potential power outages from the next severe winter on - we SOLD our only expertise and gave the contract to the French State (who owns EDF). Idiots.
news.sky.com/story/405200/bnfl-sells-westinghouse-to-toshiba

The trouble is, the Uk current account is very much in arrears, (something that's increased under Osbourne) so the only way the books can be balanced is by sell-offs. Eurostar, woodlands, the current attempt to get rid of hundred-year-old woodlands for a few extra thousand (thousand, when a 1% tax on wealthy could raise billions). We're in deep trouble.

GibberingFlapdoodle .... the government took the liability of those workers pensions, but if the deficit was £10 billion, what was the size of the paid up fund the government took over?

Governments cannot run companies, other wise we would not have bought an RBS Investment Bank, with an investment bank share price premium, and then decide we want to turn it into a far less profitable High Street bank, immediately destroying shareholder value - as one recent example.

We nationalised Steel, how did that work out?

We could have nationalized every coal mine and subsidize it as cheaper coal came in from Poland, but AGAIN who foots the bill?

When the IMF came in to the UK to financially bail us out in 1976, I'd suggest a big reason for that was 'nationalised' industries.

Gibbering ... is that the Current Account due to trade, where the EU is our largest export market STILL in the pooh house with twice our unemployment rate and a Conservative Party that handed over a manufacturing industry that formed 23% of our economy in 1997, GOT BACK manufacturing at 12% of our economy, with 1 million manufacturing jobs lost by 2005, 2-years before the financial crash began ???

I'd suggest the reason IMF stepped in 1976 was the oil shocks. 'Governments cannot run companies' - odd we did it for years. As did all the British councils. Also oddly we did it through the best economic years Britain has ever known, post-war to beginning of 70's. All we've had since the neoliberals took over is more and more financial instability, culminating in 2008, and it isn't over yet.

I admit economics is not my strongest point but things are not good as they are with the current neoliberalist strategy, their emphasis on London cut-and-sliced financial fictions and no actual real creations, their belief in makng the poor pay for the country and letting the rich exploit everyone. Trickle down does not work. Redistribution does and did. Is it not time for a complete re-think?

I strongly suspect that the EU is having problems, with the same neoliberalist model, honestly - they acknowledge them. Though the current accounts of other north european countries were a lot healthier than ours when I looked. There are issues with some dragging others down, but north europe still manufactures real things. Britain is trying to cover our bigger problems over, paper the cracks. I don't think it will work for much longer.

We are still exporting less than we are importing, that's what current account means, yes. The British unemployment figures are as fictional as Londn's financial creations. IMO.

Gibbering ... re your 1% of tax on the rich, is that on TOP of what has already been done, and why would that 1% do, that Labour's 10% raise in their last month in power did not do, having raised the top rate of income tax to 50% and raised less money?

Feb 2015: ”Britain's highest earners pay a quarter of nation's income tax”

“New figures published by HMRC show that the proportion of the nation's tax bill paid by the richest has risen under the Coalition”

www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/tax/11411790/Britains-highest-earners-pay-a-quarter-of-nations-income-tax.html

“Britain's highest earners pay more than a quarter of the country’s entire income tax bill, more than when the Coalition came to power.”

“Nearly 300,000 taxpayers are forecast to contribute the equivalent of £45.9? billion in income tax between them by the end of this year, equivalent to £150,000 each. The amount they have paid has risen from 25 per cent of the nation’s tax bill when Labour came to power to 27.3 per cent this year.”

“They also suggest that the Coalition’s decision to cut the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p has increased revenues.”

“When George Osborne announced that he was cutting the top rate in 2012, Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, described it as a “tax cut for millionaires”.”

Coal, yes it was and is time for coal to go. Imagine if the government had taken the initiative then and started to move towards a green energy base. We'd have a few more options now.

GibberingFlapdoodle .... France and Italy knowing they have to make labour reforms 'neoliberal', the latter in their 3rd recession since 2007, p-lease, France is similar to the 1970's you leave out of your post, when manufacturing fell from around 29% of our economy to around 23% when there was sod all else around.

France in 2010 had a fat State, tried penal taxes to the wealthy and they sodded off, now having to lower them having growth flatlined and still have near record unemployment of over 11% vs our 5.6%.

Gibbering ..... in socialist France, what was their nuclear power percentage back in the good old 1970's, close to 90%, now close to 60-65%, giving THEM Green options as our lights could still go out - and buying more expensive energy with a huge budget deficit and 'the people' wanting cheaper energy, led by the last Labour Energy Minister (Mr Miliband) leaving England in such an energy state?

To our claimed 5.6%.

There is a problem with high earners squirreling their wealth overseas. Europe as a whole needs to stamp down on this, it is slowly being acknowledged. The desperate attempts of the rich to evade taxes do not make the idea that the well-off should return some of the wealth they exploit from others. It just means we have to be better at catching them -or even better, flattening the wealth pyramid and letting them walk away with less compared to the rest of us in the first place. Income inequalit in the UK is horrendous.

On the question of the rich paying more taxes I note that they are paying a higher proportion. With the tax take as a whole down - incidentally, so employment is either not so high or not paying so well - proportions from high earners might well go up, especially if their wages are not falling in real terms to the extent that the normal persons are.

this seems to say that too.

I repeat economics isn't my strong point though. There are still mile-wide holes in the current model. It plain isn't working.

sorry, kids up. Signing off!