Why did you choose to stand in Brighton?
Apart from the fact Brighton is such a brilliant and wonderful place to be, it’s also, by a lot of different estimates, the greenest city in the whole of Britain and that’s been measured on a whole range of different indicators, whether you’re measuring how often people use public transport or how much they are aware of environmental issues, so it seemed to be a really positive place to be standing, where we’ve got a real chance of getting the first Green MP elected. In 2005, the last general election, we got 22% here in Brighton, which was an amazing result. At the last European elections we got 27%. Independent pollsters are now saying that we have a really good chance of winning this seat. So, because it’s winnable, and because the population of Brighton seem to be a population that are very aware of the wider Green agenda, then that makes it a very exciting place to be.
We’ve got three targets, which is Brighton Pavilion, Norwich South and Lewisham, but of those three, if you actually look at the figures, then it’s clear that Brighton is well ahead. At the last local election, for example, we doubled the number of our local councillors. We got more votes in Brighton Pavilion than any of the other parties at all. We’re ahead of all the other parties, even under this very unfair system, so it really puts us in a great position, I think.
Why should the people of the Brighton Pavilion seat vote for you rather than the Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem candidates?
I think the opportunity to make history by electing the first Green MP is something that could really attract people to wanting to do it. In one sense, one more Labour MP, or one more Conservative, one more Lib Dem doesn’t really make any big difference to the overall outcome of the general election. I think people in Brighton Pavilion would recognise that by voting for the first Green MP, that puts Brighton on the map in a very positive way. Its also the case that Greens have an amazing track record of working with their constituents and delivering what we promise and I think that the kind of experience that I could bring to this role by the fact I’ve been a member of the European Parliament for ten years. None of the other candidates for Brighton Pavilion have ever been elected to a political post before, so that kind of experience is something that I would love to put at the service of people in Brighton and by looking at the different candidates, by voting Green they can vote for both the most experienced candidate, but also the candidate that will generally put social and environmental justice at the top of the agenda and I think from what I know about Brighton and the people that I’ve spoken to here, that’s something that they care very much about.
Should you become an MP, it is likely you will be the only Green MP in Westminster. What can just one person do against parties with 250 plus MPs?
Well hopefully it will only be a very short time until everybody else joins me. There are several ways of approaching that question. The first to say is that clearly one vote is very unlikely to swing majorities, but on the other hand to have somebody there, who is speaking out about the issues that really matter, and is seen perhaps as something of a whistleblower, acting as the parliament’s conscience. Being a representative actually there in the corridors of power representing all of those people who have probably felt disenfranchised for decades because they haven’t been able to get the kinds of people they want to see into Westminster. I think that’s something very positive that we can do. It could well be, as a lot of analysts are suggesting, that the next election gives a hung parliament, in which case that gives an awful lot more scope for even just one or two MPs to have a practical influence on policy. Ideally one would want that practical influence over policy, but even if we don’t have that because its not a hung parliament, there’s only one Green MP, I still think the fact that we will be in the corridors of power, being able to speak out very directly about what’s going on there, being able to push things further up the agenda, being able to speak out, the kind of platform that it would give you, would also be an incredibly exciting one.
You’ve served the South East of England as a Member of the European Parliament since 1999. What do you feel have been your major achievements in this role and are you proud of your time in the European Parliament?
As a member of the European Parliament, as a Green Party Member, you become part of a much bigger group, of 43 in the Green group and that’s allowed us to really punch above our weight in a sense, within the European Parliament. So looking at the Greens collectively in what we’ve achieved, there is a whole range of things where I think we can say, for example, because of the Greens, we’ve got much stronger Human Rights policies through the Parliament, its because of the Greens that LGBT issues have been much higher up the agenda and these have been linked to a lot of the asylum policies because the UK has a very draconian asylum policy, particularly when it comes to LGBT people. That’s something we’ve taken up in Europe and managed to get some better results, so we’ve got a track record on the ground already as a group of Greens is something that I share a pride in, as its not just one person. What do I feel that I’ve done personally? For example, last year I was judged by my fellow MEPs to have been the MEP who’d done the most on trade and development issues, so I was given the prize for trade and development and one of the things I have been able to do I think is to put a spotlight on what I regard to be the EU’s very unfair trade policies. I’ve been crossing swords with Peter Mandelson as the Trade Commissioner very regularly and a critique that I would have of his approach is very much that it’s all about trying to force open the markets of the poorest countries for the benefit of EU corporations and it’s not very much about development and it’s not very much about the people living in poverty, so I think there’s a strong track record I can point to with my committee work on trade. On animal welfare, I was one of the co-sponsors of a written declaration (like an early day motion) that was overwhelmingly adopted to try to ban the import of seal products into the EU, animal welfare is a big part of my work and many constituents had written to me explaining their horror about the way in which seals had been clubbed to death in Canada in particular, and so we’re very close now to getting that ban on the import of seal products. There are specific policy achievements that one can point to, but I think what I’m most proud of is being part of a group that has been able to push the parliament on a whole range of issues in a more progressive and ambitious way, whether we’re talking about the environment or human rights and civil liberties.
Many people see the Green Party as a single issue party, focusing on the environment. While the environment is obviously a critical issue, people have other worries too. How do you answer the charge that you are a single issue party?
The first thing I say to people is go back and look at our manifesto, right from the days when it was first launched in 1972-73. Right from the very start, we’ve had policies that focus on things right across the board, never just on the environment, because we recognise, much as we care about the environment, you cant actually deliver a safer, fairer environment unless you deal with the economy. We have very progressive policies on the economy, we don’t believe that you can just bolt on environmentalism to business as usual, you need a very different kind of economic system, so that’s always been part of our analysis and I think if you look at places where Greens have been elected, I was elected on Oxfordshire County Council back in the early nineties, I was elected for an area of Oxford that was very run down, it wasn’t your stereotypical leafy suburb that was well off enough to worry about the environment, I was elected to serve on behalf of a deprived area because people recognised that it was the Greens who were talking about getting small businesses back into the high street when so many shops had closed down. We were looking at more innovative ways of using tax rates for business to come back and regenerating areas from the bottom up. We had a much stronger sense of how to involve people in local development, so I think our track record speaks for its self whether we’re talking about education or health, for example, the Greens have been far more outspoken in terms of opposing the privatisation of public services than any other political party, definitely more so than Labour, although that’s not that difficult these days, but also more so than the Liberals. We’re very clear that public services should stay within public hands and that’s why we have very strong links with the unions over the privatisation of hospitals or being against the PFI systems. This idea that we’re just about the environment is a pretty much outdated and I think most people actually do recognise that our policies are much, much wider than that and when you have elected Greens in power, you can see that at first hand.
You have recently proposed the Green New Deal: Could you explain a bit about the benefits and how it would be paid for?
I was part of a small group of four or five people who back in the summer put together a report called the Green New Deal. Others included Tony Juniper, Director of Friends of the Earth and Larry Elliot, the Economics editor of the Guardian and what we were talking about back then was looking at the impending recession, also being very aware of the environmental crisis and thinking that there has to be a way of addressing these two things together in a way that would be positive for both. We were looking back at the New Deal that President Roosevelt introduced back in the thirties in the US, which was a way to get the US out of Recession and he did that by a whole process of building roads and bridges and all kinds of infrastructural development. So the idea of the Green New Deal is to update that kind of thinking, saying that today you don’t particularly need roads and bridges, but what we do need is a massive investment in renewable energies and energy efficiency, so lets make this New Deal a Green New Deal, lets use this as an opportunity, for example, to create hundreds and thousands of Green jobs. That’s the interface with the economic crisis, because right now people are losing their jobs left, right and centre, every time you open the newspaper, more and more people are in a very difficult state. The Green New Deal would basically be about using the economic crisis as a way of addressing these long standing environmental crises which are every bit as serious, in fact more serious than the economic crisis. In terms of how we pay for it… What the Green New Deal has been pressing for, for months, is a tax on the windfall profits of the energy companies. They have received enormous profits over the last few years, Shell and BP and all of those companies. It’s not just because of rising energy prices, but because of the EU’s emissions trading system, they were given permits as part of that trading system which they didn’t have to pay for. They were just given them and then in turn they could sell them and so forth, so they’ve had a windfall profit of billions, so we could look at measures like that. We’re also looking at measures though, which look at where is a safe place today to put pension funds. Many pension fund holders have been asking that question themselves after we discovered their pensions were off in Iceland. They had no idea they were there and certainly had control of them, so what we want to look at is things like local authority bonds. We had this idea that local pension funds would invest in local authority bonds run by the council and underwritten by national government, but as a way of investing in these kind of insulation projects and renewable energy projects, but doing that locally as well. Having projects to insulate all the homes and all the buildings in a particular locality. That way, you know your money’s safe, you may not be getting the incredibly high rates of return which you got in the good days in the past, but you certainly wouldn’t have the vulnerabilities of having to face the incredibly awful days we’ve had over the past few months or so. So we think there are a whole set of measures there that could really help to address the crisis. Part of the green new deal is again about reforming the financial structures, closing things like the tax havens which drain millions of pounds away from where they should be. Also thinking about, how big should banks be? Maybe moving away from this idea that banks are too big to fail and that has been proved in the last few months that even very big banks fail, but having maybe smaller banks so that if they do fail it doesn’t bring the whole system down. We want to have much stronger oversight and regulation of the financial sector as well.
Do you feel the government has been adequately dealing with the financial crisis?
No. I think their way of dealing with it has been incredibly shortsighted. They haven’t taken on board the ideas of the Green New Deal, moreover, they have assumed that a crisis that has primarily been caused by overconsumption and debt is going to be better resolved through more overconsumption and debt. An example is that VAT cut. The idea that that was the best thing to be doing is absolutely ludicrous. First of all, its not going to work. At a time when we’ve already got shops slashing their prices by 50% because they’re so desperate to shift things, the idea that this miniscule VAT change will suddenly make people spend was just misplaced, but also the idea that we just somehow spend our way out of a recession that has been caused by so much of the spending in the first place. What I would like to see is for the government to have stood back a little bit and asked some more fundamental questions about the direction of the economy and it could have been an opportunity to think about how we begin to shift our economy to something closer to a steady state economy, in other words we stop this idea that we constantly have to be growing the economy and making more and more products that in turn get more and more waste and more and more resource throughput and the idea that that can be multiplied throughout the world on a sustainable basis is cloud cuckoo land, it cant. We do need to shift our economies onto a more sustainable basis onto a steady state basis. This crisis that we’re living through is a wake-up call to say that the current way that we run our economy is not only deeply unfair to many millions of people, but it’s also deeply unsustainable and very vulnerable to shocks. Lets look at a way to shift that in a more sustainable way that would be both fairer and more sustainable and better for the environment as well.
You have spoken of abolishing Council Tax and replacing it with Land Value Tax, could you explain how this would work?
I think some of those might be alternatives rather than cumulative affects, but for example, we don’t think that the council tax is a fair tax, it’s a very regressive tax that hits those on fixed incomes like pensioners and it hits the lowest paid hardest. We want to reform it and ensure that those who can least afford it don’t bare the brunt of having to pay for public services. Land Value taxation, taxes those who are benefiting most from development and as you know, rather the based on the value of their home, Land Value Tax is based on the rental value of the land, so those who own property pay the most and most other people would pay less, and by calling time on discounts for empty properties would also encourage people to bring those properties back into use again, rather than letting them decay and speculating on the value of the land. We think that Land Value tax is more effective than council tax, as well as being fairer.
Following the collapse of Woolworths and the closure of the Co-op, London Road, the main thoroughfare of the Brighton Pavilion Constituency and formerly one of Brighton’s most economically important areas is becoming increasingly run-down. What do you propose to help restore this area to its former glories?
It’s interesting that there are already quite a lot of plans on the table which come from the corporate sector. Most of them seem to involve having a huge new Tesco store down there and I think we would be fairly critical of a model of regeneration which assumes that we have to have yet more huge supermarkets. We’ve already got a number of large supermarkets here in Brighton and some of the evidence is that while you might create some jobs through the new store, what you also do is end up closing down smaller stores as a result and people lose jobs there. I think we need to have a more integrated approach to regeneration in that area. I certainly agree that it needs it. I’ve been part of some of the London Road meetings, where people have been coming together from the community and talking about their vision for London Road, and their vision isn’t of a huge superstore, its of a vibrant living community, so for example, there’s a huge potential in making the open air market into something that’s much more vibrant and popular and prosperous. I would like to see the open market becoming a key part of London Road. We need far more space for pedestrians. At the moment, pedestrians are sort of pushed to the side of the streets with no spaces in which to talk and meet and enjoy life. I think there are lots of ways in which we could make London Road into a really thriving area and what’s interesting about the meetings I’ve been to about it is that a lot of people, although they recognise that the area has become run down, actually still love it and think the London Road has its own character and we ought to be trying to preserve that and not trying to bulldoze it away and incorporate some kind of clone town from elsewhere. So what’s exciting is that people are coming together and with the help of some planners, are beginning to put their own ideas forward, and that’s how it should be, it shouldn’t be the Greens saying this is what we think should be in this area, but really trying to facilitate a way in which the community can come together themselves, with their own ideas, which are usually more interesting and sustainable than a Tesco would bring to the area.
What is your impression of the situation in Gaza? I notice you sent a letter to Foreign Secretary David Miliband and were a signatory of the letter to the Guardian on the issue of relations with Israel. What do you believe is the best way to resolve this crisis?
I have to say that I’m completely horrified about what’s happening in Gaza and of course that the immediate priority is for an immediate ceasefire. What’s been frustrating me so much when I listen to so much of the media coverage of what’s been happening there is that most journalists start from the point of saying Hamas was firing rockets into Israel, Israel had to respond therefore it is in some sense justifiable that they did and what frustrates me so much about that narrative is that it misses out over forty years of occupation, it misses out almost two years of a devastating siege in Gaza which has basically sealed that area of the country into what’s been called the biggest open air prison in the world. People cant move in and out, they cant even get out to study, they sometimes cant get out to use medical facilities, food is difficult to get in, according to various UN agencies, poverty and hunger have massively increased. Human Rights abuses that are going on through that siege are absolutely unacceptable. Rocket attacks are also unacceptable, but I think that to understand where they are coming from, not justify them and not to condone them, but to understand them, that wider context of the occupation and the siege needs to be taken into account and it really frustrates me deeply that they are not part of the media narrative, when you see what the national media is talking about. In terms of what can be done, of course the rockets have to stop, but its not realistic to expect the rockets to stop unless the siege stops. So in the same breath as we say Hamas must stop the rockets, we have to say the Israel must lift the siege of Gaza. People of Gaza have to be able to live. The EU has a critical role, which so far it’s been failing to play. The EU potentially has enormous leverage in the region, not least because it’s the biggest market for Israeli goods. There are agreements between the EU and Israel like the EU-Israel association agreement under which Israeli goods enjoy a special access to EU markets. That agreement has a special Human Rights cause within it, which states that in the event of human rights abuses, the agreement could and should be suspended. I’ve been calling for that agreement to be suspended for several years now, at least since the siege of Gaza. What horrifies me so much is that not only that EU foreign ministers are not planning to suspend that agreement, but to the contrary they are still planning to upgrade EU-Israel relations. There’s a proposal on the table which foreign ministers reaffirmed back last month to say that relations between the EU and Israel should be enhanced and improved. To do that at this point, would give a signal to the world that really the EU condones Israeli behaviour in Gaza and I think that would be absolutely unacceptable and I think that the EU must have a much stronger role in what’s happening in Gaza. It should be using its influence, which it could have with Israel if it chose to use it. It could say to Israel, via these agreements that this kind of action has got to stop.
Where do you stand on the issue of 42 days detention without trial, which the government attempted to make law last year and are likely to attempt again next year?
The Greens did absolutely oppose it, we’re absolutely against 42 days, we weren’t much in favour of 28 days either. I think detention without trial is not only a gross abuse of human rights, but it’s also deeply counterproductive. If what’s at stake, if we believe the government when they say the war on terror is destroying the values of western civilisation, I’m not saying I believe that narrative, but if you’re consistent with what the government says then surely one of those values that the west is supposed to hold high is to do with justice and fair trials, its to do with human rights and yet this government seems to be willing to sacrifice all of those in the interests of fighting the war on terrorism, that seems to me to be very counterproductive. I think that what we need to be doing is to be demonstrating that we’re acting in a just way, in a fair way and not building up more anger and resentment amongst those communities, those parts of our community who are most likely to be caught by these kind of new laws. I was delighted when the Lords threw it out and I hope the government will be sensible enough to read the writing on the wall and realise that there isn’t support for this and to drop it completely.
The EU recently passed the Climate action and renewable energy package which will reduce overall emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020 and increase renewable energy use by 20% by 2020. Do you feel this went far enough?
I don’t think it went anywhere near far enough. It’s something I’ve been working on very strongly in the parliament. I was the shadow rapporteur, in other words the person on behalf of the Greens that was following the whole climate package. For example, the EU started out by saying that it would go for a 30% emission reduction if all the other countries would do the same and they held that out as an offer. That has got chipped away and chipped away due to all kinds of industry lobbying that has been going on in Brussels and in the package that was finally released in December, that kind of automatic shift from a 20% to a 30% reduction in the event of an international agreement is now much less secure. It depends on how you read it as to whether you think that’s still there. The science is telling us that, in the industrialised countries, we need cuts of much closer to 90% by 2030, not 20% by 2020. This is far too little, too late and what’s frustrating about it is that the EU likes to tell a good story about its so called leadership on climate change. It has the potential to be a real leader on climate change policy, but what you find happens is that parts of the different institutions come up with some positive ideas, but there is such a level of corporate influence over EU decision making, that what you find is that the targets are diluted, the timetables are delayed, the whole ambition is diminished, so there’s always a battle going on. The EU would say that this set of targets that it has come up with is still the most ambitious in the world and sadly that might still be the case, because unfortunately there’s not much competition on this. I hope very much that the election of Barack Obama might change the dynamics so that we have a much more interventionist US and a much more progressive and ambitious US. That will enable us to be able to move faster, but, at the moment what worries me in particular about the EU’s position is that it doesn’t seem to recognise that to get the developing countries on board, it needs to put money on the table. Developing countries are, rightly, suspicious of the EU lecturing them about the emission cuts they need to make, when many of the emissions coming from the poorest countries are actually what they would call survival emissions, rather than luxury emissions and I think if we’re serious, as we should be about supporting developing counties so that there genuinely is an agreement on climate change and a key climate change agreement in Copenhagen at the end of this year, then we have to give money to developing countries, both to help them adapt to the climate change that’s already happening and to help them ensure that they can develop in such a way that doesn’t cause the huge number of emissions that we’ve done historically.
Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the environment?
I always remain optimistic, even when the facts don’t necessarily give you the evidence to feel optimism. I feel optimistic because there are some fantastic initiatives going on in Britain and around the world. When you think about the crises that we face, the biggest crisis isn’t a scientific one or an economic one or a technical one, the biggest crisis is one of political will and political will is something that can change quite quickly once there’s sufficient momentum. Here in Britain for example, I think the transition town movement is a fantastic movement where people are coming together and saying ‘we’re not going to wait for businesses, we’re not going to wait for government, we’re going to take action ourselves and what’s more we’re going to show that tackling environmental problems or trying to reduce our emissions can actually be fun as well, we can join together as a community and do this and it can be a very positive experience’. So I take optimism and inspiration from those groups of individuals who are already changing their communities right now, whether that’s here in Brighton or in other parts of the world and I do think and I do hope that there will be a change of political heart, because people will recognise that it’s in our interest to do it, that its completely counterproductive to ignore the climate crisis, but also that by tackling the climate crisis, we can tackle all sorts of other issues as well, we can actually make a fairer world, a better world, as well as a more sustainable world. I am optimistic, but I certainly think that there are some pretty major challenges ahead as well.
