The Government’s planned high speed rail network will make Birmingham “one of London’s commuter suburbs”, according to Green Party leader Natalie Bennett.
And while there may be some economic benefits to Birmingham, which is set to get a new city centre railway station, the £50 billion line will do nothing but harm to many other parts of the West Midlands, she said.
Ms Bennett spoke to The Birmingham Post as she prepared for her party’s annual conference at Birmingham’s Aston University in early September.
And she was upbeat about the party’s prospects, following a strong showing in the European and local elections.
Anti-EU party UKIP benefited from extensive publicity in the run-up to May’s elections and ended up coming first in the European poll, narrowly beating Labour in terms of share of the vote with Conservatives not far behind in third place.
But fourth place went to the Greens, who managed to beat the Liberal Democrats despite being largely ignored by the media.
The party also gained council seats, and is now the official opposition in Solihull Council.
And new members are flocking to the party, with membership growing by 28 per cent so far this year.
Greens hope that their conference will provide an opportunity to reach out to voters who have had enough of low-paying and insecure jobs, massive inequalities in wealth and the continual privatisation of public services - and are ready to back a party with a radically different approach to the traditional parties.
HS2 will make Birmingham "a London commuter suburb"
The high speed rail line known as HS2 is one issue where Greens differ from the Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats, who all have an official policy of backing the planned service.
Ms Bennett said: “We are totally opposed to HS2. It is simply going to concentrate resources, money and people even more on London which is actually the opposite of what we need to do.
“Most of the journeys on it will be journeys into London.
“It is not going to benefit the North and the Midlands.”
This is a stance that most of Birmingham’s business leaders, councillors and MPs - although not all - would strongly disagree with.
But Ms Bennett asked: “Does Birmingham really want to become a London commuter suburb? Which is one of the things HS2 does.
“But also, the whole of the Midlands is not Birmingham. It’s true there might be some benefits for Birmingham but what about Coventry, what about all the places that aren’t going to have a stop and aren’t going to see any transport improvement? Instead they will see a big slicing through the countryside with all sorts of negative environmental and social impacts.”
Greens want greater focus on connecting the regions outside London to each other, as well as better local transport.
“One thing that illustrates the problems in our economy well is that we have a huge problem with housing costs, a housing shortage in the south east and south - and yet there are a million empty homes in Britain. A lot of those are in the North and Midlands.
“People don’t have opportunities there, and so they are forced to move down to London.
“And if you actually had a proper investment in railways that run east-west across the country, railways that aren’t focused on London, and improve transport links between and across regions instead, then that’s one of the important aspects of a sensible regional development policy.”
There’s no doubt that Greens have a range of policies which mark them out as different to the traditional major parties.
Tax the rich and raise the minimum wage
They include raising the minimum wage, currently £6.31 an hour, to the living wage, which is £7.65 an hour.
They want to allow local councils to impose extra business rates on out-of-town supermarkets, allowing them to use the money to support smaller local businesses.
And the party is calling for wealth tax of one or two per cent on people worth £3 million or more, so that they would pay £30,000 to £60,000 each year.
A traditional objection to such proposals is that they might simply drive people to take their wealth elsewhere - but Ms Bennett has little time for this sort of argument.
She said: “It’s a recognition of the fact that inequality has utterly got out of control in our society and the wealthy are just sucking more resources out. This is a chance to rebalance society.”
The very rich would be unwilling to move overseas for the sake of £30,000 to £60,000 a year, which they could easily afford, she said.
However, she added: “If you really say that you don’t want to make this contribution to the society that’s made you wealthy, my reaction is ‘Heathrow is that way’.”
Greens also have a different vision of what a successful economy would look like, calling for “strong local economies built around small businesses and co-operatives”.
Renationalise the railways
And the party is committed to nationalising the rail network, by bringing each franchise back into public control when it expires rather than putting it out to tender.
Ms Bennett contrasted this with Labour’s “tentative” plan to continue tendering rail franchises but to allow a state-owned business to submit a bid.
“Their idea of having a nationally-owned company that can bid for train operating contracts - my question is what happens when it bids and loses, and you’ve just spent a lot of public money participating in a failed commercial system?”
She added: “Privatisation on the rail network is costing us all more than £1 billion a year.
“The way we are running the railways now makes no sense.”
The future's bright for the Green Party
This was the type of issue that saw people turning to the Greens, she said.
“You can really feel that the time is coming when there are going to be big changes in terms of our politics, our economics, the way our society runs.
“And yet the three largest parties haven’t really got that.
“What that means is we need to have jobs that you can build a life on.
“We have been making our employment lower paid and more insecure - the horror of zero hour contracts.
“And if we are going to build a sustainable society and economy we actually need jobs that pay you enough to live on. Where you have a reasonable amount of job security, you are able to think about signing a six-month rental agreement, thinking about having a mortgage, having children.”
There’s just one Green MP at the moment representing Brighton Pavilion, but the party is targeting other seats such as Bristol West and Norwich South.
Realistically, it’s hard for a smaller party to win Parliamentary seats in our political system. and Ms Bennett won’t make predictions about the 2015 general election.
But she said she was encouraged by the European Election results and the number of people who hadn’t voted for years who were now backing the Greens.
She said: “I had a guy who hadn’t voted for 30 years, didn’t really believe in the political system, but said that he was going to vote for us.
“A lot of people have realised that if we’re going to change the way things work then we have to change who we send to Westminster.”
