The Green Party's leader put forward her views on education, pay and the NHS in a live debate with young voters.
The Green Party’s leader put forward her views on education, pay and the NHS in a live debate with young voters
Last night Green Party leader Natalie Bennett was the first politician to appear on Leaders Live, a new debate series that gives young people the chance to put questions directly to leaders.
Broadcast live on YouTube, the series is created by Bite the Ballot, an organisation that empowers young people to make informed voting decisions.
Bennett’s appearance was significant as she has been omitted from the BBC’s scheduled debates that will mark the run up to the general election.
You can watch the full debate here.
The questions that the audience asked Bennett showed that jobs and education are at the top of their list of worries.
When asked who she proposed would cover the cost of the free higher education the Greens have promised, Bennett pointed to rich individuals and multinational companies who do not pay their taxes.
She stressed that there is a need for society to be “rebalanced” and that multinationals need to take responsibility for contributing towards society.
The issue of equality also informs the Greens’ policy on drugs.
Bennett was adamant that drugs “should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue”, and said that the amount of discretion given to police means that more people from minority backgrounds are arrested for drug misuse than people from other backgrounds.
This, she said, is despite the fact that more privileged people are no less likely to be using drugs.
Bennett also pledged to end zero-hours contracts, and stated that her party was “absolutely opposed” to unpaid internships. Alongside workers who currently receive a minimum wage, interns, she said, should be paid the Living Wage as a minimum.
The NHS was also a key issue in the debate. Bennett warned that the UK is ‘racing towards’ an American style privatised health system, and criticised the private finance initiatives (PFI) which are holding the NHS hostage with huge interest rates and service charges.
Campaign group Drop the NHS Debt estimate that by 2020-21, the annual costs of the 118 NHS PFIs will be £2.14bn. Saving 46 per cent of that would release about £1bn a year.
As part of the Greens’ plans for the NHS, Bennett promised that more detail on mental healthcare would be added to their manifesto. She criticised the way that mental health problems are regarded as less urgent than physical ones, and pledged parity of esteem for people with mental illness.
On education, Bennett said that no school run by a faith group should receive government money. She predicted that in the event of this becoming legislation, many faith schools would choose to come into the secular system rather than become private.
The school system also face criticism from the Green leader over its competitive nature. Bennett said that the system should be based on cooperation, and shold include a more practical curriculum covering things like relationships, health and nutrition, in order to give pupils an “education for life”.
Ruby Stockham is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow her on Twitter
49 Responses to “Natalie Bennett: We have to ban zero-hours contracts”
Leon Wolfeson
When you’re offered contracts in HE, it’s for a semester, and fixed hours within that semester.
Not the sort of contracts being talked about.
Leon Wolfeson
Rot. There’s a big demand, people would find a way. Without screwing over workers.
Leon Wolfeson
But again, you’ll KNOW you won’t be running them in December, well in advance.
People can then do i.e. Seasonal work, knowing you won’t need them in December.
uglyfatbloke
There’s not that big a demand for the shows that don’t get trailed on the telly or the radio. Making the sums work for One Direction or Adele is easy; making them work for Marianne Faithful or Squeeze is n’t. If there were a better way someone would have discovered it. The economics of gigs are such that if you want to work at them, you have to accept that the money is probably going to be rubbish virtually all the time.
Two things come to mind –
(1) You are making an assumption that workers are getting screwed. It’s certainly true that most people would make more lucrative careers as teachers, nurses, refuse workers, councillors or desk-fillers for the government than as humpers or sound engineers or lighting designers. They would make more money,they would n’t get physically damaged, they would work less hard, they would have pensions and even if they were really crap at their work their career would be protected, but you work at gigs because you love gigs; the money is n’t the motivation. Of course it can be lucrative, but even for those in the relatively well-cushioned sectors – TV, the Ballet or the Opera – it’s no way to make a fortune. A tiny proportion will make (relatively) serious money going from one tour to the next, but they will mostly end up totally knackered by the time they are 50 with very little to show for it except that they had a good time doing work that they loved and delivering great – and not so great – shows for (over the years) millions of people. If they are very lucky they will get an opportunity to pursue a different career path once they get too old, but most of them will end up in dead-end jobs ’til they get to retirement age.
(2) You are making an assumption that you have a better understanding of how a particular industry works than everyone who actually works in that industry. That’s not altogether likely. There is nothing more nakedly capitalist in nature than the concert industry. Everybody has to knock their pan in and everybody has to be professionally competent and the majority of shows have to make ends meet if promoters, production companies and crews are to make a living. There really is n’t a socialist industrial model for gigs. That does n’t mean that the workforce are n’t (broadly speaking) socialists, but they know that there is no safety net. If a Ballet or Opera company fucks up (and really they’ve no excuse) the Arts Council will come to their rescue, but there’s no government agency that will keep a concert promoter in business.
Some specialist niche promoters – generally in Jazz or Folk music – do get government support, but the sums are trivial and there’s usually a lot of strings attached. Suppose for a moment that there was a government department to oversee Rock and Roll. It would inevitably be the plaything of people appointed to head up the agency on the basis of who their pals and relatives are. Those people would put on the shows they fancied rather than what then punters would like. They would appoint production staff on the basis of who they liked and what bits of paper they had acquired at college. Competence – never mind talent – would n’t matter a damn. That may sound unlikely, but there are performing arts centres that work exactly that way where the managers just don’t understand (or sometimes don’t care) why their centre loses a fortune every year.
Leon Wolfeson
As someone who knows a bit about music and gigs…watch as I roll my eyes.
(Oh, and I can and have managed stage lighting boards, thanks)