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F. Changing the System
CHANGING THE
SYSTEM
For former Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, history, ecology and feminism are the pillars of her life, and her reading. Rachel Potts meets her among the Stacks
It was an Elizabethan poet who first drew Natalie Bennett to The London Library. A former Green Party leader – now Baroness of Manor Castle, the area of Sheffield in which she lived until recently – Bennett moved from Australia to the UK in 1999. She was working as a print journalist, and used to walk the capital’s streets “looking at the blue plaques and asking, ‘Where are all the women?’” In 2004, she “met” Isabella Whitney in a shop selling out-of-print academic books – Whitney lived in the city in the 1560s-70s and is considered the first English woman to publish secular poetry. She inspired Bennett to write a book about women in London’s past; joining the Library was a first step.
Whitney’s life and writing suggest a breezy disregard for early modern social norms, which appealed to Bennett. Female members of the nobility sometimes wrote religious verse, but Whitney is believed to have been a member of the minor gentry: she worked, probably as something similar to a lady’s companion, in a wealthy London household (though lost her position in 1573, for reasons that are unclear), and wrote from the perspective of her class. The poem Her Wyll and Testament is a satirical goodbye to London: “For maidens poor, I widowers rich / do leave, that oft shall dote: / And by that means shall marry them, / to set the girls afloat.”
Bennett’s book is still on her to-do list, because on New Year’s Day in 2006, when she’d finished a series of night shifts as a news sub-editor at The Independent, she made the “utterly spur of the moment” decision to join the Green Party. In 2012, she went from part-time campaigner to winning its leadership race, and for the next four years experienced the Green surge including an historic election result in 2015, at which more people voted for the party than at any previous election combined. This career trajectory might have been unplanned, but on meeting Bennett it doesn’t seem all that surprising. Among members of the House of Lords, “particularly the whips,” she says: “‘Hyperactive’ is an adjective that has been used about me quite a bit.” She has three degrees – undergraduate degrees in agricultural science and Asian studies and a master’s in mass communications – and spent four years in Thailand, at the National Commission on Women’s Affairs and consulting on women’s issues for the UN. She then worked in Fleet Street for more than a decade, including as editor of The Guardian Weekly, and had always imagined one day leaving journalism for work in an NGO or charity. But the climate emergency dawned in earnest in the mid-2000s and took her into politics. Women poets and reading at the Library did not recede completely. In 2015, the Campaign to Protect Rural England asked for British party leaders to nominate a verse. Bennett found the “perfect green poem” by another Elizabethan.
A few of Natalie Bennett’s favourite books
DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS BY KATE RAWORTH (2017) WOMEN LATIN POETS BY JANE STEVENSON (2005)
“My number one book recommendation. An economics professor recently told me that all his first year students were talking about this, so it’s clearly catching on, which is lovely. Mainstream economics starts from the assumption that resources are replaceable, but the foundational Green understanding is that you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, which this book addresses.”
S. Finance &c “A spectacular piece of scholarship from when Eastern Europe first opened up from behind the Iron Curtain. The author went to monasteries in the region, about which very little had been published before, and found some amazing, scholarly women from what we used to call the Dark Ages up to the Renaissance. It’s the best book I've ever read from The London Library.”
L. Medieval Lit., Hist of
THE NEW ECONOMICS, A MANIFESTO BY STEVE KEEN (2021)
“Not easy reading. Keen does at one point say, ‘You might want to go and get a cup of coffee if you’re not into maths’, which I did. But it tears apart the foundations of economics thinking. Keen goes back to the physiocrats: French economics thinkers of the 18th century who thought that wealth came from land. He wonders whether, if they had informed our economic framework, we might be in a better place.”
CONDEMNED BY GRAHAM SEAL (2021) “I try to read things without a particular angle, but often the politics gets in there somewhere. This reveals how, in 1690, the City of London rounded up 100 children that it didn’t like the look of, that didn’t have an economic place, and shipped them to Virginia. This kind of thing goes on for a very long time right through to the history of Australia.”
S. Crime
Æmilia Lanyer’s Description of Cooke-ham from 1611 discusses natural beauty and female companionship, set on an estate where she stayed with her patron, Countess Clifford. Bennett maintains a history blog, Philobiblon, set up in 2004, and her unwritten book has become a podcast, History of the Women of England. “I’m always trying not only to read about the women of the past, but to put them back on the record,” she says. Hansard, the transcripts of Parliamentary debates, is a good place to do so. In a nod to the geographical site of her title, given in Theresa May’s 2019 resignation honours, her maiden speech in the House of Lords referenced the 19th-century Sheffield poet Mary Hutton, whose thoughts on poverty and human rights aligned her with the Chartists. Natalie Bennett grew up in a Sydney suburb in the 1960s and 1970s “where the cultural highlight of the week was mowing the lawn”. But she could read by the time she was four, and in high school spent more time in the playground with Herodotus than with the other kids. “My parents had me very young; none of their friends had children. And because of my rather snobby grandmother, I wasn’t allowed to play with other children in the street,” she says. There was no television at home until Bennett was 11, so books – and the past – were her escape. She vividly remembers an exhibition of Chinese burial wares featuring
characters carved on ox-bones, and was “really into archaeology”. As an early teen, “my teacher wrote the famous phrase on my report card, ‘Natalie would be better off if she paid more attention to the living and less to the dead.’” Europe seduced Bennett with its material history – but her upbringing in Australia inspired something else. Studying agriculture was partly the result of meeting and romanticising “amazing big farm families” on her early rural holidays. But in her third year at Sydney University “it became obvious to me that Australian farmers are not so much farming the soils as mining them”. She also studied philosophy as a non-degree subject in her third year. Journalism followed. Then came an assignment on a country paper about a biodynamic farm. “This guy went into his field in the middle of summer when, usually in Australia, you’d need a pickaxe to break the crust. He very casually turned it over with his shovel and it was full of worms and organic matter, just amazing soil. That gave me a glimmering that something different was possible.”
If history and ecology are pillars in Bennett’s intellectual life, there is a third that runs through it all. “I became a feminist at age five,” she says. It was a reaction to her family and society’s conservatism – she was not even allowed a bicycle as a child and was, for many activities, told, “because you are a girl, not only should you not do this thing, you shouldn’t want to do it”. Bennett agrees that as women make up the majority of the world’s poor, they suffer most from environmental degradation. But there’s more that links women with climate issues. “I heard [British feminist] Sheila Rowbotham give a talk to launch her book Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the 20th Century [in 2010], saying that in the 1970s, as feminists, we thought there was progress. But we learned that you have to go back and fight the same battles again and again. Look at abortion in the US at the moment. Environmentalism and feminism have this in common: it’s not enough to just win a battle and change a law. You’ve got to change the system.” Bennett was not much impressed by COP26 last year, where she says there were many more women in the climate conference’s alternative programming than at official events. But she saw progress on the UK’s latest Environment Bill, which passed in November, and is clearly energised by the Lords. “Technically, we don’t interrupt, but you can ask questions for clarification or correction. You sit there thinking, ‘Am I going to leap up and interrupt the minister and provoke a confrontation?’” Her Library borrowing history suggests the demands of the Lords are less onerous than running a political party (and one with scant resources – at the height of the Green’s success, she had to rely on just one press officer for weeks). Over the past 12 months she has taken out titles from the Science shelves on Natural History, Petroleum, Sea, Birds, Botany, Food, Butterflies, Insurance, Crime and Dreams. She likes the feel of the “vaguely joint endeavour” of being in the building: “I would spend my life here, happily.”
Nevertheless, a typical weekday for Bennett might begin with an allparty parliamentary group meeting – she co-chairs on Hong Kong and vice chairs many more, including Agroecology – then writing an online comment piece from the debate the previous night for outlets including The Ecologist and PoliticsHome, before the House begins sitting at three. There may be oral questions, on say, prison policy, then work on the day’s main bill happens between four and midnight. “Sometimes we have a dinner break,” she says. This has not stopped her from completing the proposal for another book project. It will explore what a non-patriarchal, ecologically-minded system might look like beyond the “single-line axis” of socialism versus capitalism. “Basically, we have a complete political philosophy, and it’s really interesting that it doesn’t have a name. Green-ism? I don’t know. I’m still trying to work that out,” she says. It sounds like the women’s history book may stay on the back burner for a little while longer. •
