If the Greens are going to be the UKIP of the left in 2015 they can do without their own fruitcakes and loonies getting headlines for the wrong reasons. Speaking to the Economist, Green leader Natalie Bennett argued that being on benefits in the UK is worse than being one of India’s 179 million people living below the poverty line:

“The world is sodden with stuff, it cannot have more stuff,” said Ms Bennett. Yet [the Greens] do not appear to have considered what that would mean for billions of the world’s poorest people, almost none of whom live in Britain. When Bagehot suggested to her that there was a problem with this, Ms Bennett said he was worrying too much: to be poor in India wasn’t so bad as to be on benefits in Britain, she suggested, “because at least everyone else there is poor too”.

They would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich…