This summer may not have been the ideal time to do an internship in a Western embassy in the Middle East. Since ‘The Innocence of Muslims’ appeared on the internet, the whole region has erupted in anger, and the brunt of this has been levelled at symbols of the West – most notably embassies.  

The tragic death of the US Ambassador to Libya, along with 3 other US officials, signalled the beginning of a deadly wave of fury that has spanned the entire Islamic world from Indonesia to Morocco, resulting in the deaths of dozens and hundreds of injuries.

In Lebanon, where I have lived for a year, the elusive leader of the Shia militant group Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, called for protests up and down the country against what he called the ‘greatest insult’ to Islam the world has ever seen. The largest saw tens of thousands of angry Hezbollah sympathisers taking to the streets in the capital, Beirut, calling for ‘Death to America’ (the country where the offending film was produced), ‘Death to Israel’ (of course) and, somewhat more puzzlingly, ‘Death to Germany’.

Sadly, Lebanon was not spared the deadly violence and in the northern city of Tripoli, fatal clashes broke out around government buildings after a branch of KFC was set on fire and vandalised.

Given the circumstances, I should probably have been worrying for my life, and yet paradoxically, the local press heralded a new period of religious tolerance in the country.

Quite unrelated to the protests against the film, this ‘new era’ of improved Muslim-Christian relations was proclaimed after the Pope’s ‘Peace Mission’ to the Middle East. The mood in Beirut was electric as hundreds of thousands of worshippers swarmed to the sea front in the hope of catching a glimpse of the Pope-mobile. Some entered into what can only be described as a religious frenzy, laughing and swaying about and whilst muttering hymns.

But what made this visit so significant for Lebanon was not the effect it had on the Christian minority, but rather the Muslim population.

‘I’m so happy he’s here!’ shouted Ibrahim, a Muslim grocer who had travelled down from his small village above Beirut for the occasion. ‘Look how happy everyone is  – it has proved what Lebanon is about.’

And he was exactly right. Somehow the German octogenarian had brought people together, regardless of their religion or sect, proving the incredible coexistence that Lebanon has been famous for.

Whilst the rest of the region was burning, Hezbollah remained silent. Realising the significance of the Pope’s visit, and the danger of anti-West protests turning into anti-Christian ones, Nasrallah judged the situation perfectly and released a statement welcoming the Pope to Lebanon.

Then, a week later, after the Pope was safely back in the Vatican, he knew that a formal reaction to the film was expected of him, and so he gave a fiery speech calling for protests across the country. As is often the case with Hezbollah protests, they proved to be well-controlled and peaceful. Indeed, the only injuries recorded were the result of celebratory gunfire.

Lebanon has had a tough summer. With war waging across the border in Syria, the country was beset by a spate of kidnappings, dozens were killed in clashes in the North, and angry protesters caused havoc by continuously blocking roads with burning tyres.

But, contrary to what the media may make out, it is not inevitable that Lebanon will succumb to the violence that has shaken the rest of the Muslim world, and that which is devastating Syria. The tiny country has shown an incredible resilience and is still basking in the honey-moon of optimism that followed the Pope’s visit.

I never felt remotely unsafe being in the British Embassy in Beirut, or in the city more generally. Instead, whilst protests may have been staged across the country, I trusted that the authorities had the power to contain the anger, and channel it away from the sectarian lines that marble Lebanese society. Whilst these leaders agree that peace is better than war, Lebanon will hold on and weather the storm.

Jeremy Hunt, the recently appointed Health Minister, has an infamous mouth. In 2010, it yakked about football hooliganism causing the Hillsborough tragedy and later had to apologise to the victims’ families. In 2011, it congratulated James Murdoch on the progress of News Corp’s takeover bid for BSkyB. Now it’s off on another rant and the consequences for the nation’s health could be dire.

“I don’t want a fat tax. I like my Coca Cola and crisps,” Mr Hunt told the Times last week- end. As for the abortion limit, he deems twelve weeks to be “the right point for it.” These remarks – the first a flippant quip, the second a personal moral conviction – are not only medically uninformed. They reveal a Health Minister dangerously removed from the population for whose healthcare he is responsible.

Let’s begin with Mr Hunt’s desire to see the abortion limit reduced from 24 weeks. Doc- tors are unanimous about the negative impact this reduction would have on women’s health. Only nine per cent of abortions take place after twelve weeks. These tend to be the most vulner- able or complex cases: young girls who either didn’t realize they were pregnant or were previously too afraid too act, as well as those with scans revealing severe foetal abnormalities. A 12-week limit would greatly reduce the ability of tests to pick up on conditions like Down’s syndrome. The spokeswoman for the Royal Col- lege of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, summarizes the government’s contradiction well: “Politicians talk about putting patients at the centre… How is the woman at the centre of her healthcare with something like this?”

Less noise has been made about the health consequences of Mr Hunt’s anti-fat-tax joke, yet they could be equally adverse. The health secretary’s refusal to consider taxation of sugary and fatty foods is a bad omen for the trajectory of obesity in the UK.

Evidence shows that if you want people to stop doing things that are bad for them, taxation is the answer. A ten per cent increase in tobacco prices, for example, cuts cigarette consumption by about five per cent. Britain is now the fattest country in Europe. A fat tax should not be excluded from the discussion of how to tackle our obesity epidemic.

The most worrying part of Mr Hunt’s comments, however, was how out of touch they proved him to be. The proposed abortion limit reduction demonstrates a lack of understanding of women’s health needs and the reality of women’s lives. Similarly Mr Hunt fails to understand that a tax on junk food is not designed to help muesli-munching politicians like himself, but poorer Britons who opt for unhealthy food because it is cheap. This group is the most at risk from obesity.

As well as his partiality for fizzy drinks and salty snacks, Hunt reveals that he had a “moment of shock” when he became Health Minister. Most of the country did too. He would be wise to remember that next time he opens that mouth.

Izzy Westbury: No

Conference. Noun. A formal meeting of people with a shared interest. Are important policy decisions made at party conference? No. Is it a meeting of ordinary party members? No. Does it have any effect on public interest? Barely. Lamentable though this may be, the nostalgic image of the grass-roots, policy-changing party conference, ladies and gentlemen, is long dead.

The first thing to acknowledge is that the focus has shifted and the aim of the party conference nowadays is a much simpler one: to survive. Certainly conference represents a reassertion of common goals and a once-a-year chance for like-minded people to converge upon an appropriately mundane location. But on stage, where the ‘real’ stuff supposedly happens, there’s nothing real happening at all.

The crucial point, however, is that although it may just appear a large theatrical production, everything that party leaders and MPs say and do is scrutinised intensely by the media. For them, it is a question of making it through in one piece. Ask any high-profile politician and I would imagine that they don’t use the word ‘enjoy’ to describe party conference. For them it’s a dress rehearsal, a confirmation that they can withstand the scrutiny and that they have the resilience to carry it off when the real thing – the election – comes around.

Anyone remember the David Miliband banana moment? Yes – that awkward photo. Does anyone remember any of the important and constructive ideas he set out in his speech? No, nor me, until I looked them up. The media is much quicker to pick up on any shortcomings or slip-ups than any real positives that transpire. But this is a fact of life, and one which most politicians have learned to deal with. If you can get through conference, you can get through anything. ‘The aim of party conference: to survive’

Party conference is not built for the now. It isn’t a hunting ground for grass-roots activists; in fact, conferences, with their professional lobbyists and free drinks events, have had to embrace and indulge big business. Funding is becoming increasingly scarce, so the stakes have been raised. It is all too apparent that money is the key issue now, and the parties need as much as they can possibly muster.

The impact of a conference on a wider scale also remains – the public may not give a damn at that moment in time, but it sets the standards for the future. A conference is a public stage where the politicians can practice getting it right. The value of a large-scale dress-rehearsal, and the money at stake, mean that party conference plays an important a role as ever.

Patrick Kennedy: Yes

Now look,” intoned Ed Mili- band, in his recent, courageous, autocue-less oration; “let me tell you a bit of insight into Conference”. He looked mock- sheepish. Coping with the meet- ing, he confessed, “can be a bit of trial.” I’m glad someone’s admitted it.

Parties presumably need token rituals of solidarity, wheeling out the tribal elders and arriviste sha- mans to reassure the faithful that the magic’s still there. Which is great – if you believe that incubat- ing the parochial narcissism of party membership in tiny cliques is genuinely healthy.

Times have changed. Sixty years ago, around four million Britons were signed-up members of a political party. Today, a paltry one per cent of the electorate are zealous enough to send off for their coloured rosettes and cutesy car- stickers.

Party spirit is not – thank God – a central feature of most of our lives. Ours is the age of the discerning, if fashionably apathetic, consumer voter, coolly shopping about for the deal of the day. In blissful post- ideological Britain, party confer- ences look at best redundantly antique, and at worst gawkily out of touch. Miliband’s recent rhetorical triumph at Labour’s Manchester gathering would have been so much more if he’d just cut out the conference and spoken directly to voters.

Even if the bulk of the conference seems vaguely irrelevant, we are interested in juicy sound- bites from the leader’s speech. And that’s a point: conferences apparently exist largely as glossy plat- forms for a speech directed at the people who didn’t turn up. The real audience is no longer the fawning party loyalists packing the aisles, but the great world beyond. (In fact, the fawning party loyalists are falling away as we speak. Bizarrely, three-quarters of last year’s conference populace were reporters and other commercial hangers-on.)

Conferences are hardly about honestly consulting the party grassroots; boil them down and they’re merely inefficient exhibition spaces for cheesy demagogues to air broad-brush generalisations. We the apathetic want to hear big rhetoric, highfalutin, soaring visions, but you don’t need to hold a massive ego-festival to justify it. You could sweep away the tendentious panellists and impassioned leaflet stalls and nobody would notice. Get rid of the conference detritus and speak to the nation. It goes without saying that party power is invested in the few at the top: if they were still loosely democratic, then conferences might be useful for crunching out policy. But if, alternatively, these partisan clapping-sessions are put on merely to nurse fragile tribal identities, then Heaven help us. We’re supposed to be “one nation”, aren’t we?

Natalie Bennett’s chosen venue for this interview is a community café near where she lives in London, which is very nice and supportive of the local area, but it does mean that the regulars popping in for their lunch are treated to hearing this interview first hand and shoot bemused looks at the fast-talking woman with the piercing Australian accent and big laugh. I wonder if they come to the same conclusion as I do: with her friendliness and willingness to engage in discussion, Bennett comes across as a genuinely nice person who just wants to change the world.

Bennett was elected as the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales in September. Though she has never before held elected office, she’s been involved in Green campaigning since 2005, and seems like a good bet for the party: experience in journalism should make her media-savvy, while a degree in agricultural science gives her credibility on environmental issues.

On her election, she declared her intention to make the Greens the ‘third party’ (the status that Nick Clegg rejects for the Lib Dems, the Greens would gladly take). Bearing in mind that the Greens achieved less than 1% of the vote at the last general election and only have one MP, this does seems overly optimistic, but you have to admire her ambition. Her confidence stems from her certainty that the Greens have “a very distinct political vision that’s unlike anyone else’s political vision,” as well as the electorate’s disillusionment with the main parties:  “people are increasingly looking around for new answers and for new people to give those answers.” In her eyes, the “neo-liberal project of the 20^th century”  with “a grossly unequal economy with unequal wages” has failed, but all is not lost: “somewhere in there we took a wrong turn. But we can turn in a different direction now.”

Disaffected Lib Dem voters seem ripe for the picking, as the Greens oppose tuition fees, nuclear weapons and the war in Afghanistan – “All of the things Lib Dem activists thought they were working for! But the reality is there’s not that many Lib Dem voters even in their heyday, and there’s a lot of Labour voters who we’re after.” Bennett talks of showing them “that we’re a viable alternative,” and claims to be unfazed by our electoral system’s bias against smaller parties, which I find surprising until I remember that she’s hardly going to admit that any vote for the Greens could be ‘wasted’.

What shines through is Bennett’s strong sense of fairness: it’s just not fair that the rich should hog all the resources, or that we should screw over future generations by messing up the planet they will inhabit, or that women should still find themselves disadvantaged (in fact, she says, “my first politics was feminism,” and it’s something she is particularly keen to talk about). It’s all related: “The social and the environmental in my mind have always been very closely tied together because you can’t just go around saying, ‘let the rich continue to prosper, and somehow let’s bring us up to that level.’ Because that’s not physically possible. And so while you allow the wealthy to flourish with huge levels of consumption, then what you have is the poor continue to suffer, and will continue to suffer as the environment gets worse.”

As far as I can see, one of the core ‘green’ issues is how we get our energy. This battle will likely become bigger in the coming years because the infrastructure needs to be renewed; the UK’s old nuclear power stations are about to reach the end of their lives, at which point we will have to plug a yawning ‘energy gap’. The Government and Opposition would like to see that gap filled with a mixture of renewables and nuclear new build. The Greens, unsurprisingly, are not keen on the latter.

Bennett thinks that a lot of the energy gap could be filled if we just conserved more energy, even if this is considered dull: “Insulating houses and putting in double glazing and stuff like that doesn’t produce nice sexy photos that politicians like.” Alas, although this would be a convenient solution, it is blatantly not enough, and so Bennett would like to see a comprehensive network of renewables to fill the gap: “The thing is we know precisely what the fuel is going to cost, forever into the future: zero.”

She can easily reel off the reasons why she doesn’t like nuclear power (commercial lobbying, long development times, expense, finite resources of uranium, and so on). However, there’s an Energy Bill about to go through Parliament which may dramatically restructure the electricity market and supposedly incentivise nuclear new build, and she’s pretty shaky on the details of it. Perhaps this reflects how shockingly complicated it is with feed-in tariffs and Electricity Market Reform and carbon price floors (even industry insiders admit that they don’t fully understand it), but she isn’t overly sure about what the changes might mean, or for that matter what the international situation is; she claims that “pretty much every other country in the world – certainly every other developed country – is going less nuclear or dropping nuclear altogether.” Actually this isn’t entirely true, as various countries including France and Finland are currently building more nuclear power plants.

This all said, she knows there are gaps in her knowledge and she’s very honest about that. I can’t imagine the leader of any other political party confessing to a journalist, “I don’t actually know enough about that to actually know,” or “I shall have to get better on the energy bill I’m afraid.” She’s not a slick seasoned politician and it’s actually quite refreshing.

Some of the Greens would like to label their party ‘socialist’, but their new leader insists they have a “holistic philosophy” of their own: “I have many ideas that people would call socialist, but I wouldn’t say ‘I am a socialist’ because I am a Green.” In fact what she talks about does sound a lot like socialism with environmental policies thrown in, but I can see why she doesn’t want to pin the party down to a word like ‘socialism’ with so much baggage. The Greens need an identity and an ideology to call their own.

Sometimes the Greens are accused of being a one-issue party, but Bennett insists they have the full range of policies: “They’ve always been there, we’ve always talked about them, we haven’t always been heard about them.” Looking at a cross-section of issues – the EU, transport, economic policy, drugs, prostitution and healthcare – it is clear that Bennett is well-versed on them all, with strong opinions and a defined ‘party position’. She’s not a fan of austerity (“when you’re in a hole you don’t keep digging, and we’re very clearly in a hole,”) or of big business (“I think the problem is big business is innately un-green”). She stresses that the Greens aren’t anti-Europe “in a UKIP kind of way,” but is critical of the undemocratic and deregulatory aspects of the EU. Close as she is to socialism, her stance on these issues is not very surprising at all.

The Greens are essentially calling for a complete overhaul of the whole infrastructure of society, and their version of utopia certainly seems attractive; happy citizens cycle and walk to school and work, free of the burden of childcare or low wages, while old people live cosily in their warm insulated houses. Local communities rejoice in their wind turbines, using the profits from selling their spare energy to fund new roofs for village halls. China and other rising nations realise the errors of the Western path to development and find a greener way to expand.

While the cynic in me says that we’re too set in our ways to contemplate such a radical restructuring of society, it’s quite nice to meet a politician who really genuinely believes that the general public can be a force for good. She takes things right back to the beginning: “When there was a small group of homo sapiens on the plains of Africa, facing a whole lot of predators, it’s only by sticking together and protecting each other that we survived. I believe the human race is basically altruistic and community orientated because in the days of sabre toothed tigers and all the rest of it we’d never have survived if we weren’t.” Is she prescient or naive? It seems that time will tell if she’s right.