The Green Party is a small political party when compared to the likes of Labour, the Conservatives or even the Liberal Democrats. But they have perhaps a bigger public profile than the lesser-known small parties such as the Communist Party of Britain. More importantly, they have a more complete manifesto on their website, a manifesto to rival those of the "big three".

The first section is on the economy. Almost straight away, the introduction shows their overall approach shining through. They say that they argue that use of natural resources must be sustainable. They also claim to have a political programme for the next hundred years, a bold claim, and certainly setting them apart from the standard political party approach of "let's plan for our first four years and that's it."

On tax - that behemoth of an issue - they aren't afraid to tell their plans in plain English, rather than dressing it in fancy language. For the first five years (2005-2010) they plan to introduce more tax bands, so higher earners pay higher marginal rates of tax. The actual figures they give are 50% on earnings over £50000/year and 60% on earnings over £100000. They'd also reform corporation tax so that companies with higher profits than £1.5million/year pay 40% tax. They want to change inheritance tax so that it's levied by wealth of the inheritor rather than the bequeather, and they plan to abolish National Insurance, the money instead coming from the changed tax rates. They also want to introduce land value tax systems that are based on the rental value of land, thus taxing the owners of the land (apparently as happens in some US cities, so they say). This would eventually replace council tax and business rates, although they haven't finalised these plans as they call them pilot schemes (credit for their honesty there). These are interesting plans, and I suspect they're unlikely to win many voters in those higher earner ranks. People become notoriously protective of their earnings once they reach those higher salaries, no matter what they thought before. Then again, at least they're not simply pandering to people's greed.

They also plan to replace VAT with eco-taxes, the idea behind eco-taxes being that the tax is based on the natural resources used and the pollution produced whilst creating a product, and associated with the use/consumption of that product. The idea is to "redistribute" the burden of such tax according to the environmental impact of producing and consuming products, and although they claim this system would not have as high an administrative cost as the current system of VAT, there's no explanation of how or why this is the case.