THE rejection of the Navitus Bay wind farm has been derided as "utterly illogical" by the Green's leader ahead of its autumn conference in Bournemouth.

The party's members will descend on the BIC between Friday and Monday just four months after Natalie Bennett led them to more than one million votes in this year's General Election.

And in an interview with the Daily Echo, the Australian said the conference will focus on climate change, human rights and electoral reform.

She also addressed the government's recent decision to scrap plans to build a controversial wind farm off Dorset's coast.

Opponents to the £3.5billion project claimed that as well as damaging the county's Jurassic Coast, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it would harm tourism, be inefficient and cause more environmental problems than it would solve.

Ms Bennett, however, said: "It is utterly illogical. We know that we need to move away from fossil fuels towards renewable.

"This was an excellent project that reflects many other similar ones already progressing up and down the country.

"I think the company has very good cause to be aggrieved and perhaps to ask for a review of this decision given, until we got the signals in the last week or so, there didn't seem to be grounds for turning it down."

She said Bournemouth was chosen to host the conference after being identified as "an area of growth" for the party following the election of the town's first Green councillor, Simon Bull.

"We had extremely strong results in the south west region in the General Election," she said. "Our membership is growing very fast in a region we very much want to acknowledge and promote in terms of the Green Party."

Asked how she felt about the recent rise of new left wing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Ms Bennett said: "What it reflects is that politics is heading in our direction. The approach that has dominated our political discourse since the rise of Margaret Thatcher – the idea that greed is good, that inequality doesn't matter and we can just keep trashing the planet - has clearly now failed.

"I think the Tory party is going to be left very stranded with some very extreme positions that simply don’t reflect the reality of the world we are living in."

Challenged by the Echo that Labour policy is more likely to now encroach on her own, resulting in a reduced Green vote, she said: "We will have to wait and see where the Labour Party settles its position.

"We will focus on our own policies, promoting the way things should be rather than following others."