PEOPLE Party

Origins

In the summer of 1972 Lesley Whittaker a surveyor and property agent bought a copy of Playboy magazine in which there was an interview with Paul R. Ehrlich about overpopulation and how he and his wife were giving up two years of their lives to the cause. This article inspired Whittaker and her husband Tony (a former Kenilworth councillor for the Conservative Party) to form a small group of professional and business people 'Club of Thirteen', so named because it first met on 13 October 1972 in Daventry. This included surveyors and property agents Freda Sanders and Michael Benfield, who had similar ideas to the Whittakers, and worked with them in their practice in Coventry.

Formation

Many in this 'Club' were wary of forming a political party however after a few weeks in November 1972 the Whittakers, Sanders and Benfield agreed to form 'PEOPLE' as a new political party to challenge the UK political establishment. Its policy concerns published in 1973 included economics, employment, defense, energy (fuel) supplies, land tenure, pollution and social security, as then seen within an ecological perspective. Subsequently recognized as perhaps the world's earliest Green party this had the first edition of the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society as a background statement of policies inspired by A Blueprint for Survival (published by The Ecologist magazine). The editor of The Ecologist, Edward 'Teddy' Goldsmith, merged his Italian 'Movement for Survival' with PEOPLE. Goldsmith became one of the leading members of the new party during the 1970s.

Election February 1974

The party stood five candidates in the February 1974 General Election who received 4,576 votes spread across six seats. The party lost all its deposits by failing to win an unreformed 12.5% of the votes cast, namely £900 (equivalent to £8,500 in 2015). Following the election, an influx of left-wing activists took PEOPLE in a more left-wing direction, causing something of a split. Lesley Whittaker and Edward Goldsmith were two of the five which stood in the election.

Election October 1974

Membership rose and the Party stood five candidates eight months later in the October General Election which cost the party £450. This affected preparations that election, when PEOPLE's average vote fell to just 0.7%.

1975 conference

After much debate, the party's 1975 conference adopted a proposal to change its name to the Ecology Party to gain more recognition as the party of environmental concern.

Party co-founder Tony Whittaker noted in an interview with Derek Wall '… voters did not connect PEOPLE with ecology. What I wanted was something that the media could look up in their files so that, when they wanted a spokesman of the issue of ecology, they could find the Ecology Party and pick up the phone. It was as brutal and basic as that. PEOPLE didn't communicate what we had hoped it would communicate'.

Derek Wall, in his history of the Green Party, contends that the new political movement focused initially on the theme of survival, which shaped the "bleak evolution" of the nascent ecological party during the 1970s. Furthermore, the effect of the "revolution of values" during the 1960s would come later. In Wall's eyes, the party suffered from a lack of media attention and "opposition from many environmentalists", which contrasted the experience of other emerging Green parties, such as Germany's Die Grünen. Nonetheless, PEOPLE invested much of its resources in engaging with the indifferent environmental movement, which Wall calls a "tactical mistake".