2022

Leadership Team 2022-23

Co-Leaders
Carla Denyer, Bristol City Councillor
Adrian Ramsay, former Deputy Leader and Norwich City Councillor Deputy Leader
Zack Polanski, London Assembly Member

  Early years

I trust you won’t mind a comment from me on the notion that this year is the party’s 50th anniversary. This year is only the anniversary of the first public meeting of PEOPLE, on February 24, 1973 in Coventry.  The founding of the party began with the launch of Movement for Survival in the Ecologist magazine in January 1972.  PEOPLE took over from Movement, and the real founders were Teddy Goldsmith and Robert Allen, not PEOPLE’s ‘Gang of Four’  –  who came a bit later.

Together with Roger Creogh-Osborne I’ve created an early history website of green politics in the UK

https://www.green-history.uk/David Taylor details the early years
and some important dates.

                  2021

Brig Oubridge gives his personal memories of the Green Party in conversation with Claudine Letsae.

Click here   Youtube

               1989

??, 1989   The European Elections

In those days, the Party was Eurosceptic.  But the thinking was that we would get MEPs and change the Common Market from within.

We gained 15% of the popular vote.  With proportional representation, this would have entitled us to 12 MEPs, so we sent the candidates who had been deprived of their seats to Strasbourg.Left to Right:
??,  Richard Lawson, Nic Bagnall, Sue Blount (Mallender), ??,  Felicity Norman, Steve Rackett, Nikki Lortvelyesy, Tim Andrews, David Milner, Jan Clark, Tony Slade.

Are you one of the people in the photo?  Can you provide any more names?

A Manifesto from the 1980s.

The Ecology Party changed its name to the Green Party in 1985.

                1975

People became the Ecology Party at Spring Conference in June 1975, held in Coventry.

The first Manifesto for a Sustainable Society was ratified.

          1972

      Change of Name

This was when campaigners began to organise in the face of threats to the environment.  Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson had been published in 1963 and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb in 1968.  The Ecologist magazine was launched in 1970.  Its Blueprint for Survival issue was very influential.

Movement for Survival was launched in London at Conway Hall, with 300 sttendees.  It became People when the “Gang of Four” Tony Whittaker, Lesley Whittaker, Michael Benfield and Freda Sanders decided that they needed to become more political to achieve the change that was needed.

Who were the Gang of Four?