We didn’t want politicians, we wanted people who were passionate in what we believed in.
Two solicitors walk into a Coventry pub. The birth of the Green Party sounds like the set-up to a bad joke.
But that’s where it started: at the Bridge Inn in Napton, where a small group of professionals began meeting after work to discuss their environmental concerns.
Their lively debates eventually got them thrown out of the pub, but they also prompted a simple question – why was no one doing anything?
Cappuccino
With Westminster seemingly uninterested, they decided to act themselves. Lesley Whittaker, her late husband Tony, and friends Michael Benfield and Freda Sanders founded their own political party. PEOPLE, as it was first known, was launched in 1972.
It would later become the Ecology Party before adopting its current name, the Green Party.
More than fifty years after co-founding Britain's Green movement, Lesley Whittaker believes Zack Polanski has returned the party to the radicalism that first inspired PEOPLE.
Lesley Whittaker was born during the Second World War and grew up in Salford. She told The Ecologist: “My green roots go right back to the beginning.
"I would get the bus home and go over the River Irwell, and it looked like a cappuccino. It was a dirty brown, polluted and filthy.”
Political
The publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring in 1962, exposing the damage caused by DDT, further shaped Whittaker’s views.
She was far from alone in her concerns. The 1960s saw the emergence of environmental organisations worldwide, including WWF and Friends of the Earth.
The catalyst for Whittaker’s activism, however, came from an unlikely source. In 1970, living in Coventry and working as a solicitor with her husband, Whittaker bought the August edition of Playboy magazine, which featured an interview with Dr Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.
A professor at Stanford University, Ehrlich argued rapid population growth would cause global famine. “Everything started to gel together,” Whittaker said. “We realised we would have to do something about this because no one else was.”
“We contacted all the political parties, and they all wrote back to us very politely and didn’t have a clue what we were talking about.”
Candidate
“Our funny little group of drinkers said there’s only one way, it’s going to have to be a new political party,” Whittaker recalled. “We didn’t have time to think about it. It was urgent so we just got on with it.”
Ehrlich's predictions did not come to pass. A veritable revolution in farming practices ensured more food could be produced to feed a growing global population, although this often relied on fossil fuels and other chemicals. Population globally is now expected to fall, raising concerns there will not be enough young people to support the older 'boomer' generation.
We didn’t want politicians, we wanted people who were passionate in what we believed in.
Having resolved to create a party, their first decision was what to name it. Whittaker said: “We decided that the trouble was being caused by people and the solution to the problems would be people, so we would call ourselves PEOPLE.”
The new party still needed a policy platform, however. Their meetings at the Bridge Inn had attracted people from throughout the country. They had also caught the attention of Edward "Teddy" Goldsmith, editor and founder of The Ecologist, who later became a PEOPLE candidate.
The Ecologist is now owned and published by the Resurgence Trust, an educational charity. The publication is independent and has no relationship with the Green Party or any other political organization. The publication does not endorse any party or candidate in any election.
Contest
In early 1972, Goldsmith and The Ecologist published A Blueprint for Survival, an influential special edition that argued for environmental and economic overhaul.
Whittaker said: “It gave us the bare bones of the policies that we should be looking at. They had done some intense thinking about it, and it was helpful to us. We didn’t have to do all the work.”
Inspired by Clement Attlee’s post-war government, Whittaker believed her party could enact similarly radical change.
She said: “We would have a five-year term during which we would make all the major changes the UK needed to become an ecology-based country. Now it sounds insane. We didn’t want politicians, we wanted people who were passionate in what we believed in.”
Within just a year, PEOPLE had set up 40 branches from Cornwall to Caithness and planned to contest every seat in the next general election.
Ecology
But events overtook them. Industrial strife prompted prime minister Ted Heath to call an early election in February 1974. PEOPLE fielded just six candidates.
Whittaker said: “Everything fell apart. But we had to fight it somehow, so I got my life savings out and put it down as my deposit. At least it was six people standing there on this policy programme.”
The new party also faced challenges from the media. Whittaker says, “I don’t know whether they deliberately tried to destroy us, but the media insisted on calling us The People’s Party, which in those days was the party that ran Russia and China.”
Accordingly, in 1975, PEOPLE was renamed The Ecology Party.
Success
In 1976, the Whittakers moved to Devon to start a new life of self-sufficiency farming. The move coincided with Lesley becoming increasingly disillusioned with the party.
She said: “A new executive came in by the late seventies and into the eighties, and I thought they’d lost the plot, rather.”
She decided not to renew her membership, but continued to support from afar as the movement became what is now the Green Party.
Today, Whittaker believes Polanski has recaptured the spirit of the movement’s early days. The Green Party has enjoyed a huge rise in membership and some breakthrough electoral successes. But its renewed radicalism is the thing that most impresses Whittaker.
Radical
She said: “They are appealing to the young generation and have backing from other people too. Zack is a most interesting person. He’s clearly very ambitious, but you need to be to take charge of a party.”
Reflecting on whether Polanski’s eco-populism may alienate more traditional green voters, Whittaker said: “When we started everyone asked us if we were left or right wing and we said neither.
"If you are seriously green, some things you have to be right wing about and some of it you can be very left wing about because your social agenda is a very different thing.”
She concluded: “The reason why I left was because it had become a conventional political party and was trying to win a few seats here and there. It wasn’t a radical party. It is again, and that’s great. It’s what I would have wanted.”
This Author
James Edginton is a freelance journalist based in England who covers politics and environmental issues.
