PEOPLE Party
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PEOPLE Party
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|---|---|
| Leader | Tony Whittaker |
| National Secretary | Lesley Whittaker |
| Founder |
Tony Whittaker Lesley Whittaker Freda Sanders Michael Benfield |
| Founded | November 1972 |
| Merger of | Club of Thirteen Movement for Survival |
| Preceded by | None |
| Succeeded by | The Ecology Party |
| Headquarters | Coventry |
| Ideology | Green politics |
| Political position | Left-wing |
The PEOPLE Party was a political party in the United Kingdom. It was the first Green political party in the United Kingdom and Europe as a whole, and the political predecessor of the Green Party of England and Wales, Green Party of Scotland and the Green Party of Northern Ireland.
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.
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.
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Wikipedia