In the winter 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. 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 called 'Club of Thirteen', so named because it first met on 13 October 1972 in Daventry. This 'Club' 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, defence, energy 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. 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.
The party stood six candidates in the February 1974 General Election. They received a total of 4,576. The party lost all of its deposits by failing to win 12.5% of the votes cast, namely a total of £900. Lesley Whittaker and Edward Goldsmith were two of the six who stood in the election.
Membership rose and the party stood five candidates in the October General Election which cost the party £750. This affected preparations for that election, when PEOPLE's average vote fell to just 0.7%.
Constituency
Candidate
Votes
Percentage
Position
Birmingham Northfield
Elizabeth A Davenport
359
0.7
4
Coventry North West
Lesley Whittaker
313
0.8
4
Hornchurch
Benjamin Percy-Davies
797
1.8
4
Leeds East
Norma Russell
327
0.7
4
Romford
L H C Sampson
200
0.5
4
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".
