This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first meeting of a group that was, with a few name changes, to emerge as the Green Party of England and Wales.
It owes its origins to the People Party, which was founded in November 1972, but only held its first meetings in February 1973. Just a couple of years later it was renamed the Ecology Party, and in 1985 as the Green Party, and slightly tweaked in 1990 as separate Green Parties were set up in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The archives of the Green Party of England and Wales are now held at the LSE, and their library has put on an exhibition looking back at the long history, not just of the party, but also of many aligned campaigns.
Ranging from cutting down on street litter with the Keep Britain Tidy campaign through to anti-nuclear campaigns – both bombs and power plants, the exhibition is a collection of ephemera, of leaflets and newspaper cuttings, of posters and letters.
A sort of blast from the past is an early election poster from 1979, which has the Ecology Parrty candidate, but also the National Front one – they both lost to Keneth Baker MP though.
Some of the early headlines in the exhibition would not look out of place today – such as from the September 1990 edition of Econews, which opens with a warning that the motor car is killing London, although an advert next to it offering “cycling for softies” is possibly less viable today.
The party shows its early objections to nuclear power — something the party still upholds, to the considerable ire of other green campaigners who see it as a necessary baseload backup for renewable power supplies. Let’s overlook the Green Party’s peculiar objections to low-carbon transport – HS2.
As an exhibition though, it’s like a lot of displays of documents from the near-past, being both unfeasonably amateur at times, and a reminder how grassroots campaigns were run in the day of the Typewriter instead of Twitter.
In a way, the party won. Cranks aside, there are few people now who disagree with the basic premise, that climate change is real and pollution is bad — and the argument has shifted onto how to and quickly to solve the problems.
As a political legacy, that’s pretty impressive.
The exhibition, Clothing this Naked Earth: Politics and the Planet is at the LSE Library until 20th August 2023.
It’s free to visit and open when the library is open — Mon-Fri 9am to 7pm and Sat-Sun 11am to 6pm.
