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In last years UK general election the Green Party polled 1.1 million votes (3.8% of the total) but only returned 1 MP (Caroline Lucas in Brighton, now co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales) due to the FPTP electoral system. This was the greatest success a green party had ever had in a general election, but could they have been more successful earlier?

In the 1979 GE their predecessor the Ecology Party gained just under 40,000 votes, not a bad increase for a party that had only been founded 4 years earlier (succeeding the UK's first environmental party PEOPLE, itself only founded in 1972). The Ecology Party saw their membership increase tenfold during this time, becoming the fourth largest political party in the UK, but were unable to capitalise on these successes and were soon overtaken as the fourth party by the newly formed SDP.

In the late 1980s the Green Party (following a name change in 1985) saw major electoral success in the 1989 European parliament elections (helped by increased environmental concerns after the Chernobyl disaster), gaining over 2 million votes (the third largest vote-share, eclipsing the recently merged Social and Liberal Democrats) cast in the greatest electoral success of a green party in any election in the UK, but again due to FPTP they failed to gain any seats.


How can the Greens/Ecology capitalise on the momentum they had built up in the late 1970s and late 1980s to gain elected representation before they did OTL, and how would this earlier representation effect the way green politics developed? Would overpopulation remain a concern of the party, would they still feel the need to greater emulate their continental cousins from the 1980s onwards, would the party still split into separate English & Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish parties as happened in 1990?
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