Peace Party (UK)
political party in the United Kingdom
The Peace Party is a minor political party in the United Kingdom, founded in Surrey in 1996, campaigning mainly for pacifist and environmentalist issues. Its leader John Morris had stood at every general election since 1997.
History
The party was founded in 1996 as the Pacifist Campaign by a group of activists, including Quakers, in Guildford, Surrey. In 2001 it became the Pacifist Party and it was registered with the Electoral Commission in 2003 as "The Peace Party - Non-violence, Justice, Environment". The leader, retired geography teacher John Morris, has as of 2019 stood for the party in every general election since the party was founded, and though he expects to lose he says "Standing at election time means the word peace and some of the other words we use get put in front of everybody who is of voting age. It's worth the lost deposit - it's £500 well spent."
The party stood one candidate, John Morris, in the 1997 and 2001 general elections in the Guildford constituency, and two in the 2005 election with Caroline O'Reilly also standing in Brighton Kemptown. It fielded nine candidates in the South East England constituency during the 2004 European election, gaining 12,572 votes. This was equivalent to 0.6% of the votes cast in the South East and more than three other parties. The party has also stood in a number of local elections in Dartford, Kent, Horsham, West Sussex and Guildford. The party stood again in the 2009 European election in the South East region, winning 9,534 votes (0.4%).
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This entry incorporates text from “Peace Party (UK)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.