Penny Kemp, campaigner and activist described as the ‘trailblazer of Green socialism’ – obituary

Penny Kemp, who has died aged 71 after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease, was a pivotal figure in the rise of the Green Party of England and Wales; she was its co-chair when it first made an impact, in the 1989 Euro elections, a long-serving member of its executive, and the handler of its relations with the wider Left.

Witty, exuberant, committed and a gifted organiser in a movement not prone to being organised, she was to her collaborator Peter Tatchell a “true trailblazer of Green socialism”. She tried to persuade Jeremy Corbyn to enter a pact with the Greens, and once turned down a safe Labour seat.

Penny Kemp joined what was then the Ecology Party in 1979. Between then and 2017, when her health deteriorated, she was at crucial points the party’s chair, co-chair or communications co-ordinator. She worked tirelessly to ensure Green speakers got their share of publicity, lining up panellists for Any Questions? or wangling an appearance on a daytime chat show – and won a place for the Greens in one of the leaders’ debates during the 2015 general election.

By her death, the Greens could claim one MP, two peers, three London Assembly members and 477 local councillors. In Scotland, their sister party is in coalition talks with the SNP.

Penny Kemp believed that “the three tenets of economic, social and ecological justice must be part of a whole. You can’t just add on environmental policy [to a conventional party’s manifesto]; it must be central.

“Justice is the driving thing and if you have a just and more equal society, you have a happier and healthier society. I’m not just here to save the planet – I think the planet will save itself quite happily without us on it. I think we are here to save ourselves.”

One of her achievements was a United Nations resolution on the environmental effects of the 1991 Gulf War, which stemmed from a symposium she organised.

Penny Kemp rang the Jordanian royal palace because the war had cost the country 37 per cent of its GDP, and King Hussein sent his chief scientific adviser to the symposium’s first session, in London; the Iraqi ambassador and the chairman of Shell also attended.

She then took the event to New York, where influential figures including Paul Crutzen of the Max-Planck-Institut and the cosmologist and author Carl Sagan came on board. “I went to the UN, and ended up writing a new resolution which was taken up by Canada, Sweden and Jordan.”

Thereafter, whenever King Hussein was in London he would send a car round for her. The first time he asked what she would like to drink she started to say “gin and tonic”, but quick as a flash turned that into “the juice of an orange”.

Penny Kemp also played a part in advancing Green politics in Taiwan. In 1996 she was invited there for the island’s general election, and helped the Taiwanese Greens win a seat. The Mayor of Taipei even wore a green suit when they met.

She was also prepared to take direct action. In the 1980s she was one of a group of activists tracking nuclear-waste trains through Kent with a view to disrupting the traffic. An undercover police officer infiltrated the group and the attempt was foiled.

“The police searched my car and found a coat hanger, and tried to use that as evidence of conspiracy to commit criminal damage. I didn’t get charged in the end, but I wanted to go to court – I would have loved to ask how I was supposed to damage a nuclear train with a coat hanger!”

She was also the tireless long-time organiser of Glastonbury’s Green Futures field, pulling together a set of visionary guests each year – many of them personal friends – for her Speakers’ Forum.

Personalities spanning the political and social divide came to speak under the distinctive pink canvas roof, and stayed on around the campfire backstage, talking well into the night: Sir David King, Tony Benn, Ruby Wax, Justin Rowlatt, Billy Bragg, Vince Cable, Ed Miliband, Jonathan Cainer and many more.

Penny Kemp was involved in more festivals than Glastonbury. She was marketing director of the Big Green Gathering, and during the 1990s staged events based on “green and earth magic principles” on her own field at Headcorn in Kent, culminating in the hugely popular Small World Festival. One happy memory was of her inaugurating the first compost toilet on her land, emerging from the canvas curtain to rapturous applause.

She also co-founded Headcorn Sustainability, encouraging the use of local produce. She explained: “A typical Sunday dinner travels 49,000 miles to get on your plate, and emits 37kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. You can see the difference that would be made if it’s only travelled 12 or 20 miles.”

She was born Penelope Bineham in Watford on May 10 1949, one of five children of a quantity surveyor and a post mistress. The family moved to Sussex, and she attended Fosse Bank School at Tonbridge.

Penny married at 19, had two daughters, and until joining the Green Party’s staff ran her own driving school (“Not very green,” said her daughter Tracy.)

She was introduced to the Ecology Party by a friend who was its regional treasurer. “I knew there had to be something else than just socialism combining social justice, economic justice and ecological justice. I’d read books about ecology and then I came across the Ecology Party – it was the missing link!”

In the mid-1980s she became the party’s South-East regional representative, finding herself on the interview panel when it decided to employ its first press officer. The successful candidate was Caroline Lucas, now MP for Brighton Pavilion. She recalled: “Penny was a brilliant boss, immensely kind and huge fun – and an utterly tireless champion for climate and nature.”

Penny Kemp was instrumental in opening dialogue between the relatively young Green movement and the traditional Left, organising the first national Greens and Socialists conference with Tatchell and Robin Cook. She pursued some of these themes in a book she wrote with Derek Wall in 1990, A Green Manifesto for the 1990s.

While the Green Party won 14.5 per cent of the vote – if no seats – in the 1989 Euro elections, she felt it had done so on a false premise. Her fellow co-chairs took references to animal rights and opposing Nato out of its manifesto – yet the Telegraph still condemned the party’s programme as dangerous.

After this ground was lost at the 1992 election she was elected to manage the party’s election campaigns, then took charge of its media operations.

Penny Kemp did not bother with diplomacy when Germany’s Greens agreed to troops being sent to Afghanistan to support America’s “war on terror”. She wrote: “Greens who are propping up the German government have put power before principle. Their claim that they must participate in the war effort in order to make it more humane is obscene.”

However, she did make concessions to the art of spin. After the Greens first took control of Brighton & Hove council in 2011 on an anti-austerity programme, then pushed through a package of cuts, she blamed Labour councillors for having joined with the Conservatives to block the Greens’ proposed budget increase.

Before the 2015 election, the broadcasters proposed three party leaders’ debates without the Greens, with David Cameron and Ed Miliband, plus Nick Clegg in two and Nigel Farage in one.

Penny Kemp got them to change their minds, firing off a letter of protest. She wrote: “The Green Party received 150,000 more votes than the Liberal Democrats in the 2014 European elections and won three times as many seats. In general election opinion polls the Greens are neck-and-neck with the junior coalition partners.

“Despite our comparative lack of airtime, our policies are consistently popular with the public. Political commentators have declared the decision to be unfair and even the prime minister has called for the Greens to be included in the debates on the grounds of fairness.”

She succeeded in setting up a fourth debate in which the Greens’ Natalie Bennett took part.

Penny Kemp’s illness forced her to give up full-time work for the party in 2017, but she kept up her involvement at Glastonbury for two more years. “The gradual onset of the disease was both debilitating and frustrating for Penny as her speech was affected,” a colleague said. “For a woman of many opinions it was difficult for her to be understood, but understood she was. She insisted on being there, and had the support of dedicated and wonderful friends.”

Penny Kemp’s marriage to John Kemp was dissolved in the early 1980s. She is survived by her partner Johann Sikora, her two daughters from the marriage, and five grandchildren.

Penelope Kemp, born May 10 1949, died June 12 2021