Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
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The Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was a political party in the United Kingdom. It grew out of the Kibbo Kift, which was established in 1920 as a more craft-based alternative to the Boy Scouts.
The organisation was led by John Hargrave, who gradually turned the movement into a paramilitary movement for social credit. With its supporters wearing a political uniform of green shirts, in 1932 it became known as the Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit and in 1935 it took its final name, the Social Credit Party. The party published the newspaper Attack and was linked to a small number of incidents where green-painted bricks were thrown through windows, including that of 11 Downing Street.
The party stood a single candidate in the 1935 general election, a Mr. W. Townend, who polled 11% of the vote in Leeds South. Despite this lack of success, Hargrave was invited by William Aberhart to take an advisory post in the Government of the Province of Alberta, Canada, that had been formed by the Social Credit Party of Alberta.
The party began to decline when political uniforms were banned in 1937. Its activities were curtailed during World War II, and attempts to rebuild afterwards around a campaign against bread rationing had little success. Hargrave stood again in the 1950 general election, but after he gained only 551 votes, the party disbanded itself in 1951.
A second Social Credit Party was founded in 1965 by C. J. Hunt, a member of the former party, but it had little success and disbanded in 1978.
