“Death to the Bank of England!” and “Abolish the means test and issue the National Dividend to all” read the banners of a uniformed paramilitary group marching to the beat of a drum through the streets of early-1930s London. Under the command of an enigmatic leader code-named White Fox, backed by the propaganda circular Attack!, these well-drilled and disciplined brigades sought the implementation of Universal Basic Income (then termed “Social Credit”) via direct action and extra-parliamentary means.

Despite what the popular consciousness suggests, Sir Oswald Mosely’s BUF were not the only paramilitary mob active in Britain prior to the banning of political uniforms under the Public Order Act 1936. These men-of-action pounded the streets in green, not black. Though now largely forgotten, the Green Shirts are thought to have numbered not much less than the high estimate of 10,000 Black Shirts.

Overlooked though they may now be, the Green Shirt movement was of great interest to Wales’ First Minister during his decades as an academic. The Green Shirts “offer the substantial foundation of being the only example in twentieth-century British history of a social movement which began as a youth and cultural organisation and became a militant, paramilitary, uniformed political force, equipped with a radical economic theory and vision of a reformed society,” writes Mark Drakeford in the introduction to his far from unreadable Social Movements and their Supporters: The Green Shirts in England. 

Released in 1997, the work tells the history of the Green Shirts, from the ashes of the First World War to their effective dissolution in the maelstrom of the Second, through a series of interviews conducted with surviving members during Drakeford’s youth. 

In 1918, an eccentric cartoonist, author and high-ranking member of the Boy Scout Movement, John Hargrave, returned from the Great War. Repulsed by the brutality he saw whilst serving as a medical orderly during the Gallipoli Campaign, he turned on the culture he believed to have spawned it.

The redemptive quality of outdoorsy, adventurous activity still appealed to Hargrave, but Baden-Powell’s Edwardian values of subservience to God, King and Empire were now abhorrent. Thus began the search for alternatives. Unlike other adrift lost generation contemporaries, he did not see the principles of hierarchy, discipline or even the cultivation of an elite as evils in themselves. Hargrave had hated the war, but he had loved the rigidity and the structure of the army. England simply needed new versions of the old forms.

Weekend camps were now to feature open discussions of sex and nakedness

A splinter group was developed — which would later leave the Scouting Movement altogether — named The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift. Here, he thought, an elite could be generated not through birthright, but through taboo-breaking lifestyle choices. A fellowship could be held together not through loyalty to the nation, but to an invented tradition determined by a charismatic leader: himself. Accordingly, traditional Scout uniforms and rituals were dropped and replaced with elaborate arts-and-craft inspired costumes. Weekend camps were now to feature open discussions of sex and nakedness, accompanied by woodcraft, critique of organised religion, and the studying and practice of Hargrave’s invented cultural mishmash of Arthurian legend, the occult and Native American symbolism.

The Kibbo Kift kept this up for roughly a decade when Rolf Gardiner, the Germanophile folk-revivalist (and later National Socialist sympathiser — a detail omitted by Drakeford), introduced Hargrave to the monetary reform theories of a Major C.H. Douglas. Douglas believed that the economic issues of the day lay in the problem of under-consumption, not production. The international system of banks and financiers should be dismantled and a dividend, or Social Credit, should be issued to every citizen. This would close the gap between the insufficient purchasing power of the consumer and the total amount of goods produced. The trick would also allow greater freedom for the individual to choose between work and leisure, loosening the reliance of the pre-war capitalist system on the family unit.

Social Credit, which promised both practical-sounding economic solutions and a potential to free men and women from the spiritual degradation of the industrial age, had obvious appeal. The idea energised the group, transforming the inward-focused eccentrics of the Kibbo Kift into a mass movement. The cumbersome name was changed, and the craft costumes were put away in favour of smart pressed uniforms. Branches sprang up across the country. 

Though they courted and recruited from the ranks of the working classes and the unemployed, the Green Shirts did not believe they were representing the proletariat, or that the proletariat had a particular historical role to play in the transformation of society. There would be an elite vanguard who would use the power of symbols and emotion to mobilise the masses, and that would be that. The Green Shirts toyed with democracy — registering as a party and standing a candidate in South Leeds in 1935, who polled 11 per cent of the vote — but they also shot an arrow through the window of 10 Downing Street and found themselves in frequent violent confrontations with both the left and the right.

One interviewee, Colonel Tacey, described as being a “level-headed and reliable witness” by Drakeford, claimed the group were offered funding from Joseph Goebbels in exchange for refraining from attacks on National Socialism.

The Green Shirts were ascendent until 1936 when, due to the passing of the Public Order Act, the threat to parliamentary democracy presented by bodies of disciplined, uniformed men was stamped out. Thereafter, much as with the Black Shirts, the militarisation of society and the eventual outbreak of war swept up the recruits and satiated the desire for a collective mission among Britain’s youth. The movement was formally dissolved in 1951.

Social movements take exotic theories and bring them into the mainstream

In the closing chapter, Drakeford reflects on whether Green Shirt activity could be classified as a success. They of course did not overthrow parliamentary democracy, nor was Social Credit, according to Douglas’ doctrine, implemented anywhere. After the mid-30s and especially after 1945, the moment had in any case passed for the street militia putsch. Nevertheless, Drakeford suggests that the real function of a social movement is to take exotic theories and bring them into the mainstream: Keynesian economics, child benefit and the welfare state, he suggests, were all influenced by the actions and ideas of the Green Shirts. 

“The shocking elements of the movement — mixed camping, frank discussions of sex, the challenge to established orthodoxies in dress and speech — have all been absorbed into mainstream culture,” Drakeford correctly observes. 

Absorbed enough, perhaps, for many of the ideas and values of the group to now be realised by Drakeford himself as the head of the devolved government of Wales. 

Wales is currently undergoing a UBI pilot scheme. Over the next few years, around 500 care leavers will be given £1600 monthly. Drakeford clearly wishes to expand the project. He says: 

Our radical initiative will not only improve the lives of those taking part in the pilot, but will reap rewards for the rest of Welsh society. If we succeed in what we are attempting today this will be just the first step in what could be a journey that benefits generations to come.

On the cultural front, mandatory sex education is to be extended to children as young as three years old after a legal challenge launched by a group of parents was dismissed by the High Court in December.

The Green Shirts were not an insignificant preoccupation of Drakeford’s life. The interviews were conducted over two decades, with Drakeford thanking his friends and family in the acknowledgements for “having to live with Green Shirts for all this time”. He ends the book writing that the “power of the experience burns more than half a century later” and that this “demands both a celebration and a sense of humility from those who come afterwards”. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that he has Hargrave’s pack somewhere in mind as he subjects Wales to these English taxpayer-subsidised experiments?