"Ugh, what does the Social Credit Party even agree on?"
- Prime Minister Jacob Koppel Javits (Con.) in 1967
SOCIAL CREDIT - ITS RISE AND FALL
Before the breakdown of British politics in the coming of Mixed-Member Proportional, in the days of the dominance of the Big Three, there was always a fourth choice. This fourth choice in a lot of areas were regionalists, and they continue to persist in their crusade to represent their countries in the Houses of Parliament today. Another option many would have, especially in more suburban and developed areas, were the Progressives - a party commonly seen as "more red than the Liberals, less than the SDP" and often championing minority causes overlooked by the establishment, such as civil rights. The Progressives still exist today as part of the SDP after a merger in the 1980s.
But if you didn't have a regionalist party worthy of credibility, or lived far away from the suburban lands of Progressive voters, and you wanted to send a message to the Big Three, there was a choice to you.
Social Credit.
The general idea of Social Credit, as famously confusing as it was, boiled down to a simple sum "(wage paid to workers) + (price of goods needed) < (price that it had to be sold at to make a profit)". C. H. Douglas, the man who came up with Social Credit, argued that it ended up with workers being unable to afford the goods they made, and thus this caused poverty. This theory was especially popular in rural areas where farmers in the middle of the Great Depression were forced to realise that they sending their crops and lifestock to market would cost more than they would sell for.
Douglas came up with several policies that he argued would solve the sum, by ensuring workers had more capital to invest in the economy and ensure they would trade better, without turning to
socialism. Douglas famously declared in the early 1930s, when a lot of Social Credit parties popped up all around the UE, that partisan politics was not the answer. Much to his dismay, his followers universally ignored his statement and continued to push for names on ballots and manifestos rolled out for Social Credit.
The 1935 imperial election was the first time an united Social Credit Party of Great Britannia rolled out. Led by Englishman John Hargrave, the idiosyncratic yet charismatic leader of the quasi-scouts pacifist Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, it performed very well, winning several seats in areas the Social Democrats and National Government were unpopular in, especially in rural British-American areas.
The first batch of Creditors in the Imperial Parliament was a motley bunch. All inspired by C. H. Douglas, but it was clear the interpretation was wildly different. Hargrave, seen as on the party's "left" for his die-hard pacifism and opposition to racism and sexism, was forced to apply a light whip to maintain party unity with the more conservative elements of the party. This would lead many comic satirists to resurrect an old Oscar Wilde joke to refer to the Social Credit Party
Lady Bracknell - "What is your politics?"
John Hargrave - "I've afraid I have none, I am a Social Creditor."
The 1937 election, called in the wake of the Abdication Crisis, almost wiped out the Social Credit Party before it established itself. Over its almost two years in Parliament by that point, the party split its votes for a lot of bills and consistently pushed for monetary reform that even with some interest, the other parties universally rejected. And their incoherent response to the Crisis meant that they lost a lot of their seats in the election, much to the secret delight of Sir Walter George who held a deep loathing for them.
Hargrave resigned in the aftermath of the election, and a balding, gruff pastor from the west took charge - William Aberhart (known to many as "Bible Bill" for his die-hard Christian views). Aberhart rejected Hargrave's light whip system, and rather oriented the party more around their economic policies, while emphasising "family values" and emphasising God, creating a perception that on social issues, Social Credit was the most conservative of the "significant parties" [SDP, Libs, Cons, Progs, SoCred].
The German-speaking Aberhart also created an unusual coalition of soft-regionalists by opposing the government's proposal for an universal education scheme, pointing out that it would "silence the many languages from our land". This would lead to the 1945 election returning some SoCred MPs from Alaska, Quebec, Acadiana and Florida, and in Scotland Edwin Scrymgeour, an independent Prohibitionist former MP won his seat on the Social Credit line before dying two years later and forcing a by-election the Creditors lost.
But Aberhart wouldn't live to see this, dying in 1943 in the midst of the war. The leadership went to an obscure Westralian MP who won his seat in an upset in 1937 and proved a rather uncontroversial choice - Charles North. North would prove a "silent workhorse" unlike Hargrave and Aberhart. A "moderate" in the party, he spent the next 13 years encouraging growth in Social Credit parties, no matter their inclinations. It was under his leadership that the Southron Credit Party was established, the Carolina branch of the SoCreds, and one very much focused on farmers and social evangelicalism. But he also oversaw the growth of the New Zealand Country Party as it shifted from orthodox theory to a more left-wing model.
Social Credit always had three streaks in it, the "reformists" which were on the party left and united monetary theory with social reforms, the "free-marketeers" which saw Social Credit as the best way to guard capitalism against the godless socialists and the far-right "Douglasites" which, well, thought that it would be the best way to stop the (((bankers))) from undermining the economy. North was a free-marketeer, yet he had the perhaps misguided idea of "no enemies under the Social Credit banner".
With outright fascist parties being banned after the Second World War, a lot of would-be far-right people joined the Social Credit Party instead, raising suspicion with many people. North in his long leadership would insist that all the reports of Social Credit MPs talking about stopping "Jewish banks" were nothing but exaggeration and anyway, when it was obviously true [aka politically toxic], he kicked the guilty MP out.
By the late 1950s, Social Credit was at a high. The SDP and Liberals were both facing a blowback from their long time in coalition, the Progressives was struggling and the Conservatives firmly on the centre ground with Robert Menzies. Things were looking good for the Social Credit Party. And then the 1959 election came. A huge Social Credit surge that saw them win almost 20% of the vote. Menzies declaring that he would offer the chance of "joining government to show the people what they can do" to the Social Creditors. North was by this time just retired, but he had a key part in negotiation.
The leader of the Social Credit Party by this time was Ernest Manning. Keenly ready to take the Creditors into government, he oversaw the silent "deprioritising" of many old monetary reform ideas, and instead replaced it with more social conservatism. This created an outcry with more die-hard monetary reformists on the party's left and far-right that threatened to bring down the second Menzies ministry before it started. Manning relented and Menzies ultimately ended up putting a National Dividend in his budget, one that strained relations with more laissez-faire Tories who saw Social Credit as just baloney.
This would be the start of the party's troubles. The luxury of Opposition meant that the party could be as incoherent as it needed to be, and still broadly get away with it if they put on an united face at campaign time. The heat of government hurt their appeal and once Jacob Javits took over, he called a snap election which he hoped would deal with the Creditors for good. Unfortunately for both Javits and Social Credit, the arithmetic that emerged, even with a much shrunk Social Credit Party, only offered one possible coalition choice what with the Liberals very much unwilling to join the Tories and the SDP, well, the purple coalition was still very much unthinkable in 1964. Manning ended up, after much grievances with well, Javits' not being Protestant [that's a big understatement], agreeing to a continuation of the coalition.
Javits was an One Nation Tory who found that he could agree very much with the left of the Social Credit Party, but he very much despised the hard-right for being "Nazis in green shirts". Much to Manning's displeasure, Javits could be found chatting with the Social Credit Party's left-wing "Fellowship" MPs [of people such as the young wunderkind Bruce Beetham and long-time activist and military officer John Loverseed] more than with the Social Credit Party's establishment. The thing that brought down the Javits ministry was civil rights. A Jew from New York, Javits always held civil rights as a cause he would champion, and plenty of Fellowship MPs would applaud him, but the SoCred establishment as a whole insisted on "dominion rights".
Part of Manning's willingness to go hardline on this was his worry that the SoCreds would be increasingly competed on the right by the rising newly-created Heritage Party that in the last Carolina election, wiped out the Southron Credit Party to just one sole seat. Javits called a vote of confidence in his government, to test just how much Manning would go on this, and ended up losing it as the right-wing of the Creditors as well as the right-wing Tories sided with the Opposition to bring down his government.
The 1968 election was unforgiving to the Social Credit Party. Shackled with a government that was being seen as pro-civil rights, yet voted to bring it down due to their opposition to such, both left and right voters abandoned Social Credit. The Fellowship MPs increasingly became more and more a separate party and more tied with environmentalism and human rights, while the more die-hard soc-cons quickly defected to the Heritage Party.
And Aberhart's regionalist coalition shattered as Manning's statements on faith led to a split on religious lines as Real Caouette took the non-Protestant free-marketeers out to form the second Independent Social Credit Party, but he later labelled it "Democratic Party for Social Credit", leading to the 68 election being even more of a massacre than it would have been otherwise. The 1969 leadership election was between the Fellowship champion Sir John Loverseed and a moderate free-marketeer Missourian by the name of Al Quie. Quie narrowly won, and the Fellowship MPs left to form the Fellowship Party, which was for most of the 70s heavily reliant on the Progressives' support to get in Parliament, and by 1980 stood alone for the first time under a new name and a new identity [and getting burgeoning dominion Green parties' support in the process] - the Green Party.
Quie was a believer in monetary reform theory, but he was still a Conservative and was indeed just elected as one. This led to some grumbling with the die-hard purists who felt that decades moving away from Douglas' theory has undermined the party. And of course, some on the party's far-right [that haven't left for Heritage] insisted that this was because (((bankers))) have interfered with the party. Quie, full well knowing the Social Credit Party was tainted, reached out to Caouette's Democrats and proposed a "Confederation of Regions". Monetary theory would of course still be in the party, but the rebrand would allow the party to refound itself on a new, more coherent ground. Caouette accepted.
Some bitter die-hard people went and founded the Continuity Social Credit Party, but once all the important Social Credit parties by that time accepted the merger, they became irrelevant. The Confederation of Regions would increasingly become more and more a party for rural interests and social conservatism as Douglas' theories were left on the shelf, gathering dust, and when the party rebranded as the Populist Alliance for Democracy, the book was burnt.
However, it would have a legacy as some people remember the 1960s and the days of the National Dividend [before it was repealed sharpish by the SDP government before the economy started to tank as a result], so by the 2010s, when a young fresh-faced Asian-British chap started talking about bringing back the National Dividend,
but doing it "right" this time, as a "Citizens' Dividend" and doing it as Universal Basic Income, those people certainly listened.
Leaders of the Social Credit Party of Great Britannia
John Hargrave (England, Great Britain) 1935-1937
William Aberhart (Alberta, Canada) 1937-1943*
Charles North (Westralia) 1943-1956
Ernest Manning (Alberta, Canada) 1956-1969
Al Quie (Minnesota, Missouri) 1969-1971
