Ben Greene (28 December 1901 – October 1978) was a British Labour Party politician and pacifist. He was interned during the Second World War because of his fascist associations and appealed to the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords against his detention. In the leading case of Liversidge v. Anderson the Law Lords declined to interfere with ministerial discretion on matters of national security and thus refused to review his detention. Early life Greene was born in Brazil to a mother who had been born a German national, but moved with his family to England as a child, in 1908. He attended Berkhamsted School, where his uncle, Charles Greene, was headmaster and where his cousins, Graham Greene and Hugh Greene, were also pupils. He went up to Wadham College, Oxford, but became committed to the causes of the Labour Party and the Society of Friends (Quakers), and left without graduating. Until 1923 he worked with the Society of Friends, the Save the Children Fund and the American Relief Administration in humanitarian work in Eastern Europe. Greene was motivated to get involved in politics almost solely by his belief in pacifism. He returned to London and during the 1923 United Kingdom general election he worked for Clement Attlee in the Limehouse constituency, where he met John Beckett. In 1924 Greene joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and soon became its liaison with Ramsay MacDonald. He fought Basingstoke in the 1924 United Kingdom general election, but without success. He often felt that Labour Party policies were at odds with his pacifism. Greene got married in 1925 and became a businessman, in England and abroad, while serving on Berkhamsted Urban District Council and on Hertfordshire County Council, and becoming a Justice of the Peace (JP) in 1937. He unsuccessfully contested Gravesend against Irving Albery in 1931 and 1935. He also continued with human rights work in the Saar and Germany. By 1938 he had become disillusioned with the Labour Party, perceiving it as being in the grip of Communists, and resigned from it. Fascist friends Shocked by conditions in Germany, Greene formed the idea that Britain should co-operate with Nazi officials in order to facilitate the emigration of as many threatened Germans as possible. However, he fell under the influence of an English-born Nazi diplomat, Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, who was all too ready to exploit his naivety. Greene briefly joined the Peace