FASCIST POLICY [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
Sra,—In your leading article on the subject " Should Black • Shirts be banned ? "—in many ways a fair statement of point-of-view—I was surprised to find much of that very triteness of which the writer accuses Sir Oswald Mosley. The article asserts : - • -
" With all the play ho makes with the heart and soul of Britain' and ' the glorious standards of Britain' and so forth, Sir Oswald fails rather conspicuously to gauge the preference of the English people for its own methods and its own traditions when he borrows the name of his movement and the garb of his followers from Italy and his personal pose from Mussolini."
Now conceding the somewhat arbitrary conclusion that Sir Oswald has failed to gauge this " preference," surely the
objection amounts to no more than a quibble about nomen- clature and the acknowledgement of a significant political emblem. But if, as the sentence suggests, the meaning goes deeper and the writer is attacking the Fascists for adopting a policy which is undoubtedly stimulated to some extent by foreign initiative, though it is Sir Oswald's claim that British Fascism is an expression of a European State-form which is specially adapted to British needs and the Anglo-Saxon temperament, has he not the precedent of 1832, when the present system of government was accepted by the country partly as the result of revolutionary feeling stimulated by the example of France and Belgium ?
But, in any case, whether the Fascists have or have not adopted a policy which is not fundamentally British, the point to be decided is whether the system of government instituted 100 years ago is still valid in the present economic situation. If there is a better form the British people would be the first to recognize it, whether the initiative emanate from Rome or • Aston Tirrold, Berks.
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