A cuppa or a coup?
Neil Clark
HURRAH FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS: FASCISTS AND FASCISM IN BRITAIN BETWEEN THE WARS by Martin Pugh Cape, £20, pp. 320, ISBN 0224064398 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 In David Lean’s classic film This Happy Breed, husband and wife Frank and Ethel Gibbons pause for a moment to listen to a Blackshirt haranguing the crowd in Hyde Park. They glance at each other, smile and then utter the immortal words, ‘Let’s go for a nice cup of tea.’ The view that fascism never made it big in interwar Britain, because as a people we will always prefer a brew to a coup, is one which has persisted for over half a century. Yet, as Martin Pugh shows in his masterly study of fascism and fascists between the wars, it’s one which, if not wholly wrong, certainly requires serious revision.
The Blackshirts may never have made it into power, but fascist ideas were far more widespread in Britain than the official postsecond world war version of history would have us believe. In the aftermath of Belsen and Auschwitz, many will find this appalling. But while today fascism is considered an extreme and indefensible ideology, for many interwar Britons fascist beliefs seemed eminently reasonable.
The first of several myths that Pugh seeks to debunk is that interwar fascism was a ‘political contagion’, arriving, like most unpleasant things, from abroad and something against which the British had an inbuilt immunity. While many fascist groups did draw their inspiration from Mussolini’s Italy — and in the case of the British Union of Fascists (the BUF) their funding too — the preconditions for a fascist movement were already present in Britain before 1914 and the fascism which did develop had a distinctly British flavour.
Myth two is the political classification of all fascist parties as being on the ‘far right’. Some, such as Viscount Lymington’s English Mistery — which sought to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages — were reactionary, but the most popular fascist party of the period, the BUF, had a programme of social and economic reform far to the left of anything the Labour party was offering at the time. John Beckett, the former Labour MP who followed another, Oswald Mosley, into the BUF, claimed to have found more sincere socialist conviction in his new party than he had ever seen in his former one and was not alone among left-wing radicals in believing that the progressive, modernising programme outlined by Mosley in his ‘The Greater Britain’ manifesto of 1932 offered the working classes significantly more hope than the means test bequeathed them by Ramsay MacDonald.
Another myth is that the fascist views were too ‘extreme’ to be co-opted by other parties. The definition of extremist is a relative one — it was not the self-styled ‘socialist imperialist’ Mosley who stated that he was ‘strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’, but Winston Churchill, the man recently voted the nation’s greatest Briton. The fascists were not alone in their staunch support for empire, nor in their support of economic protectionism — a policy which was adopted, albeit in a diluted form, by the ‘moderates’ of the National Government in 1932.
Neither did anti-Semitism or violence at political meetings come with a fascist copyright. As Pugh points out, there were few politicians who went out of their way to insult Jews more than Sir William Joynson-Hicks, who received as his reward the job of home secretary in Stanley Baldwin’s 1924-29 Conservative government. Joynson-Hicks would have felt less at home in the BUF, which, at least in its early days, eschewed anti-Semitism and forbade Jew-baiting in any form. The BUF’s slide into anti-Semitism in the mid-tolate Thirties is commonly held to have lost it support, but Pugh believes that the party may actually have suffered by not being antiSemitic enough — at a time when the influx of Jewish refugees was pushing the issue up the agenda and the BUF found itself outflanked by other newly formed fascist parties.
But why, if so many of its tenets were so widely accepted, did fascism — and in particular the BUF — fail to make a major political breakthrough? Bad luck and timing undoubtedly played their part. The gravest economic/political crisis of the period reached its peak in 1930/1 before the BUF had even come into existence, and by the time the party had hit their stride unemployment, though still high in many parts of the country, was already falling nationwide. In 1936 the BUF sniffed power at the time of the constitutional crisis, but King Edward VIII’s tame surrender to Baldwin’s ultimatum dashed their hopes of being summoned as members of a new government. The lead-up to war saw the fascists under increasing pressure: Hitler’s foreign policy highlighted the contradiction between their patriotism and their increasingly pro-German stance. In the end, liberal democracy, long derided by the fascists for being weak and dissolute, had the last laugh. In May 1940, Mosley, his wife and several other hundred fascists were arrested under Regulation 18B, and held without charge — the foundation in Churchill’s own words of ‘all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist’. As Pugh points out, neither Nazi Germany, fascist Italy or Soviet Russia was able to mobilise their human resources and win the co-operation of the population as effectively as Britain in the waging of the second world war. In its moment of crisis, liberalism proved that it worked after all, even if it meant at times doing some rather illiberal things.
But, 60 years on, does Britain’s national story since 1945 really make, as Pugh concludes, ‘the earlier fascist thesis about conspiracy, decline, decadence and rejuvenation appear irrelevant and defeatist’? The jury is surely still out on this one and you don’t have to be a fascist to have your doubts.
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