“Fascist-style” movements were not an abnormality in the inter-war world, especially in Europe. Virtually every European country had either fascist style movements or fascist-style authoritarian regimes sometime between 1922 and 1939. Even Stalin’s “Red Menace” to the east exhibited tendencies during this period that are normally associated with Fascist-style rather than Communist regimes. That a fascist movement would be found in inter-war Britain is not a surprise. Britain, like all other European countries, dealt with the disillusionment of post-World War reality, the fear of Communist subversion, and the harshness of economic depression. But it would be irresponsible to cast British fascists as simply a cheap facsimile of its Continental counterparts. British fascism, while certainly influenced by Italy and Germany, was a uniquely British phenomenon.
Just as any in-depth study of the Italian Fascists must begin with Mussolini or a study of Nazism must begin with Hitler, studies in British fascism must begin with Sir Oswald Mosley. Unlike Mussolini and Hitler, Mosley was an aristocrat and a professional politician. After the First World War, Mosley served as a member of Parliament from 1918 to 1931. He was expelled from the Labour Party in 1931, and quickly organized the New Party. After the New Party’s sound defeat in the 1931 election, Mosley started the British Union of Fascists (BUF), an organization that boasted 50,000 members at the height of its popularity in 1934.
In 1968, Mosley wrote My Life, a self-serving autobiography/contemporary commentary. Despite the obvious drawbacks to an autobiography, and Mosley’s self-aggrandizing, this volume provides very interesting insight into Mosley’s and fascists’ psychology. Mosley emphasizes that “action must follow thought of political life is meaningless.” Like Hitler and Mussolini, Mosley states that “intellect, to be effective, must . . . unite with will.” Mosley’s work is also useful in that one gets a first hand account of why fascists and other revolutionaries resort to violence when faced with the reality that their movement could not win enough popular support to make headway into the government. “What were we to do?” Mosley asks, “Go home and call it a day?” More pointedly, Mosley explains, “It is precisely at this point that intellect must decide whether to retire into the ivory tower or to enter into the street with all that this entails.”
The standard scholarly biography of Mosley is Robert Skidelsky’s Oswald Mosley, published in 1975. Skidelsky’s work represents the first attempt to objectively assess Mosley’s life and career. As such, Skidelsky was met with fierce criticism that he had been too sympathetic to his subject. Prior to Skidelsky, historians treated Mosley as “an unprincipled political adventurer . . . [who] turned to fascism in a desperate attempt to seize power with an authoritarian program.” Skidelsky paints a picture of Mosley as a “Labour’s ‘lost leader,’ the man who might have arrested the drift into depression and national decline.” Furthermore, Skidelsky challenged the conventional wisdom that Mosley was a racist. R.I. McKibbin severely critical of Skidelsky on this point, stating that “Mosley was a racist in the conventional sense of the term,” and that his “objection to this apologia is not to its morality but to its relative importance.”
In response to criticisms of his bias, Skidelsky answered that “Those who demand . . . a ’rounded view’ of reality within the confines of a single book ignore the previous background and the fact that it is through the process of argument between different historians that contentious issues get clarified.” Regarding the charge that he dismissed Mosley’s racism and anti-Semitism, Skidelsky responds the the development of Mosley and the BUF’s anti-Semitism “cannot be explained without some reference to Jewish anti-Fascism.” Also, rather than a “simple-minded assumption that Mosley made a deliberate decision to ‘invade’ East London,” Skidelsky points out that “Gentile East Londoners sought out the BUF in order to make it a vehicle for their anti-Jewish grievances.” Skidelsky’s work is significant in that it represents a milestone in interpretation and analysis of the period, but students of the period should be cautioned to not rely solely on Skidelsky’s work for an understanding of Mosley and the fascist movement.
In 1980, scholarship on British fascism was a hot topic among contemporary history scholars, thanks in part to Skidelsky’s controversial biography. That year, Kenneth Lunn and Richard C. Thurlow edited British Fascism: Essays on the Radical Right in Inter-War Britain. The work was intended to “provide a reassessment of some of the major issues that have caused controversy.
Chief among these issues is the role of anti-Semitism and racism in the politics of British fascists. There is also discussion on the precursors to the BUF and almost a call for a shift in emphasis away from the person of Mosley and towards a wider view. The work is a valuable tool for those interested in an overview of controversies and the genesis of post-Skidelsky scholarship.
Seven years later, Thurlow would produce Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985. Thurlow’s work was intended to tie together Inter-war fascism with the resurgence of neo-Nazi movements in Britain in the late 1970s. Unlike previous works that tie British fascism strictly to the Inter-war period. Thurlow ties the roots of British fascism to the “political economic and social problems of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” and points to the “failure of the political elite adequately to manipulate and incorporate emerging populist mass forces in this period also proved crucial to the activism and conflict associated with British fascism.” Touching on its reactionary nature, Thurlow states that British fascism “originated in several distinct and contradictory reactions to the long-term decline of Britain and the dislocation caused by the First World War.” The culmination of the first half of Thurlow’s study is the statement that the BUF “represented the mature form of the fascist phenomenon in British society.” In total, Thurlow’s work contains a good, brief synopsis of the Inter-war period, but tries too hard to tie Inter-war fascism to the post-war variety as some sort of unbroken chain when clearly, many different dynamics are at work in the post-war and contemporary varieties of “fascism.”
One of the latest and most complete works on British fascism is Thomas Linehan’s British Fascism 1918-1939: Parties, Ideologies and Culture. The work offers analysis of all previous scholarship and is far more comprehensive in scope. Rather than focusing strictly on Mosley and the BUF, Linehan discusses all fascist-style movements in inter-war Britain, mainly the precursors to the BUF like the British Fascisti and the Imperial Fascist League..
One of the more fascinating aspects of Linehans’ work is his discussion about how the British fascists interpreted British history. Thurlow touches on this topic briefly in his work, but Linehan is far more in-depth. The reign of Henry II is particularly admired for the “termination of of the ‘feudal anarchy that had arisen in Stephen’s reign.'” The Tudor dynasty was considered one of the great periods in British history, with its “hostility to party factions and self-interested sectional interests.” Furthermore, the British fascists lamented the ascendency of the Puritans, “whose exposure to Old Testament Jewish philosophy” made them more materialistic and less interested in national order. While Linehan acknowledges that “opposition to economic and political liberalism was solidly rooted in native traditions and influences, . . . scholars of British fascism quite correctly suggest that the roots of this antipathy reside in traditions and influences beyond those identified by fascist propagandists.”
The historical foundation of Linehan’s book is a good synthesis of previous scholarship including Thurlow, but also includes a vast amount of secondary articles and dissertations that were not addressed in Thurlow’s work. While Linehan produced nothing earth-shattering or terribly different from Thurlow, Linehan’s work is more narrow in scope and is not burdened with the task of tying the Inter-war fascism with the neo-fascist movements of the post-war period. This narrowing of focus permits Linehan to explore an area overlooked by Thurlow, the subject of culture.
Linehan defines fascism as “a cultural phenomenon as much as . . . a movement for political or economic change.” British Fascists held the “neo-romantic perception that the people shared fundamental characteristics with Nature.” By reviving ” a popular culture of folk songs, medieval dances and ancient festivals, the ‘eternal’ or fundamental beneath the artificial veneer of modern bourgeois society would be rediscovered.” This echoes the anti-modern sentiment found not only in Fascist Italy, but in the Nazi ideology as well. British Fascists further decried the dissemination of mass culture and warned that “one should shield oneself from the ‘bustling ineptitude of the unenlightened’ mass, the ‘enemies of light and imagination’, by cultivating detachment and ‘interiority.’ It was “a vital national duty in a Philistine age of commercially driven mass culture” for a fascist regime to provide “a generous government subsidy to the arts.”However, such cultural expression shold be “purged of immoral and ‘pornographic’ associations.” Culture, “like the human body . . . needed to be expunged of poisonous infections and ‘genetic’ defects.”
In addition to cultural comments, Linehan also includes an in-depth discussion of the various “decadence” theories of the prominent fascist organizations. Fascists were pre-occupied with the “apparent modern phenomenon of decadence . . . the harbinger of national disintegration and decline.” In addition to the anti-modern sentiment coupled with the standard anti-Jewish, anti-Bolshevik fears, there was also a fear of “Americanism.” Chief among the American threats was Jazz, or as one senior BUF offical called it, “a ‘bastardization of music.'” That jazz was a product of black Americans “caused obvious discomfort and sparked crude racist remarks.” Special praise was reserved among British fascists for Hitler, who had “‘cleaned-up’ the Berlin night life of ‘pornographic film shows’ and beer halls where ‘rouged youths dressed in girls clothes awaited nightly custom.'” Another threat was the intellectual decadence of the “Bloomsbury bacilli” who “were debasing English literature and subverting culture by advocating anarchy in the art form.
Several articles and compilation books provide excellent starting points for the study of British fascism. John D. Brewer attempts to look at BUF membership from a “sociological perspective . . . to delineate the social base of fascism.” However, too much of Brewer’s essay smacks of an attempt to draw British fascism into some broad exercise in group psychoanalysis and trying to fit it into some pre-conceived mold of generic fascism, as if such an animal existed. Brewer’s work trends more into sociology and less into historical analysis, so history students should be forewarned. However, Brewer’s essay is insightful in that it delves into the theme of the fascist movement as a youth rebellion against old age and the old order, hardly a characteristic of a strictly reactionary movement.
Roger Griffin edited an Oxford Reader called Fascism in 1995 that is useful to the student of British fascism. Not only does Griffin conclude that no generic fascism exists, he further asserts that “there was no truly British fascism in the inter-war period.” Only “Mosley’s British Union of Fascists . . . ever showed signs of developing into a mass movement.” The strength, however, of Griffin’s work is not in interpretation, but in content. Griffin’s Fascism includes documents from Mosley and other key British fascists which are invaluable. Included in this collection is an essay by Mosley where he presents fascism as a synthesis of the seemingly incompatible ideas of Christianity, Nietzschean philosophy, and Oswald Spengler’s idea of “Caesarism.” There is also an essay by William Joyce, who was cast out of the BUF in 1937, extolling the virtues of his hero, Adolf Hitler. Griffin’s work, while light on original ideas, is valuable for the primary material included.
British fascism at no time seriously threatened to envelop England the way similar movements has seized power in central and eastern Europe. Britain’s long tradition of representative government and the fact that England was not hit nearly as hard as other European countries by the depression prevented it from taking that path. But the fascists were a phenomenon in Britain. They represented the pulse of Inter-war Europe and in many ways how Britons felt about their situation in the new world created by the destruction of the pre-World War reality. It can be safely concluded that the fascists, like many in England and the world at that time, were simply trying to answer the question, “Where do we go from here?” A difficult task for any generation.
Roger Griffin, ed. Fascism. Oxford University Press; Oxford (1995)
Oswald Mosley, My Life. Arlington House; New Rochelle, NY (1968)
Gordon B. Beadle review of Oswald Mosley by Robert Skidelsky. The Journal of Modern History 48, (Jun. 1976)
R.I. McKibbin review of Oswald Mosley by Robert Skidelsky. The English Historical Review 91 (Jan. 1976)
Kenneth Lunn and Richard C. Thorlow, ed. British Fascism: Essays on the Radical Right in Inter-War Britain. St. Martin’s Press, New York. (1980)
Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985. Blackwell, Ltd.1987,
Thomas Linehan, British Fascism 1918-39: Parties, Ideology and Culture. Manchester University Press, Manchester; 2000
John D. Brewer “The British Union of Fascists: Some Tenative Conclusions on it Membership” Stein U. Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, Jan Petter Myklebust, eds. Who Were the Fascists? Social Roots of European Fascism. Universitetsforlaget, Bergen (1980)
