[Militant No. 533, 19th December 1980, p. 9]
Politically, Sir Oswald Mosley had long been as dead as a dinosaur. However, the creator of the Blackshirts and the British Union of Fascists actually died in exile near Paris on 3 December.
In burying this exotic political fossil the capitalist press has been lamenting, in almost affectionate terms, the “squandered years” of this great “might-have-been”.
It is good-bye to the black sheep of the family, Mosley’s ruling-class friends are ready to forgive and forget, glossing over his totalitarian, fascist aims – and his decisive defeat at the hands of the working class.
Mosley was in many ways a typical product of the ruling elite: “public” school, Sandhurst, aristocratic connections… In 1918 he seemed all set for a rapid rise to a top position in the ruling circles of his class.
But after four years as a Tory MP in the crisis period 1918-24, Mosley made an opportune switch to the Labour Party, just in time to become a junior minister in Ramsey MacDonald’s first government.
During the second Labour government, however, Mosley split from Labour over MacDonald’s refusal to consider his radical-sounding proposals to cure unemployment.
This was 1929, when the great world capitalist slump hit Britain. An acute social crisis was opened up, provoking a split in the Labour Party with the formation of the National government.
At first his “New Party” included lefts like John Strachey, but it moved rapidly to the right, transforming itself into the British Union of Fascists in 1932.
This, according to the Tory obituaries, is where Mosley went astray. “His greatest flaw, impatience, led him [says the ‘Mail’] into a style of politics completely alien to the British tradition.” The implication is: Britain could never have gone fascist.
The theatrical trappings of fascism, it is true, were in many ways alien. But what the press now omit to say is that when the BUF was first set up it had big-business backing, and there were not a few Tory MPs who sympathised with Mosley.
Lord Rothermere, the press baron, used his ‘Daily Mail’ as a recruiting rag for the fascists, as its obituary coyly hints.
In the 1930s, moreover, Mosley was not regarded at all unsympathetically by Winston Churchill. This is hardly surprising when it is remembered that the man later lauded as the leader of Britain’s war against fascism was at that time a fervent admirer of Mussolini.
“If I had been an Italian,” Churchill told Mussolini in 1926, “I am sure that I should have been with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” As late as 1937, Churchill was applauding the Italian dictatorship’s occupation of Abyssinia.
If the social crisis in Britain had gone to the same extremes as in Italy, Germany and Spain, there is little doubt that the British capitalists too would have turned to fascism to settle accounts with the working class.
Mosley’s misfortune was that he cast himself in a role which, as it turned out, was not needed by the ruling class.
The British capitalists still had several layers of rich fat, accumulated from the Empire, on which they could draw. They still had room for manoeuvre, sufficient reserves to cushion sections of the middle class.
Above all, they could still rely on the reformist leaders of the labour movement to restrain the movement of the workers. When the National government under MacDonald, the Labour renegade, was successfully imposing draconian cuts in workers’ living standards, what need was there for Mosley and his Blackshirts?
Without mass support, Mosley was revealed for what he really was, an aristocratic clown with dictatorial pretensions.
This was not simply the result of his “flawed character”. His turn towards fascism reflected the splits in the ruling class and the confusion of some of its leaders in the face of a potentially revolutionary challenge from the working class.
Mosley’s evolution also reflected the pressure of the unstable middle layers of society, who were caught between big business and the working class, and faced catastrophe.
Mosley’s agitation on unemployment was not so much a programme as a demagogic means of mobilising the support of the demoralised middle layers. Despite vigorous campaigning the BUF never won support in working class areas like South Wales, Scotland and the North.
His support came from small businessmen, street traders, taxi drivers, porters, clerks and despairing workers on the fringes of the industrial working class. This is why it was particularly in areas like East London that the Blackshirts were able to recruit. Yet the BUF never won more than a fifth of the vote, even in its most favourable areas.
But it was determined, organised resistance of the working class which crushed Mosley and his Blackshirts.
The Blackshirts’ tactics were sufficient warning that, if he got the chance, the British ‘Führer’ would emulate Mussolini and Hitler in smashing the labour movement, and set up a totalitarian police state.
There were goose-stepping parades of Blackshirts; vile anti-Jewish propaganda; vicious attacks on Jews and labour movement activists; and the ruthless beating up of hecklers at the BUF’s big rallies, at which the fascists’ totalitarian aims were openly proclaimed.
The crunch came with the BUF’s attempt to march through the East End of London on Sunday, 4 October 1936. About 3,000 Blackshirts with police protection were faced by a mass of over 10,000 anti-fascists, with barricades thrown up around Cable Street.
The police were obliged to order Mosley to call off the march. Nevertheless, many fascists were “acquainted with the pavement,” and there were numerous arrests.
One legacy of Mosley’s movement is the 1936 Public Order Act. This was supposedly introduced to curb the fascists, prompted particularly by the notorious Olympia rally at which protesters were beaten senseless by Mosley’s uniformed thugs.
But it did little to impede the BUF, and from the beginning was turned against the anti-fascists. In the last few years, we have seen this “progressive” Act used time and again against those demonstrating against provocative, police-protected rallies of the National Front, British Movement, and similar grouplets.
After 1937, Mosley’s forces declined. The later 1930s saw a new swing to the left in British society, with the Labour Party gaining and trade unions recovering some of their lost members.
The ruling class itself, having ridden out the storm of the slump years, did not favour the fascists goading the workers into renewed action.
Increasingly alarmed by Hitler’s war aims, moreover, some of the British capitalists also began to fear that Mosley’s fascists could become a “fifth column” for their German rivals.
When Britain declared war with Germany, Mosley and his wife were interned.
After the war, Mosley’s attempts to revive a fascist organisation in Britain came to nothing. With the relative prosperity and political quiet of the post-war period, there was infinitesimal support for fascist sentiments.
Experience of the war against Nazi Germany put Mosley beyond the Pale, not only for workers but for the vast majority of people.
In 1954 Mosley moved to Ireland, and in 1963 went to live in even greater obscurity in France.
Mosley was a failure from the beginning. In the end, however, Mussolini and Hitler were failures, too, and with them the capitalists badly burned their fingers. In the future, the danger of reaction for the labour movement will come through the tops of the military and the police, under the direct control of the ruling class.
Big business will certainly allow fascist and racist groups to carry out individual provocations and attacks, attempting to intimidate and split labour’s ranks. But they will never again allow a free hand to fascist adventurers like Mussolini, Hitler… and the unsuccessful Mosley.
However, the demented, racialist grouplets now trying to resurrect the defunct ideas and methods of Mosley are having to be taught the same lesson all over again. The labour movement will not allow the freedom of the streets to totalitarian movements out to smash the workers’ organisations and destroy all democratic rights.
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