Fascism and Labour Government

This paper is an attempt to connect two books on which I've worked: the first is my PhD thesis, which looked at fascism and anti-fascism in postwar Britain, the second is an edited collection, British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State, which I published last year, with a colleague Nigel Copsey. The latter book considers fascism in Britain over the past seven decades, the role of fascism's opponents, from the feminist anti-fascists of the 1930s, and the first campaigns in support of anti-fascist refugees to the Anti-Nazi League in the 1970s and the labour movement in the last ten years. The various chapters discuss the labour movement, how fascism had attempted to permeate it and been resisted, and the extent to which labour politics remains a barrier to fascism today.

It would do no favours to the book if I tried to summarise its entire contents, so this paper speaks instead to just one small part of it, not labour movements as a whole, but Labour parties, and in particular the relationship between British fascism and Labour governments. There are three periods when Labour cabinets have been charged with responding to a fascist revival: in 1946-8, in 1974-9, and under Blair. Several questions arise: why have far-right parties done well even while Labour was in office? How has Labour responded to this threat? Are there noticeable differences between the responses of Labour and Conservative governments? To make the history manageable, I will concentrate it down still further: and focus only on the 1945-51 Labour government.

In the last months of summer 1939, Britain's fascists enjoyed a brief revival. In July 1939, for example, Oswald Mosley (the best known of all British fascist leaders) spoke to an audience of up to 20,000 people at Earl's Court. He told them that 'a million Britons shall never die in your Jews' quarrel.' Mosley's BUF, now re-named as the British Union, portrayed itself as keen only to avoid another war on the scale of 1914-8. But the outbreak of war served to puncture this short boom. When the BU stood candidates in 3 by-elections between late 1939 and early 1940, none of the candidates managed to win even 3% of the vote. Objectively 'Britain' was at war with 'Germany.' And Germany was the world's major fascist power. The war could only be won if millions of people felt themselves to be part of a popular crusade against fascism.

When the British army and its allies suffered a series of defeats, leading to the fall of Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium, and in a climate where millions saw Oswald Mosley and the other fascists as potential fifth columnists, the state was obliged to act. From 22 May 1940, and following a series of arrests which seemed to indicate that members of the fascist fringe had been spying on British and foreign representatives, the authorities began to intern (that is, to detain without trial) prominent fascists, including around 750 members of Mosley's party.

Oswald Mosley was held in detention for three years, most of his followers for shorter periods. Because the fascist groups remained intact in the localities, so the war years saw the emergence of a whole series of very small fascist groups. These would be formed, merge, split and re-form again, in rapid succession.

The government's decision to release Mosley, in September 1943, was a major fillip to the fascist right: it signalled an end to a period of state action against fascism. The release was also bitterly unpopular. It was opposed by the TUC, the Communist Party, hundreds of trade union branches, and even a majority of Labour MPs. Herbert Morrison was the Home Secretary, and his biographers described the anti-release movement as 'the biggest storm of Morrison's wartime career.'

By 1945, a number of former members of the British Union of Fascists had established successor organisations. The most important of these was one called the British League of ex-Servicemen and Women, which was led by Jeffrey Hamm. Mosley claimed that he was not looking to set up any new organisation. However, his later autobiography puts the matter differently: 'Directly the war was over and I was free to move anywhere in Britain I began the organisation of a political movement.'

Between 1945 and 1948, the building blocks of a new party were assembled. First, Mosley published two books, one My Answer, to provide an apology for his past; the other, The Alternative, to act as a programme for the future. Then, there was a Mosley paper, the Mosley Newsletter, which could even be bought under the counter at WH Smiths; before protests closed that avenue. Next, a network of Mosley book clubs were set up, to provide a forum to discuss the leader's ideas, and also with the intention of recruiting a new layer of respectable fascists. Finally, in November 1947, Mosley held a large meeting, attended by Hamm, the British League, and about 50 organisations all told: to announce that he would form a new party, the Union Movement.

In terms of core politics the Union Movement was no different from its predecessors. The best indicator of continuity is the way in which the Union Movement continued the anti-Semitic tradition of the BUF. Formally, no anti-Semitism was tolerated. However, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in practice. For example, a 1948 survey of open-air meetings found that Mosleyite speakers referred to the Jews as 'Filthy lice, underhanded swine, black marketers corrupting the children of the country.' Other speakers claimed that 'the reason why so many British mothers were dying in childbirth was because the hospitals were full of alien refugees.' One suggested that 'the Jews should be given food, they have to be alive for when we want them later.'

How successful were the fascist groups? By autumn 1947, they were holding around 20 meetings a week in London. Many people turned out to watch, few of them fascists, more anti-fascist, others just curious. This was still a time when public meetings were the norm rather than the exception, and when many towns had their own speakers' corner. At their peak, these meetings had a combined audience of around five thousand people, with very large meetings in the east end, in north London, and especially at Ridley Road, the border between north and south Hackney.

The meetings showed a high degree of political theatre. They would begin the night before, with groups of fascists and anti-fascists sleeping at the best-known pitches, trying to hold the ground so that each could claim to the police 'we got here first'. The Dalston police division was headed by a Superintendent Satterthwhaite, highly regarded in fascist circles, and the subject of widespread contempt on the left. Satterthwhaite and his officers made it their business to hold meetings open for the Mosleyites. Through the morning, there would be pushing and jostling, building up to meetings, counter-meetings, processions and counter-processions.

If the left succeeded in persuading the police that they had been there first (or were there in much larger numbers), sometimes, they might hold the ground, and the result would be a meeting addressed by left-wing journalists or MPs or other public personalities. If Mosley held the space, then he would arrive often from within the belly of an armoured car. He would then play music and attempt to speak. Either set of speakers would be met with eggs or worse. Each week saw arrests.

What longer historical processes helped the fascist group? One, I think, was the declining radicalism of the Labour Party in power, the pause in reforms, the turn to austerity, the sense that Labour had completed its 1945 mandate and now lacked any further plans to benefit the poor. Another, crucially, was the legacy of empire: the presence of 80,000 British troops in Palestine, the fact that 338 British soldiers were killed in the wars that would culminate in the creation of an Israeli state. In August 1947, the news that Zionist militia had murdered two British sergeants at Natanya fuelled anti-Semitic riots: these more than anything gave the Mosleyites their brief burst of energy.

So what then was the response of the Labour Party? At first, it was marked by confusion. Many Labour Party members and MPs, including Prime Minister Attlee, had supported the Republicans in Spain. In the 1930s, Labour had warned of the fascist danger, had published anti-fascist pamphlets, and had called demonstrations against Mosley, in 1933 and 1936. As late as 1943, a majority of Labour MPs voted against Morrison's decision to release Mosley.

Between 1945 and 1951, however, the Labour Party (as a national organisation) did little to stop fascism. There were no Labour-sponsored demonstrations against fascism, no speaking tours, no pamphlets, and no campaigns against Mosley. At the most charitable we can say, perhaps there was no desire to afford Mosley the oxygen of publicity, but already by 1946 or especially Autumn 1947, the papers were full of little else.

So in 1946, the Labour cabinet set up a Government Committee on Fascism. The first meetings of the committee suggested that new laws should be introduced to ban fascist parties, but difficulties were acknowledged, how might any ban be practicable? What would happen if parties changed their name? To the second meeting of the committee, the Home Secretary, J Chuter Ede, contributed a long memorandum, 'The Case Against An Attempt To Suppress Fascism'.

Ede argued that any ban would diminish Britain's long tradition of free speech. In the Labour cabinet, a compromise was adopted: no new laws would be passed, but a separate report would be commissioned on the possibility of extending the law to allow people to sue on grounds of racial vilification. A second Porter report was eventually published, advocating such changes. These in turn were ignored.

The inaction of the Labour cabinet caused great controversy within the Labour Party. There was an amendment calling for the fascist parties to be banned at the 1946 Labour Conference. Again, at the 1948 Conference, there was an amendment calling for the banning of 'defamatory statements concerning groups identifiable by race, creed or colour.' Harold Laski replied for the party's National Executive Committee (NEC), expressing 'our hatred on this platform for Fascism and our determination to prevent the spread of its poison.' Laski asked the individuals who had moved the amendment to accept his personal assurance that the government would act to destroy fascism. They, then, dropped the amendment.

The failure of the Labour Party to take a lead in the campaigns against Mosley meant that there was a vacuum, which was partly filled by the next largest party on the Left, the Communist Party. But even the Communists' response was equivocal. Many within the party called for changes in the law to ban fascist parties or to suppress fascist hate speech. Several hundred trade union branches under the influence of the Communist Party or the Labour left wrote to the Home Office demanding changes in the law. At a local level, the Communists did more than anyone to campaign against Mosley. But even in the CP, there was a strong sense that Mosley was a fringe figure: what mattered more was the general tasks of the government: the degree to which it was introducing free health care or education. In this context, the agitation against Mosley was regarded (and perhaps rightly) as a diversion.

From mid-1947, the most important conflicts the large confrontations at Ridley Road. The size of the audiences suggests that there were around 2000 people who looked to the Union Movement. But the Communist Party had 50,000 members; and over 10,000 in London alone. Hackney Trades Council could easily mobilise 2000 on anti-fascist counter-demonstrations. The combined resources of the anti-fascist Left were so much greater than the resources of the Mosleyite Right, that if the conflict was simply about the large set-piece demonstrations, the Left was bound to win. Indeed it did: as Mosleyite activity came to the boil, so precisely then there emerged an anti-fascist opposition, which eventually succeeded in taking over Ridley Road, and preventing the Mosleyites from holding rallies. The fascists were absent for much of winter 1947-8, through December, January, February, and when they attempted to speak again thereafter, their audience had dwindled from the thousands to dozens. Hamm's later explanation was that the Mosleyites had been beaten only by a harsh winter. I doubt even Hamm believed that. What we can say rather is that the long-term factors served to diminish the popularity of fascism. The legacy of the war and the Holocaust did eventually prove decisive. The intervention of anti-fascists also played its part.

So to return to the questions with which I opened: why have far-right parties done well even in periods of Labour government? We could ask the same question differently: had there been a Conservative government in power, would the fascist mini-revival have been the same? The context would have still been similar: whoever was in power in 1945 would have had to cope with the remnants of a fascist party, which had possessed up to 50,000 members at its peak before the war, and whose activists were angered and bitter, following their internment. A key factor in the fascists' limited success was the of morbid fascination of journalists wondering how it was possible that in Britain fascism was marching again? Whatever the composition of the government, it is likely that the press's response would have been similar. Fascism does not prosper only under Labour: Mosley and his BUF did well initially during a period of National (i.e. Conservative) government; similarly the National Front would grow later under Heath.

On the other hand, some context is unique to Labour. If you look at the sociological backgrounds of the people arrested as fascists in the midst of public disorder, they are strikingly shop owners or workers, people employed in small workplaces, in sales or services or sometimes petty production, usually in non-union workplaces. The five most common careers of the fascist detainees from 1940 were (in order): shopkeeper, teacher, policeman, farmer, manager.

Put another way, rank-and-file fascism seems to be a phenomenon similar to working-class Conservatism. Parties like Mosley's seem often to have their moments of success at a certain point in the political cycle: when people are disenchanted with Labour, and before the Conservatives have succeeded in dominating that space. It is striking that the issue of fascism belongs to the second half of the Labour government: the period of Cripps rather than Bevan, of austerity, Cold War, retreat.

How did Labour respond to the threat? I have cited Ede's opposition to new anti-fascist laws. On one occasion, he told the Commons, 'The law is fully adequate to enable action to be taken against all really dangerous activities. If believers in Fascist doctrine engage either simply or in conspiracy in subversive activities, or disturb the peace, they can be, and will be, dealt with firmly as law breakers.'

In a sense, Ede was correct. The police did have an extensive range of powers that they could have used against the fascist organisations. They had the power under common law to close meetings, or to move speakers on. They could charge fascist paper sellers with obstructing the traffic. Using the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act, the police could arrest anyone using 'threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour with intent to provoke a breach of the peace'. Under the 1936 Public Order Act, speakers could be arrested not just if their intent was to provoke a breach of the peace, but also if 'a breach of the peace [was] likely to be occasioned'. The police also had the authority to regulate or prohibit demonstrations. Following the cases of Duncan v Jones and Thomas v Sawkins, the police had the power to enter private premises, or to prevent meetings, if either of these actions would prevent disorder. Even without new legislation, they did have the powers to destroy the fascist movement. The critics' complaint was that the powers went unused.

How we judge this period, is likely to depend on how we view the issue of fascism more generally: and also the extent to which we judge that legislation is the solution, anyway. Had new laws been passed, there is no guarantee that they would have been used rightly. Later race hate laws such as the first Race Relations Act were used initially to prosecute black critics of racism. Indeed, the measures that the government took to root out extremism in the civil service seem to have been used much more vigilantly against Communists than they were against the far right.

Are there differences between the responses of Labour and Conservative governments? The National Government was more interventionist, first introducing new laws (the Public Order Act) and then in war-time conditions detaining members of the BUF. In the 1930s, the National Government had experimented with local bans on far-right marches. This policy was then reintroduced in 1948, to howls from the left. When Mosley proposed a May Day procession, it was first banned and then allowed. To make sure that the law was 'impartial' left-wing processions were also banned. Trade unionists also hoping to demonstrate on workers' day were stopped, making Britain the one country in Europe in 1948 (outside Spain and Portugal) where workers' demos were prohibited.