Fascism, as a subject of historical inquiry in twentieth-century Britain, has heretofore been examined predominantly through a lens of political failure.

Fascism, as a subject of historical inquiry in twentieth-century Britain, has heretofore been examined predominantly through a lens of political failure. Using the undeniable fact that no such movement in the country has ever secured national power as an analytical fulcrum, fascist groups, from the British Fascists of the nineteen-twenties to the present-day British National Party, have been discussed as eccentric at best, and, more often than not, violent and misguided political flops. Despite there having been a number of organizations that have identified themselves as fascist in the last seventy years, much of the existing literature has focused its attention on Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists (BUF) for at least two reasons: Mosley's party of the nineteen-thirties had the greatest following of any of the fascist organizations of this century and is thereby the most significant; and in the last decade the British Home Office has begun declassifying the records kept on both Mosley and the BUF during the inter-war period, allowing a greater measure of precision in illuminating specific points of interest such as membership and the extent of government infiltration within the group.

However, closely tied to most explanations of fascism's political failure has been the general "reluctance of authors to accept . . that those who supported the Fascists may have done so for genuine ideological reasons." Contemporary claims, in the nineteen-thirties, that fascism, and "Mosleyism" in particular, was something "un-English" which simply was "not done" have neatly dovetailed with the assertions of later authors to create an implicit argument that fascism could only be an intruder on the principled political scene of parliamentary Britain. Further, studies such as W. F. Mandle's Anti-Semitism and the British Union of Fascists, by concentrating on single issues, have neglected examining the whole of the BUF's ideological and practical concerns during the inter-war years and had the effect of limiting analysis in other areas. The sentiments of such arguments and studies have been summarized by Stanley Payne in his work A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 where he wrote that there "was neither space nor 'need' for revolutionary nationalism" in Great Britain, and that the amount of literature on the BUF was actually "inversely proportionate to the group's significance."

G. C. Webber, however, has argued that to dismiss a political ideology because it failed to result in "immediate or tangible reforms" would be a mistake as "[e]ven 'rejected' ideologies . . . can tell us about the political culture of which they were a part." And while the intrusion arguments often provide solid reasonings for the overt political failure of the BUF, they tend to neglect or downplay the contemporary issues the movement attempted to address and the sources from which it drew both ideas and support. Inter-war Britain was home to a political culture, deeply affected by a harsh economic situation, that saw the Conservative Party, the British right in general, and all of society undergo a profound ideological crisis which, as a direct result, fostered the political emergence and rise of fascism.

After World War I the Liberal Party in Britain was decimated. and, for the first time, in 1924 the Labour Party tenuously formed a government. This shift left, which was noticeable in nearly all of post-war Europe, was accompanied in Britain by the reinforcing of a more extreme, but often fractured, position on the right. But this was more than a simple reaction to the rise of the left, for this was a "new conservatism," as Modris Eksteins has called it, that had to rebuild, as much as conserve. "The right, too," he wrote in the Rites of Spring, "had to engage in radical reform if the world was to be set right. Political polarization, which was to be the hallmark of the interwar era everywhere, confirmed the disappearance of a normality everyone craved but no one knew how to effect."

As was already alluded to, the most intractable obstacle to a settled normality in Britain was, seemingly, the country's economic position both internationally and domestically immediately following the war. In an attempt to lower the country's rampant unemployment which had damaged both its industrial output and the availability of a home market for goods, as well as address the apparent loss of British dominance in trade globally, governmental policy in the inter-war years largely followed a conservative program that emphasized savings and slow investment with a return to the gold standard, abandoned during the war, as both the goal and the key to a return to economic normalcy. However, return to the gold standard was delayed, at least initially, by a post-war boom, "based on a universal desire to replenish stocks," which "got under way in 1919-20." Reestablishing the standard then would have "involved violent deflation, and to start the peace with a depression seemed an appalling prospect."

Using the post-war boom as a stepping off point, and following a cautious plan that laid attention on the economic basics of work, wages, and family welfare, the country seemed to head down a road of recovery. In fact, "the British record of growth in the inter-war period was considerably better than in the decade before the war, and . . . attention has been drawn to rapid economic progress in the expansion of 'new' industries." An unexpected, and positive, consequence of the war, these industries were in areas that "Britain was forced to develop . . . which had hitherto been neglected. Chemicals, electrical goods, motor vehicles, aircraft and precision engineering were stimulated, as well as the science-based industries such as radio and pharmaceutical." What is more is that the country also benefitted from the less tangible variables of economic development such as stricter standardization, mass production, and more efficient management that the rigors of war had forced upon the industrial base.

This apparently prudent economic plan, coupled with the growth in new industries and increased efficiency in all industries, as well as the fact that four-fifths of Britain's merchant fleet survived the war, accounted for not only the experienced growth, but also an apparent continued economic recovery as the real wages of the employed steadily increased from 1924 to 1931 while the cost of living steadily decreased in the same period. These factors and economic indicators provided the hopeful impetus for a continued conservative policy during much of the decade. As Robert Skidelsky writes in Politicians and the Slump, while "government intervention in the economy had to some extent been legitimised during the war, the climate of opinion in the nineteen-twenties favoured a swift return to laissez-faire, and this dictated the course of British economic policy."

The gold standard, which "was a device for keeping the national currencies of different countries at a fixed value" and ideally generating "the confidence required for international trading," remained the supposed panacea for the country's remaining economic ills. As the world's pre-war leader in global trading Britain was "anxious to take the lead in re-establishing [it and getting] back to the pre-war rate of parity." A rate that was seen as not only a "symbol" of returning normality but also of "London's financial strength," and it was generally believed that "nothing short of return to the old parity would restore confidence in London's ability to resume her former role."

Thus, Britain's eagerness to re-institute an equalizing tool as powerful as the gold standard was believed to be, that would also aid the country in returning to pre-war industrial and export levels, was understandable. The country had entered WWI as perhaps the most affluent nation in the world and left it with a legitimate fear of economic collapse. Previously, a "century and a half of economic growth, expanding trade and the accumulation of foreign investments had led Britain to the position of being a major--if no longer the sole--workshop of the world and the hub of international trade and finance." Even facing the growing competition of a unified Germany and a forcefully emerging United States, the country was still a primary international supplier of the base industrial products of coal, textiles, iron and steel. Citing John Stevenson's British Society 1914-45:

In 1913, the shipyards of North-East England alone produced a third of the world output of shipping. The cotton mills of Lancashire were still producing enough yarn and textiles to clothe half the world, contributing more than a quarter of the country's total exports. Britain was the second largest producer of coal in the world and its exports alone were greater than the national outputs of major powers like France and Russia. Britain's merchant fleet accounted for almost half the world tonnage, while abroad Britain was a major international creditor with a large inflow of invisible earnings from investments, shipping and insurance.

There was, however, a dangerous underside to these incredible levels of exportable industrial output. Nearly fifty percent of the country's available labor force was engaged in either mining or manufacturing which meant that roughly three-quarters of its foodstuffs and much of its raw materials had to be imported. Consequently, and more than most other industrialized nations, Britain was susceptible to economic repercussions that were the result of fluctuations in the world market and its own industrial efficiency.

However, Britain's economic international position and domestic stability were important and decisive issues because they impacted more than simply the material well being of the nation's populace. They were, in fact, at the root of the country's construction of its identity both internally and internationally. Perry Anderson has argued that "[c]apitalist hegemony in England has been the most powerful, the most durable and the most continuous [of] anywhere in the world." And it has been the "cumulative constellation of the fundamental moments of modern English history" that has allowed such a complete capitalist victory to take place.

For Anderson, these fundamental moments, prior to WWI, were the Civil War of 1640-49, the industrial revolution, and the seizing of the largest empire in history by the end of the nineteenth century. Each has played an important and collective role in crafting not only the formal structure of British society, but also the ideological construction of British identity. The Civil War, which was a "'bourgeois revolution' only by proxy," effectively "led to the creation of a modern capitalist" state. This was achieved through "three major idiosyncrasies of the English Revolution." First, it destroyed the "juridical and constitutional obstacles to rationalized capitalist developments in town and country: monopolies, arbitrary taxation, wardships, purveyance, selective enclosure, etc." This, in turn, had the effect of hurrying the development of the economy in the latter half of the century; making it a "supremely successful capitalist revolution . . . [but one that] left almost the entire social structure intact." Second, this was achieved by "profoundly transforming the roles but not the personnel of the ruling class." The types of production that the ruling class now pursued were capitalist in nature ("landlord, tenant farmer and landless agricultural labourer, which eventually destroyed the English peasantry and made Britain the most agriculturally efficient country in the world"), however, "landed aristocrats . . . continued to rule England." Moreover, mercantile capital "expanded on a new and imperial basis." Still, it was never able to "constitute itself as an internally compact or autonomous political force," and instead prosperous merchants purchased estates while landowners invested in trading interests. Thus, there was "a permanent . . . interpenetration of the 'moneyed' and 'landed' interests" which ultimately bound the two together. Third, radical Puritanism was repressed which allowed for an unbridled pursuit of capitalist development.

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The industrial revolution was most remarkable in that it "produced the earliest proletariat when socialist theory was least formed and available, and an industrial bourgeoisie polarized from the start towards the aristocracy." Emerging during the French Revolution and Napoleonic expansion, the industrial class was marked by a "whole era of war against the French abroad [rallying to the cause of the aristocracy] and repression against the working class at home." Further, as the economic importance of agrarian capital fell and that of industrial capital rose towards the end of the nineteenth-century, the intertwining trend of the two classes continued--industrialists purchased greater estates and landed aristocrats pursued industrial interests. "The end result of these convergent mutations was the eventual creation of a single hegemonic class, distinguished by a perpetually recreated homogeneity and actual--determinate--porousness." This resulted in the development of a two-party political system of upper and working classes with, at best, a "large, diffuse, polymorphous reservoir," ready for use by the upper class, between the two. The creation of the British Empire "saturated and 'set' British society in a mould it has retained to this day." With the advent of "military-industrial imperialism" in the late nineteenth-century the lasting "contours of British society" were cast in sharp relief. It was this which gave its "characteristic style to that society, consecrating and fossilizing to this day its interior space, its ideological horizons, its intimate sensibility." While the general "motifs" of Empire were most likely internalized by the entire society, the real imperial influence came to bear "on the character and ethos of the ruling bloc." The most conspicuous illustration of the imperial motifs was "the new religion of monarchy which marked the late Victorian era." In this, the "'manifest' function of the monarchy was (by assertion) to unify the nation; its 'latent' function was (by example) to stratify it." In this way "social-imperialism . . . created a powerful 'national' framework which in normal periods insensibly mitigated social contradictions and at moments of crisis transcended them altogether."

Taken as a whole, the points and issues which Anderson has developed led to a total victory of capitalism in British society which served to set the course and parameters of political and cultural ideology and identity for nearly three centuries. It was the untrammeled success of capitalism in England that provided the "organized, governed social world" of all of Britain with the "remote and elevated conceptions that allow[ed] them to sustain a sense of continuity and adequacy, to identify with other individuals and groups, and to perceive and define a relationship to past, present, and future." Consequently, the seeming downward spiral of the country's economic system also cast the society's "symbolic structures," which gave life its apparent coherence and comprehensibility, into doubt. Moreover this capitalist crafted ideology was so pervasive that even those opposed to it, such as the Labour Party, were forced to define themselves and establish their relationship to others through it, even if it was in terms of opposition--that which they were not and struggled against.

Hence, while the partial economic recovery of the nineteen-twenties and thirties mentioned above was decidedly welcome, the governmental conviction, along all party lines, to return to the gold standard, which was accomplished in 1925, was as much an ideological imperative as it was a supposed economic one. Although "the restoration of the . . . system [was] an extremely precarious undertaking," given that a substantial portion of Britain's assets "had been sold to pay for the war" and "her exports could no longer produce a surplus sufficient to finance international growth on the pre-war scale," it was one that had to be taken perhaps, in the words of Skidelsky, "almost as an act of faith." For the Conservative Party, which had spent the nineteenth-century becoming the party of both the landed and industrial interests (or more simply, Anderson's ruling bloc), return to the gold standard was an attempt to recapture the years before the war when the lines of social demarcation were clear and the "terminology of 'rank' and 'degree'" were the norm.

Economic debacle and decline coupled with the economist Pigou's "intractable million," and increasing radicalization of the left brought on by the war along with the "gradual extension of the franchise" proved an unsettling mixture for the British right. "Modernity has meant in significant part," wrote Craig Calhoun, "the breakup--or the reduction to near-irrelevance--of most all-encompassing identity schemes." With conventional remedies unable to effectively attack unemployment, which continued to hover around ten percent for much of the nineteen-twenties, and the language of "class" encroaching on the traditional categories of rank, not simply the British right, but the whole of British society was facing an ideological crisis that was the result of the breakup of its traditional identity schemes. Because of this, "an important section of influential opinion had, by the end of the decade, come round to the view that traditional remedies would not meet the new economic facts."

In The Ideology of the British Right 1918-1939, G. C. Webber has argued that for much of the first-half of the century the British right has faced an ideological crisis. And in asserting this he places the context of the crisis as having been, until the mid nineteen-thirties, "determined by questions of nationalism and imperialism." For him, it was not until after this time, and "not fully until the late 1960s," that "sharp economic . . . disagreements" came to the fore of the debate. However, while the language of the Diehards did use "a basic vocabulary of nationalism," it was a loss of the status quo (which includes nationalist concerns), predicated on British economic standing across the globe, that was feared. Hence, economic concerns, in the nineteen-twenties and before, served as the actual locus of debate for the ideological crisis of the British right during this time, and this remains the case whether its discourse was couched in a nationalist vocabulary or not.

Britain's capitalist economy was evolving before WWI as is evidenced by the country having "enjoyed a tremendous [international] preeminence in particular fields" as well as base industries such as textiles and steel up to 1913. The war, however, forced this maturation into a frenetic pace and created, after the conflict, what William Sewell, Jr., in another context, identified as the capitalist phenomenon of uneven national development. The results of this uneven development in Britain were the advances in the new industries as well as the less tangible economic variables which accounted for the sectional recovery of the economy mentioned earlier. The pace of modern mechanized war had pushed all the combatant nations to face the resultant economic evolution that came with it, and Britain's global presence made this confrontation more radical than nearly anywhere else. For Britain, modernity came in the guise of truly modern capitalism, with its concomitant uneven development and language of class, and this disrupted the country's traditional identity schemes. It was for this reason that there was a substantial, and influential, section of opinion that began to search for new means of dealing with the problem of hyper-unemployment during the inter-war years. For, many came to believe that only if this ill could be cured would anything at all remain of British society.

Webber's text makes it clear that this period witnessed a radicalization of the Conservative Party where members were willing to revolt against party leadership and "organised dissent was becoming a commonplace feature of Conservative Party politics." However, Skidelsky has noted that there is an unfortunate tendency "to view inter-war politics in terms of a struggle" between parties, when the "real cleavage of opinion occurred . . . between the economic radicals and the economic conservatives. This cut right across party lines," and quickly spilled out into the general populace. Extension of the franchise, expansion of educational opportunities, and the growth of the popular press widened not only the potential audience for the current political debates but also increased the number of those actually participating in them, and this brought to bear on Parliament a larger active constituency than ever before.

Again, the dominance of the issue of unemployment in social and economic debate during this time can not be overestimated. No matter how often or loudly discussion of the rising standard of living for the employed was attempted, it could not drown out the murmur of the over two million insured workers who were without employment between 1931 and 1935. The most obvious effect of this persistent problem was the increasing dependence of many on continued government assistance. By the late nineteen-twenties there were entire villages that relied on programs such as public relief, or "the dole," to simply survive. This, in turn, had the consequence of changing the attitudes of a large segment of the general populace in regards to the role of the government in managing the economy. Many lost sight of any personal qualms they previously might have had concerning receiving government assistance, and came to now believe that it was the Government's role to take an active hand in directing the economy. The sense of urgency surrounding the economic situation and the active debate that followed it moved T. S. Eliot, author of The Waste Land and editor of The Monthly Criterion, to write that "politics has become too serious a matter to be left to politicians. We are compelled to the extent of our abilities, to be amateur economists, in an age in which politics and economics can no longer be kept wholly apart."

The call to political action that Eliot was sounding found many sympathetic ears, as a growing number of people feared that the current situation was quickly eroding British culture along with the economy. Wyndham Lewis spoke for many when he wrote that Britain was

going rotten at the bottom and at the top, where the nation ceased to be the nation--the inferior end abutting upon the animal kingdom, the upper end merging in the international abstractness of men--where there [were] no longer . . . English men, but a gathering of individuals who were nothing.

More than anything perhaps, what people demanded, both inside Parliament and out, was that the Government take a firm step in one direction or another. Webber has pointed out that many in the British right had long since wearied of the "pragmatic" coalition governments that dominated much of the period, and "erupted with enormous force after the electoral defeat of 1929" that was marked only by Baldwin's careful and disastrous slogan of "Safety First."

The attitude towards state interference in personal economic affairs had so dramatically shifted among many that in 1934 the economist J. A. Hobson could write

The old individualist conception of the State and its government, as rightly confined to the protection of persons and their property from injuries by other members of the nation or from foreign aggression, has almost disappeared. It was in effect owners' anarchism, condemning every State activity except those which safeguarded existing rights of person and property. . . . Their lives were in their own keeping, their incomes were of their own making, and any interference by the State with their full freedom of action in either of these spheres was an unwarrantable abuse of governmental power. Save for a little group of die-hards, this view . . . no longer exists in this country.

As early as 1926 Wyndham Lewis had expressed his abstract preference for the Soviet system and praised Fascist Italy because in these systems there "will not be an extremely efficient ruling caste, pretending to possess a 'liberal' section, or soft place in its heart for the struggling people, on the traditional [E]nglish model." These governments will, according to Lewis, govern in a straightforward way, and, perhaps most importantly, [e]conomics will simply disappear in such a State. On a more popular level, in 1933 the general populace was drawn to the theory of "technocracy," as related by Professor Soddy, and pamphlets on the subject were "added to the huge politico-economic literature which was challenging the works of . . . Elinor Glyn and Edgar Rice Burroughs as the chief reading of the people." There can be little doubt that as the inter-war period progressed a growing segment of the populace recognized that the persistent economic problems of the era were eroding more than simply the material well-being of the nation, and many sought out new answers for a new age. "[N]ew certainly to this extent," wrote Eliot, "that the nineteenth century gave us a very inadequate preparation for it."

It was from this social-political fray that fascism emerged in Britain, and under the guidance of Sir Oswald Mosley that it came nearest to political success. There had been at least two fascist groups in Britain before Mosley founded his BUF, the British Fascists and its outgrowth the Imperial Fascist League, founded by a former veterinarian Arnold Leese. The former organization was little more than a conservative pro-Britain group with few more than a couple of hundred members at any time, and Leese's movement was influential only in terms of propagating a racialist anti-semitism. It was Mosley's British Union of Fascists which "represented the mature form of the fascist phenomenon in British society."

Mosley, born in 1896, came from the tradition of the "country gentry of England," his family rose from the ranks of the merchant class in the sixteenth-century, and his early childhood was spent in the pastoral and near self-sufficient feudal setting of Rolleston in the countryside. Although as a young man in public school he was not particularly academically distinguished his written essays "were apparently cited as models of precision and clarity" and there were those who "put his intelligence on a very high plane." His real aptitude seemed to be in sports, where he excelled at not only riding, hunting, and boxing but also fencing, winning the public school championship at the age of 15. During WWI he served in both the infantry and the Royal Flying Corps before being wounded in the leg and ordered home in March 1916. Skidelsky has written that Mosley "always thought of himself

as the spokesman of the war generation. He had little or no interest in the pre-war world, which to him was simply the liberal era which had perished on the battlefield." The war, for Mosley, "was a catalyst, not a cause. It produced a new man rather than a new idea." Economic and social change were unavoidable, and life was shifting from "an individual to a collective basis." Mosley recognized this and it was to be his point of departure for his political life.

He began his political career shortly after being invalided out of military service as a "part-time" civil servant at the Ministry of Munitions. This proved to be an experience which would further strengthen his belief in this time being the dawn of a new age as the war pushed the social ideal closer to the military. "Gone, it seemed, were the class animosities and laissez-faire principles of the nineteenth century, to be replaced by a mood of solidarity and organisation for survival."

His career as an elected political official began in 1918 when he was elected as a Conservative M.P. in support of Lloyd George's Coalition Government, and at the age of 22 he carried the election by nearly eleven thousand votes. This was to be the beginning of a stormy parliamentary career throughout the nineteen-twenties during which he left the Conservative Party, ran as an independent, and finally joined with the Labour Party, helping them win the election of 1929. By this time he was a practiced and polished politician, widely recognized for his dynamism both personally and as a public speaker. In the election of 1929 "Mosley was the key figure in Labour's advance in Birmingham and the Midlands. . . . To the ordinary Labour militant Mosley's outstanding quality was his fighting spirit." Still, as Skidelsky notes, many within Parliament suspected the motives behind many of his actions, while he was often able to charm most people he just as often unable to secure their trust. His political party jumping got him branded a "class-traitor" by the Conservatives and made many in the Labour Party worry about his ambition.

It was during 1928 and 1929 that he began making "constructive" contributions to the debates on unemployment and he had rapidly become "a force to be reckoned with in the Labour Party." For his work in the 1929 election, he was made the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and given the task of working on the "unemployment problem." Unfortunately for Mosley, it soon became apparent that while "for him the moment had come for the 'new movement' to show its mettle, for [the new Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald] it was a matter of carrying on the king's government. However, Mosley soon produced a "bold and iconoclastic" plan meant to directly attack the problem of unemployment through a variety of governmental initiatives such as public works, the raising purchasing power through loans, the raising of the school-leaving age to limit the impact of the young on the market, and the raising of pensions for those sixty-five and older to encourage retirement. John Maynard Keynes, the economist who would become associated with most progressive economic policy by WWII, even wrote in support of the plan, saying that it was a good "starting point and action," and he found it impossible that "anyone professing and calling himself a Socialist can keep away from the Manifesto." Despite this, "[f]inancial and budgetary conservatism dominated the response of the Labour Government" and the Manifesto was rejected.

This moment was nearly as significant for Mosley as the war had been. Because of it, he came to believe that no real change could come from within the two major parties and he set out to found his own. Followed by a small group a friends and advocates he founded the New Party in 1931 after resigning from the Labour Government. The same year, John Strachey, who had been a fellow Labour M.P. with Mosley and left with him, along with C. E. M. Joad published "Parliamentary Reform: The New Party's Proposals." In it they boldly stated that "Parliament is dying . . . no nation can thrive without good and wise government. Parliament still governs Britain--or rather, Parliament attempts to do so, and failing, prevents her from being governed at all." The policies they outlined state clearly what they, and Mosley, believed to be the remedy for these ills:

I. The initiation of legislation must be formally transferred to the executive.

II. Legislation should be effected by the issue of "Orders in Council" which will lie on the table of the House of Commons for seven days. Unless . . . an adverse vote . . . is recorded against them during that time, they will then have the force of law.

III. Supply. . . . all money needed by the Executive Government should be voted by Parliament.

Through further initiatives Parliament was to be reduced to a Standing Committee with its only real task being to "watch the proceedings of the Government for its statutory period of office." Falling back on his experiences during after the war, Mosley had proclaimed that national collectivization, or rationalization, was the only remedy for old ills that continued to plague the new era.

In the general election of 1931 Mosley and his New Party suffered a devastating defeat in which the party "lost all its parliamentary seats and twenty-two of its twenty-four candidates forfeited their deposits." Strachey would later say that it was the humiliation of this defeat that pushed Mosley to fascism. A number of his contemporaries did ask why a man a bright as he made that dark turn and, though the complete answer is assuredly more nuanced, in short, the "decision to go fascist," Skidelsky wrote, "was made for a variety of reasons, some of them rational, others rooted in Mosley's temperament and outlook. At the core of his rational justification was the notion of the 'crisis.' The liberal economic system was doomed. The existing elites lacked the character and mentality to create a new system in time." Whatever the reasons, after trips to both Rome, where he met Mussolini, and Munich in January of 1932 he founded the BUF and made a "spectacular but ineffective assault on democracy."

The very term "fascism" has been used so promiscuously in this century, by both adherents and opponents alike, that some mention of what it meant for Mosley could be useful in deciphering why he would pick such a doctrine.

Fascism was in essence a national creed, and therefore by definition took an entirely different form in different countries. In origin, it was an explosion against intolerable conditions, against remediable wrongs which the old world had failed to remedy. It was a movement to secure national renaissance by people who felt themselves threatened with decline into decadence and death and were determined to live, and live greatly.

In general dynamics, this conception differs little from that of Italian fascism as it was laid out by Mussolini's chief theorist Alfredo Rocco. In fact, Mosley was much impressed by Rocco's attack on both liberalism and socialism for what he recognized as an "atomistic" concept of the state of "a plurality which breaks up into its single components." However, Mosley's sense of fascism did differ from most Continental varieties in at least two ways. First, even though he made numerous calls to action he backed away from Mussolini's cry of "No Dogma! Discipline suffices," his policies were always highly structured and "his close analysis of the economic and governmental problems of Britain in 1932, allied to his detailed prescriptions, made him quite unlike other fascist leaders." Even more obviously, and in direct contradiction to most continental fascist doctrine, Mosley abjured the Marinettian idea of war being "the world's only hygiene." Perhaps because Britain already possessed an empire, something that Italy wanted and Nazi Germany planned for with its continental plan of lebensraum to the European east, Mosley could afford to give in to his fear of another world war and adopt the policy of defensive peace he outlined in his pamphlet "The British Peace--How to Get It." Still, the greatest difference between Mosley's brand of fascism and that on the continent was simply the intellectual rigor to which he subjected all of his planned policies. Richard Thurlow has written that "it was a movement which was intellectually the most coherent and rational of all fascist parties in Europe in its early years."

With the publication of The Greater Britain in 1932, Mosley had produced a "reasoned pragmatic plan of action to attack unemployment." Though this text was more radical than his previous collectivist and corporatist plans, it was not qualitatively different in any significant respect. His basic argument remained that the current economic conditions coupled with advances in science had rendered the governmental theory of Britain's parliamentary system obsolete.

However, the greatest problem of the moment was that career parliamentarians sitting in government continued to act as if nothing had changed. With this in mind, he wrote that "[o]ur problem is to reconcile the revolutionary changes of science with our system of government, and to harmonise individual initiative with the wider interests of the nation." It is here that the "Modern Movement" of fascism comes in, with its emphasis "on a high conception of citizenship" and its recognition of an authoritarian state that will insure such policy that is "above party and sectional interests." For, in the modern world it must be "all within the State; none outside the State; none against the State." The Corporate State "envisages . . . a nation organised as the human body" with each part playing its role as determined by the "driving brain of government." To those critics who argued that there could be no liberty in such a system, Mosley replied in 1934, in Blackshirt Policy, that there could be no liberty as long as there was poor housing, low wages, unemployment, and insecurity. "Only economic liberty brings real freedom. That economic liberty consists of things which really affect the lives of the people, such as good wages, good houses to live in, short hours of labour, after which home and leisure can be enjoyed with family and friends. . . . We therefore claim that in our new system we shall exchange the 'false liberty' of the few [parliamentary politics] for the 'real liberty' of the many." For Mosley the "beginning of liberty is the end of economic chaos."

In terms of direct economic corporatism he held that "science, invention, technique have recently increased the power to produce out of the range of all previous experience." Consequently, the sheer amount of production now possible renders the policy of waiting out depressions for the opening of markets impossible. Hence, only "the rationalised State can hope to overcome the problem created by rationalised industry." Because rationalisation of industry is necessary for its development, it can not be denounced or ignored so the State must move in to organize and regulate it. As it takes an industry expert to pass judgment on industry the economic side of the "Corporate State will consist of corporations, each embracing an appropriate area of connected and interlocking industries. . . . these corporations will not be conducted by the State . . . They will be self-governing bodies, controlled by representatives of employers and workers, to whom will be added representative consumers' interests appointed by the National Corporation with the approval of the Government. . . . The National Corporation will be a synthesis of all other corporations and will represent the pooled experience and technique of the nation's industrial system operating under the auspices of Fascist government." Also predicated on his faith in science to rationalize industrial production, his plan to raise wages asserted that efficient rationalized industry would balance out the wage hike. This, in turn, would bolster the British home market for their own finished goods, especially with the further security of "scientific protection" which will protect the manufacturer from wage-cutting competitors both home and abroad, or, as he asserted, "protection must protect organisation, and not chaos."

This was, while not in full, the essence of Mosley's corporate fascist plan. What is missing from the above is discussion of his plans for the Empire. The Empire was to play a large role in his overall economic plan, as he wrote in The British Peace: "We have a quarter of the globe and one fifth of its inhabitants; we possess every raw material and potential wealth that man can desire." The ultimate goal was to be a self-sufficient Britain within a self-sufficient Empire. A completely insulated autarkic economy that dealt with other nations on its terms alone.

What should be realized in all of this is that while Mosley's corporate plans, both economically and politically, may have been more detailed and structured than others, he was hardly alone in pushing for this sort of organization. Prior to WWI, Hilaire Belloc, author of the influential book The Servile State, had quietly pushed a primitive distributism that was later developed into a corporate theory. In 1923, J. C. C. Davidson had stood before the House and argued

that since the war European markets had been destroyed and if we were to have a recovery of British trade we must look elsewhere . . . It therefore followed that the problem facing the Economic Conference and facing the Colonial Office . . . was to find a means of development of the market with the British Empire, and replace those we have lost.

The prominent Conservative L. S. Amery, as Webber has noted, "campaigned tirelessly for 'the principle of imperial unity in its economic aspects,'" and that he also "rejected both laissez-faire individualism which ignored the interests of the 'community' and socialist planning which ignored the importance of individual enterprise. Instead he urged a policy of 'economic nationalism.'" Nor was the appeal of such ideas bound to the British right either. "[S]ocialists like G. D. H. Cole [had] a profound disillusionment with the 'old gang' of politicians and the 'muddle' of laissez-faire capitalism." Neither should it be assumed that these corporatist sentiments were limited to the political fringe. Stevenson has pointed out that even "ostensible conservative figures such as Neville Chamberlain saw their task as to bring 'order and logic' to public affairs, seen primarily in his abolition of the Poor Law and the creation of the centralized system of unemployment benefit under the Unemployment Assistance Board."

The mass appeal of Mosley's ideas should not be forgotten either. As was mentioned above the general populace was now not only reading the politically charged news papers of Lords Rothemere and Beaverbrook, as well as technical pamphlets on subjects like technocracy, but the intransigent unemployment had left a deep influential mark on them as well. Further, self-styled guardians of culture like Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot had made their positions relatively plain in their condemnations of the contemporary situation. From the founding of the BUF in 1932 to 1934, the movement swelled to its peak membership of between forty thousand and fifty thousand people. However, after the Olympia meeting in June of 1934 when Mosley's blackshirted stewards brutalized a number of hecklers and Lord Rothemere withdrew his public support, the number quickly fell to roughly six thousand by 1935. For the rest of the decade membership rolls once again slowly filled until in 1939 there was once again some twenty-two thousand members, though most of these were probably reacting more to the encroaching war than anything else.

Webber has made as detailed and careful a study as possible of the existent information in also attempting to discern the social and class make-up of the BUF, and has argued that in 1934 the movement attracted an educated upper middle class generally, and in the north a working class that were usually neither unionized nor employed. By 1925, most of the original middle-class supporters had left the party ranks, though they may have remained sympathetic followers as sales of the group's literature did not significantly drop off. However, by 1939 it was nearly completely a middle class movement as it had become almost a monocausal organization that tied itself to the middle class peace movement and in so doing pushed its membership up once again.

Because of these findings, Webber argued that there is good evidence for tying support for the BUF to "dissatisfaction with the Conservative Party." However, the two years that the party reached its zenith, 1932-1934, were also the years that Mosley was trying the hardest to gain legitimacy for his corporatist ideas. And, perhaps not coincidentally, Webber's class analysis seems to demonstrate that the two groups which made up the mass of the membership at that time came from the educated upper middle class and non-unionized working class, the two groups that would logically be the most affected by not only the overt economic situation but also the ideological crisis of the period.

Why, then, did the BUF go into such decline, ultimately saving itself from an apparent total dissipation by aligning itself with the peace movement of the last half of the nineteen-thirties? Part of the reason is perhaps offered by Richard Thurlow: "from the beginning the BUF exhibited a Janus-faced appearance; it was a movement which was intellectually the most coherent and rational of all the fascist parties in Europe in its early years, yet whose aggressive style and vigorous self-defence attracted political violence." During the campaign for the 1929 general election the Birmingham Town Crier had written that "[w]hen Mr. Mosley gets up he seems to suggest that if anyone wants a scrap--well, he isn't going to be far away." This indeed seems to have been the case, especially after he could be followed by any number of "Blackshirts" as party leader. He quickly developed a feel for populist tactics in his speeches and, by 1935, frequently appealed to the lowest common denominators of the crowds that gathered to hear him speak. And even he later admitted that the eventual donning of full paramilitary uniforms was a mistake as it was likely to "create prejudice."

These points, however, do little in the long-run to explain why a movement that began as strongly as the BUF did could reach its nadir as quickly as it did. Both the economic and ideological crisis that Mosley had been addressing still existed so why the decline. Webber has argued that the movement "passed through three fairly distinct phases." During the second, from 1935-1938, the movement became openly anti-semitic and regionally focused. Some have argued that the Mosley's anti-semitism was pure political opportunism, an attempt to scapegoat Jews for the party's decline, especially as organized Jews played a large role in the organized opposition to the party throughout its existence. After the huge drop in membership in 1935, the movement also simply no longer had the resources to make its case nationally and was forced to operate on regional basis; and the passing of the Public Order Act in 1936, which banned the wearing of uniforms for political purposes only hurt the movements visibility more. Further, as war seemed to loom ever nearer through the progression of the decade, the attention that Mosley required to be focused on the economic and ideological crisis shifted away to concentrate on the rumblings of the Europe. It was finally, only the emergent peace movement, which Mosley was able tie his "Mind Britain's Business" campaign to, that kept the party from disappearing altogether. Though that fate might have been kinder than the internment that awaited Mosley on the twenty-third of May, 1940 as Britain entered into WWII.

Robert Skidelsky has, in recent years, said that Mosley was more a man of his time than even he allowed in his biography and a number of authors have begun to say that many of his economic insights and policies were ahead of their time. Neither of these was intended to be the argument here, rather what is of interest concerning Mosley and the BUF is the vibrant expression they gave to the ideological crisis of the interwar years. Britain most assuredly faced such a crisis and Mosley, with his quick, if at times superficial mind, was able to see the importance of unemployment to not only the overt economic crisis, but also its role in the overall ideological crisis afflicting Britain as its traditional identity schemes failed. But Mosley's ideas were ultimately as much a result of the problems that faced Britain during the inter-war years as they were a reaction to them, he did not rise above them as much as he tried to wrestle them away.

While hardly an exhaustive bibliography, some works that should be examined in regards to the BUF and the failure of British fascism in general are: Gerald Anderson, Fascists, Communists, and the National Government Civil Liberties in Great Britain, 1931-1937, (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1983); Robert Benewick, A Study of British Fascism, Political Violence & Public Order, (London: The Penguin Press, 1969) re-edited and published in 1972 as The Fascist Movement in Britain; Michael Cronin ed., The Failure of British Fascism, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); Colin Cross, The Fascists in Britain, (New York: 1963); Kenneth Lunn and Richard C. Thurlow eds., British Fascism, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980); S. Taylor, The National Front in English Politics, (London: 1982); Richard C. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, (New York: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1987). G. C. Webber, "Patterns of Membership and Support for the British Union of Facists," Journal of Contemporary History, 19(1984), pps. 575-606; Stephen Cullen, "The Development of the Ideas and Policy of the British Union of Fascists, 1932-1940," JCH, 22(1987), pps 115-136; and idem., "Political Violence: The Case of the British Union of Fascists," JCH, 28(1993) pps., 245-267 are three journal articles that have made use of declassified governmental material.

G. C. Webber, The Ideology of the British Right 1918-1939, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), p. 8.

Cecil F. Melville, The Truth About the New Party, (London: Wishart & Company, 1931), p. 24. See in particular Robert Benewick who argued that the action oriented ideology of the movement allowed "[p]olicy [to] often [be] manipulated with a callous disregard for principles." Benewick, A Study of British Fascism, Political Violence & Public Order, p. 133.

W. F. Mandle, Anti-Semitism and the British Union of Fascists, (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1968). Webber has argued that Roger Griffith's Fellow Travelers of the Right ultimately does the same thing. Webber, The Ideology of the British Right 1918-1939, p. 9.

Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pps. 303 and 305.

Webber, p. 2.

Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring, The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, (New York: Doubleday, 1990), p. 255.

The social and economic blight of unemployment would remain the dominant concern for the entire inter-war period. No matter what economic advances were made otherwise, as will be discussed below, this problem remained. A good discussion of the situation can be found in John Stevenson, British Society 1914-45, (London: Penguin Books, 1984) pps. 266-295.

Robert Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump, The Labor Government of 1929-1931, (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1967), p.1.

Donald Winch, Economics and Policy, A Historical Study, (New York: Walker and Company, 1969), p. 68.

John Stevenson, British Society 1914-45, (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1984), p. 105.

ibid. and Skidelsky, see Appendix II, "Selected Statistics," p. 398.

This, at least, sectional recovery was strong enough that Robert Graves and Alan Hodge argued that the New York Stock Market crash of 1929 that plunged not only the United States but all of Europe into a depression, did not, at first, much affect Great Britain. They go on to write that "In Britain the Thirties were to be merely the 'Troubled Thirties' [as opposed to Groucho Marx's 'Threadbare Thirties']. Repercussions from Wall Street broke few windows in the City." The Long Weekend, A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939, (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1941), pps. 247 and 248.

Skidelsky, p.2.

ibid. pps. 2-3. He also notes that this view of the gold standard as not only a tool for fixing the relative value of currency but also as a guard against uncontrollable inflation was buttressed by the European episode of rampant inflation in 1920-23.

Stevenson, p. 103.

ibid. p. 104.

ibid.

Perry Anderson, English Questions, (New York: Verso, 1992), p. 17.

The similarities here between Anderson's developmental interpretation and E. P. Thompson's should not be overlooked. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common, Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, (New York: The New York Press, 1993), see in particular ch. 2.

Anderson, pps. 17-20.

ibid. pps. 20-22.

With the term "military-industrial imperialism" Perry means imperialism that "proceeded by straight conquest" as opposed to "diplomatic-industrial imperialism" which is the "economic subjugation of other nations." ibid. p. 24.

ibid. pps. 23-26.

Fred Weinstein, History and Theory After the Fall, An Essay on Interpretation, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 84.

ibid.

The experience of the Labour Party during the second Labour Government of 1929-1931 is a striking example of the pervasiveness of capitalist structures in either limiting or allowing political action during the inter-war period. "If the revenue were not available there could be no socialism." Skidelsky, p. 77. See also John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The Slump, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), in particular, chs. 4 & 5.

Skidelsky, p. 3.

Webber, p. 7.

A. C. Pigou, Aspects of British Economic History 1918-1925, 1947, p. 234. Cited in Skidelsky, p. 1. The "intractable million" was Pigou's phrase for the ten percent "of the working class unable to find regular employment in the Britain of the nineteen-twenties." ibid. Webber, p. 7.

Craig Calhoun, "Social Theory and the Politics of Identity" in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun, (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1994), p. 11. Identity is here taken to be the individual reflexive activity which "turns on the interrelated problems of self-recognition and recognition by others." ibid. p. 20.

Skidelsky, p. 2.

Webber, pps. 10-11.

ibid. p. 5. The Diehards were a group on the British right from the turn of the century through to the nineteen-thirties that preached protectionism and feared imperial decline.

Stevenson, p. 104.

William H. Sewell, Jr., "Uneven Development, the Autonomy of Politics, and the Dockworkers of Nineteenth-Century Marseille," American Historical Review, 93(1988), Feb.-June.

Webber, p. 25.

Skidelsky, p. x.

For the growing importance of the popular press see Webber, pps. 34-35.

Robert Graves and Allan Hodge, The Long Week-End, A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939, (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1941), p. 257.

T. S. Eliot, The Monthly Criterion v.VI no. V, Nov. 1927, (London: Reprinted, Faber and Faber Limited, 1967), pps. 386-387.

Wyndham Lewis, The Revenge for Love, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock, (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1991). p. 17.

Webber, p. 27.

J. A. Hobson, Democracy, (London: John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd., 1934), pps. 113-114.

Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), pps. 369-371.

Graves and Hodge, p. 260.

T. S. Eliot, p. 387.

Richard C. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, (New York: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1987), p. 92.

Oswald Mosley, My Life, (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1968), p. 11.

Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, (London: Papermac, 1990), pps. 38-40 and 61-65.

ibid. p. 45 and ch. 2, "The Challenge to Liberalism"

ibid. p. 65.

Mosley: The Facts, (London: Euphorion Distribution Ltd., 1957), p. 291.

Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 172.

ibid. pps. 90 and 158.

ibid. pps. 168 and 177-180.

Winch, pps. 122-123. These are examples of his short-term proposals, for an in depth discussion and analysis of Mosley's overall plan see Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump, ch. 8.

John M. Keynes, Nation and Athenaeum, December 13, 1930. Cited in Winch, p. 123.

Stevenson and Cook, p. 72.

John Strachey and C. E. M. Joad, "Parliamentary Reform: The New Party's Proposals," The Political Quarterly, v.2, 1931, pps. 319, 322-323, 325.

Thurlow, p. 92.

Strachey and Joad would both leave not long after the election because of the overt turn to fascism. Strachey later published a book entitled The Menace of Fascism, (New York: Covici Friede, Publishers, 1933).

Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 288.

Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump, p. 386.

Mosley, My Life, p. 287.

Alfredo Rocco, "The Political Doctrine of Fascism," in Communism, Fascism, and Democracy The Theoretical Foundations, ed. Carl Cohen, (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 336.

Benito Mussolini, ibid. 332. Stephen Cullen, "The Development of the Ideas and Policy of the British Union of Fascists, 1932-40," Journal of Contemporary History, v.22(1987), p. 118.

Filippo Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," in Marinetti Selected Writings, trans. and ed. R. W. Flint, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 42.

Mosley, The British Peace--How to Get It, (London: Greater Britain Press, 1940), p. 5.

Thurlow, p. 93.

ibid.

Mosley, The Greater Britain, (London: BUF Press, 1932), pps. 12-13.

ibid. pps. 13, 27 and 26.

Mosley, Blackshirt Policy, (London: Greater Britain Publications, 1934?), p. 11.

Mosley, The Greater Britain, p. 22

ibid. pps. 47 and 53.

Mosley, Blackshirt Policy, p. 27.

Mosley, The Greater Britain, pps. 106 and 92.

Mosley, The British Peace--How to Get it, p. 5.

Memoirs of a Conservative J.C.C. Davidson's Memoirs and Papers 1910-37, ed. Robert Rhodes James, (London: The Macmillan Company, 1969), p. 181.

Webber, p. 79. It is actually interesting to see the overlap of Mosley's and Amery's ideas. Compare the above to Mosley's notion assertion that within the limits of the welfare of the State, all activity would be encouraged; "individual enterprise, and the making of a profit, are not only permitted, but encouraged." The Greater Britain, p. 27.

Stevenson, p. 327.

G. C. Webber, "Patterns of Contemporary History, 19(1984), pps. 575-606.

Webber, "The British Isles," in The Social Basis of European Fascist Movements, ed. Detlef Mühlberger, (New York: Croom Helm, 1987) pps. 140-154.

Webber, The Ideology of the British Right 1918-1939, p. 45.

Thurlow, p. 93.

"Smethwick Notes," in Birmingham Town Crier, 3 Aug 1928. Cited in Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 172.

Mosley, My Life, p. 303.

Webber, "The British Isles," p. 147.

Strachey has asserted that Mosley's anti-semitism was nothing more than political maneuvering. On organized resistance to the BUF by Jews see, for example, Skidelsky, "Reflections on Mosley and British Fascism," in British Fascism, ed. by Kenneth Lunn and Richard C. Thurlow, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), pps. 84-85.

Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 449.