Source: Socialist Press (Workers Socialist League), no. 68, Wednesday 31 August 1977, pp. 6–7.
Why did fascists not come to power in Britain? The workings of capital are international and the needs of capital are international. How was it that capital did not require the fascist solution in Britain?
The answer to this question will not be found in any notions such as British love of “justice” or democracy or British “character”. These sort of bogus notions are swept aside when capitalism, in crisis, is fighting for its life.
For it is in response to capitalist crisis that fascism emerges. Unable to solve the endemic problems of slump and stagnation in the 1930s, the capitalist class could only impose the economic measures necessary for survival by attacking the working class; in Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal by entirely breaking the back of the working class.
CRUSHED
In that situation of economic catastrophe, with bourgeois democracy unable to maintain a stable social order, the “little men”, feeling themselves crushed by the growth of monopoly, not wishing to identify with the workers’ movement, turned in desperation and panic to fascism.
Small shop keepers, farmers, small businessmen, lower professionals and the peasantry form the social layer from which fascist parties take their recruits. These fascist parties none the less served the interests of capital.
Why in Britain did these layers not turn in such numbers towards fascism? There was of course no peasantry in Britain and the small capitalist farmers were also very few in number. Despite the size of the urban petty bourgeoisie the class nature of British society was one where there were fewer of the kinds of social groups that fascism incites to action.
WEAKENED
The answer to the question, however, lies mainly in two areas. Firstly the nature of the capitalist crisis and the relation of class forces were not such in Britain as to demand a fascist solution. It was possible, because of the earlier defeat of the working class in the 1926 General Strike, for solutions to be imposed by the capitalists on a working class greatly weakened by the earlier betrayals of its leaders.
The British ruling class did not need to call the fascists to power to break the working class; the British ruling class could rattle the sabre of fascism but did not need to hand over state power to the fascists.
But secondly, at crucial moments the British fascists were physically taken on by the workers’ movement and were physically halted on the streets. These events demand special attention today as once again street battles break out against the fascists.
But before looking at the dramatic climax of the rise and fall of the fascists in Britain, we should see in some more detail how the ruling class managed without putting the fascists into power.
Britain at the end of the 1920s experienced the economic depression which was world-wide. Between 1929 and 1932 the British official index of industrial production fell by 17%. Coal output in 1931 was no higher than it had been in 1900; and iron production was down to that of 1927. Unemployment reached 3 million. In the twelve months to June 1933 the world tonnage of merchant shipping showed a net decrease of 1,814,000 tons—more than half this decrease being tonnage owned in the UK. In many ways, however, this crisis in Britain was less precipitate than in other major capitalist countries because British capitalism had failed to achieve even the modest, short-lived boom of the 1920s.
Following 1926, when the General Council of the TUC handed the working class on a plate to the government, British capital was able to operate with the most abject collaboration of the leaders of the labour movement. Thousands of militants in the factories had been sacked at the end of the strike and the Tory government passed the anti-union Trades Disputes Act in 1927. Then, in 1931, MacDonald and Snowden betrayed the labour movement by entering a coalition government with the Tories. What was left of the Labour Party went down to a catastrophic electoral defeat.
TAMPERING
The “National Government” engaged in repressive measures against the working class. As a commentator at the time put it:
“The record of the National Government is largely the history of a movement away from democracy. The tampering with parliamentary forms, the reorganisation of the police and their increasing violence, the restrictions on free speech and assembly, the Royal Defence Corps (a new body of the Territorial Army to deal with ‘foreign agents’ i.e. the left) the Unemployment Act (cutting the dole and means testing), the Incitement to Disaffection Act—behind all these is a purpose essentially fascist . . .
It is the good fortune of British capitalism that it has so far only needed to adopt a part of the authoritative fascist procedure. It has been able to achieve its purposes—the partial subjugation of the working class without resort to anything glaringly undemocratic, without the trouble of dressing in coloured shirts.”
(W.A. Rudlin, The Growth of Fascism in Britain).
BEATEN
Yet there were those who dressed in coloured shirts and they did need to be physically beaten. This was the movement that Mosley built. There were fascist bodies in Britain prior to the formation of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists but it was this movement that was most significant. Indeed the history of the British fascist movement is often seen as the history of one man—viewed by the bourgeoisie as brilliant but erratic, as a maverick who could have been Prime Minister. Beatrice Webb, the Fabian, described Mosley in 1923:
“Here is the perfect politician who is also a perfect gentleman.”
This gentleman was to lead a movement which marched through the East End of London chanting “The Yids, the Yids, We gotta get rid of the Yids” and initiated and ordered the worst scenes of thuggery seen in British politics this century. This was Mosley.
ARISTOCRAT
He was an aristocrat who entered Parliament as Conservative member for Harrow in 1918—yet by 1920 he had crossed the House and joined the Independent Labour Party in 1923. By 1926 he reached the Labour Party national executive and became Labour MP for Smethwick (having ironically been defeated in Birmingham Ladywood).
In 1930 he was defeated at the Labour Party conference on a resolution urging a programme of action on unemployment. He straight away began to build a new party which was to move rapidly right towards fascism.
Like Mussolini, he moved from the left to the far right.
Mosley was supported financially by big business: to begin with by William Morris the motor manufacturer, one of the fathers of what is now British Leyland, followed later by Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail and Evening News.
Mosley began building the action wing of his movement in his youth clubs where young thugs were trained in physical combat.
Various intellectuals, such as Harold Nicholson [sic; Nicolson] and Osbert Sitwell dithered at the edge of Mosley’s movement, not quite able to commit themselves nor to break from its horrid appeal.
The New Party failed resoundingly and Mosley moved to model his movement more closely on the continental pattern and came out in favour of that key aspect of fascist policy, the corporate state.
HARMONY
“A society working with the precision and harmony of a human body, every interest and every individual is subordinate to the overriding purpose of the nation.”
He toured Spain, Germany and Italy (as honoured guest of Mussolini) and came back a convinced fascist.
The British Union of Fascists, which by 1934 had 370 branches and perhaps 5,000 active members had 3 conditions of membership, loyalty to King, Empire and leader, acceptance of discipline and payment of one shilling a month.
Its themes were its appeal to youth, nationalism, anti-communism and anti-semitism. It relied on the politics of action, of marches, demonstrations and rallies, in its moves to set up a corporate state where the employers, workers and consumers would be equally “represented”; there would be no strikes, no trade unions and decisions of the state would be unchallengeable.
The Mosley movement, dressed in its black shirts and black boots, made scapegoats of the Jews—blaming them for unemployment. There was, they said, a conspiracy of Jews and Bolsheviks which must be physically fought. From the beginning the Mosley movement engaged in physical violence against its opponents. It was at the rally in Olympia in 1934 that it reached its peak and revealed most sharply the dangers of fascism. Mosley stood, picked out by a spotlight in the vast hall. When he was repeatedly heckled by anti-fascists in the audience he stopped speaking and the spotlight turned on them and they were beaten up.
Even a Conservative member of parliament who was present was shocked:
“Men and women were knocked down and were still assaulted and kicked on the floor. It will be a matter of surprise for us if there were no fatal injuries.”
The extreme violence of the Mosleyites lead to the timid dithering calls by the Mervyn Stockwoods and Mayor of Lewishams of those days that “the government ought to ban fascist marches”.
PUERILE
The Communist Party, too, lent support to the demands for the government to do something—rather than relying on the strength of the working class. But as the Trotskyist paper Militant put it just before the Cable Street march:
“The methods with which the Labour Party and Communist Party are opposing Mosley’s proposed march are equally puerile. To ask a capitalist government to ban the activities of the Fascists, the agents of capitalism, but to leave unhampered the activities of the working class, the enemies of capitalism, must appear ridiculous . . . to anyone who recognises the existence of the class war instead of talking only about democracy.”
Nowadays the Communist Party presents the crucial battle in which the workers defended themselves in Cable Street in 1936 as if it was entirely the Party’s idea. This is an unconvincing falsification. Such a position would have been totally out of keeping with the policy of Stalin and the Comintern to “fight” fascism through class collaboration in “democratic” fronts with the “progressive” bourgeoisie. It was the Stalinists’ refusal to see the fight against fascism as a class question which throughout the 1930s strengthened the hand of the fascists.
SHARPNESS
There is other more concrete evidence available on the role of the Communist Party in Cable Street, a role initially very like that of CP leaders in Lewisham on August 13, of avoiding the sharpness of the fight in the interests of class collaboration.
The following letter was sent to a CP member in the East End by the East London organiser of the CP.
28.9.36
Dear Joe,
Arrangements re Mosley’s march. A party meeting at Salmon and Ball and another at Poplar, i.e. near to each end of the march. Meetings to be kept orderly. Avoid clashes, keep order: no excuse for government to say we, like BUF, are hooligans. If Mosley decides to march, let him. Don’t attempt disorder (time too short to get a “they shall not pass” policy across). It would only be a harmful stunt. Best see there is a strong meeting at each end of the march. Our biggest trouble will be to keep order and discipline. *
The party line changed only 3 days before the march after it was evident that the decision to stop Mosley had already been made by the workers of East London despite the line of the CP.
The Mosleyites, with their usual police protectors, planned this provocative march on October 5, 1936 [sic — the march was Sunday 4 October], through London’s poorest area, with its high proportion of Jews, as a gesture of intimidation.
The fascists were held out of the East End at Gardners Corner [sic; usually Gardiner’s Corner] by 100,000 anti-fascists; and in the barricade battle at Cable Street some of the police surrendered to the anti-fascists.
This enormous physical show of strength was a decisive turning point for Mosley—the march was unable to continue and the Mosleyites were unable to display that action and control essential to a fascist movement.
DECLINE
From that moment the BUF went into a sharp decline. It was the action of the working class on the streets which halted the advance of fascism, rather than gestures like the Public Order Act of 1936 forbidding the wearing of uniforms.
Mosley’s movement, not called upon by the ruling class, was smashed by working class awareness of the fascist danger; a danger which was understood in a political sense not only for its racism but as a deadly menace to the whole workers’ movement.
There could be no clearer lesson for today of the need to build workers’ defence organisations. The fight against the British Union of Fascists then, like that against the National Front today, is not just a battle against racialism; it is the defence of the independence and material conditions of the whole working class. The most important weapon in this fight is the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International.
*For opposing this line and similar positions, the recipient Joe Jacobs was finally expelled from the CP and spent the remaining 40 years of his life, first in the Trotskyist movement and later in the anarchist movement. He died earlier this year.
The letter to Joe Jacobs is published by kind permission of Solidarity.
Notes
“the Trotskyist paper Militant“ is the paper of the 1930s Militant Group, not the later Militant tendency in the Labour Party. Do not conflate them.
The 5 October date is wrong in the original. Cable Street was Sunday 4 October 1936.
Written three weeks after the Battle of Lewisham (13 August 1977), and the argument is built for that moment: it reads the CP’s conduct at Lewisham back into 1936. The companion polemic is Socialist Press no. 69, 14 September 1977, p. 6, answering James Klugmann’s eulogy of the CP’s role and referring the reader back to this issue.