Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) served in World War 1, fighting on the Western Front, before becoming a Conservative MP for Harrow at the age of twenty one. I find this quite striking, because it’s difficult to imagine any twenty one year old being elected as an MP in the current era. Apparently he was a skilled orator and impressive young politician despite his politics not yet being fully formed. Anyway, he became disillusioned with the Conservative Party over its Irish policy. His opposition to the Black and Tans led to his departure from the Tories and crossing the floor to join Labour, where he would identify with the left wing of his new party.
The Black and Tans were a force of temporary constables (more commonly known as special constables) recruited to assist the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921). Their impact on the war was such that the conflict is sometimes referred to as the Black and Tan War.
In January 1919, the Irish Republicans, who had won a landslide victory in a December 1918 election, declared independence from Britain and formed a breakaway government. Two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary were shot dead in County Tipperary. The Irish Volunteers, later renamed the Irish Republican Army, targeted the RIC and British Army barracks and ambushed their patrols. The British Army recruited the Black and Tans (mostly in Britain but there were some Irish members also) to bolster the strength of the RIC. The Black and Tans were the creation of Winston Churchill. His heavy handedness in such affairs gained him many opponents over his long career, as in his favoured handling of the General Strike, and his opposition to Indian self-rule. Of course, in relation to the growth of German fascism in the 1930s, Churchill’s willingness for confrontation was to sit on the right side of history. The Black and Tans were renowned for ill-discipline and brutal attacks on civilians. When members of the Tans were killed by the IRA, Irish civilians were often murdered in acts of ‘retaliation’.
The Conservatives, creators of the Black and Tans, were no longer a party that Mosley felt he could align himself with.
Mosley, having joined the Labour Party in 1924, saw that Harrow would not re-elect him as a Labour MP (although they had re-elected him as an independent, after he’d left the Conservatives two years prior), and instead stood in another constituency, Birmingham Ladywood, where he opposed one Neville Chamberlain. He lost by seventy seven votes but was more successful in Smethwick, where he was elected as MP in 1926. During that campaign he complained that the Tories were attacking him based on his wealth. Whatever they attacked him for, they were unsuccessful.
He became close to Ramsay MacDonald and hoped for one of the great offices of state, but when Labour won the General Election in 1929, he was given a position outside of the Cabinet. He was given the job of tackling the unemployment problem, but his proposals were deemed too radical by his superiors. Mosley advocated nationalisation of main industries and a programme of public works to boost employment. His left wing ideas were rejected by the Labour government, and he resigned. The Nation, a publication which was later merged with the New Statesman, said “the resignation of Sir Oswald Mosley is an event of capital importance in domestic politics… We feel that Sir Oswald has acted rightly — as he has certainly acted courageously — in declining to share any longer in the responsibility for inertia”. Many of Mosley’s policies were a generation ahead of the Labour Party.
So then, clearly the ground was prepared for a decisive swing towards fascism.
After his ill-fated New Party completed its brief trajectory across the skies of British politics, Mosley visited Italy, and returned convinced that Mussolini was a shining example of what could be achieved in Britain. He strove to bring the various fascist groups together and formed the British Union of Fascists, in 1932. The BUF was protectionist (i.e. restrictive of trade with other countries so that homemade products can compete), anti-communist, and nationalistic. The Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror were among the party’s early supporters. No surprise regarding the Mail of course. But why the Mirror, doesn’t that seem odd? Well, the one-time piece of support for the BUF in the Mirror was an article written by that lovable Daily Mail owner, Viscount Rothermere. The Mirror was in fact so vitriolic in its condemnation of fascism that the Nazis would later add the paper’s directors to a hit-list in the event of a successful Operation Sealion.
Mosley established a uniformed paramilitary wing of the party known as the Blackshirts, who were frequently involved in violent confrontations with communists and Jewish groups in London. After the Night of the Long Knives in Germany, the BUF was weakened to the extent that it was unable to fight the 1935 General Election. This did not stop them organising street protests though. In 1936, they attempted to march, demonstrating, through London’s East End. They were opposed by groups of anti-fascists, and supported by the police. Eventually the BUF and the police had to admit defeat and they abandoned the rally. This was the infamous Battle of Cable Street.
Mosley’s Blackshirts continued to take to the streets and proved enough of a concern for the government to pass the Public Order Act of 1936, which prohibited political uniforms and quasi-military style organisations. After the outbreak of war with Nazi Germany, the BUF began to face hostility, particularly after the Blitz had begun. Mosley was interned in 1940, along with most of the prominent fascists in Britain. He was released in 1943. After the war, he was persuaded by his supporters to return to politics and set up the Union Movement, which stood for a single nation state to cover all of Europe. In this, too, he was generations ahead of prominent political movements.
