Stony ground for fascism.(Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars)(Book Review)

Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars, by Martin Pugh; Jonathan Cape, 2005, about $50.

BRITONS SINCE the end of the Second World War have comforted themselves with the received wisdom that fascism is not a part of their national history and that, despite Sir Oswald Mosley's talent, notoriety and a few newsworthy episodes involving his British Union of Fascists, it never really had much influence over British political life.

Martin Pugh, however, thinks that the traditional assumptions about British fascism are "misleading and ... based as much on prejudice as on the evidence". His Hurrah for the Blackshirts! is an attempt to demonstrate that fascism is part of the British story of the inter-war period. And even if he does not contend that fascism ever came especially close to power in Britain, his argument has significance for Britain's assessment of its place in the moral history of the twentieth century. Perhaps above all, the case for the Second World War as a just war from the Allies' perspective owes a lot to the reading of fascism as an alien ideology, antithetical to a civilised political outlook such as Britain's.

Pugh's critique is partly methodological. He sees the general oversight of fascism as a consequence of it being approached as a collection of miscellaneous movements that appeared from time to time of which Mosley's BUF was the most popular. This can give the impression that fascists were unhinged aristocrats like Lord Redesdale and his daughters, Unity and Diana Mitford, or eccentric extremists like Arnold Leese, a world authority on the diseases of camels, or the transvestite Valerie Arkell-Smith (aka Sir Victor Barker) who joined the National Fascisti because it would assist her to pose as a man.

Pugh's approach is to follow a fascist vein that he sees running through British politics and society in the first half of the twentieth century. He starts with the "pre-fascist tradition" of governments in the early 1900s suppressing political opposition with legislation intended for the defence of the realm. This was accepted by the British despite their veneration for the common law, the guarantor of civil liberty.

He also identifies a real disenchantment in the inter-war period with democracy and a sympathy for fascist activism amongst politicians, businessmen, high-ranking ex-servicemen, society figures and writers. A headline that appeared in Lord Rothermere's influential newspaper, the Daily Mail, provides the title for this book. And, according to Pugh, high-profile figures such as the pro-Nazi historian Sir Arthur Bryant and the Dukes of Buccleuch, Westminster and Hamilton were active during the "Phoney War", exerting influence behind the scenes in parliament and bringing pressure to bear on the royal family in efforts to keep Britain from going to war with Germany.

As an ideology, Pugh argues that fascism had appeal across the board as Mosley managed to balance elements of traditional Toryism with the coarse street politics the BUT adopted, particularly in the East End. There was a brisk trade in ideas and personnel between the fascists and the Tories and, in 1934, the right wing of the parliamentary Conservatives established the January Club to engender an understanding of the corporate state amongst respectable politicians. On the left, the fascists found ...