Political Violence: The Case of the British Union of Fascists

Abstract

The British Union of Fascists (BUF) has been regarded as something of an aberration in British political history, an inappropriate mode of politics. Although almost uniformally unsuccessful in electoral terms, the existence of such an active fascist movement in the industrialized world's most stable liberal democracy gave the BUF an importance out of all proportion to its size and prospects. Renzo de Felice has linked the emergence of Oswald Mosley's movement in 1932, and the publication of John Strachey's The Menace of Fascism in 1933, with the multiplication of contemporary 'warnings and alarms about the dangers of fascism. Yet fascism came to little in Britain, being finally killed off once the country became involved, though not by choice, in war with the only fully fascist regime, Italy, and its dominant ally, Germany. As a result, the historiography of the BUF has tended to stress what successive writers have seen as the inappropriateness of the movement's politics. Yet it is possible to argue that whereas the BUF, and Mosley in particular, might have been absurdly optimistic as to his chances of success, he was no more so than any other political grouping that has stood outside the mainstream of British political life this century. Further, that vain optimism is not, in itself, evidence of the inappropriate nature of Mosley's political project. In terms of his political ideas and policy in the 1930s, there can be no doubt that he advocated a coherent programme for restructuring the political and economic life of Britain. His programme envisaged the implementation of Empire autarky, and the creation of a totalitarian democracy in the shape of the corporate state. That political project has an ancestry that can be traced back to revolutionary France. Similarly, the style of the BUF's politics lay firmly within a distinct