Why Was the Political Impact of Fascism in Britain so Marginal and Easy to Contain?

¶ … rise of fascist states in Germany and Italy during the post World War I era was accompanied by similar movements in nations across the world; but most of these never achieved the same prominence. Great Britain saw the emergence of the British Union of Fascists, which gained thousands of supporters, but the organization never came to power. Largely this was for economic reasons: Britain did not suffer as severe an economic downturn after the First World War as many other nations did. Another explanation is the general rejection of the violent methodology employed by the British Fascists. It is tempting to argue that fascism was fundamentally opposed to the overall democratic nature of the British populous, but it is more likely that the failure of the fascist movement in Great Britain had economic origins.

There had never been a war quite like World War I. In its aftermath it was simply called "the Great War"; some even referred to it as, "the war to end all wars." Never before had people died on the same scale or in the same manner that they did during World War I. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the architects of the peace agreement that followed -- the Treaty of Versailles -- were unprepared for the consequences of the stern punishment they dealt to the Germans.

For being the instigators of such a brutal and costly war the Germans were forced to surrender large portions of their territory, as well as pay huge reparations. These penalties created a setting that was ideal for fascism to grow and thrive: a crippled economy. A nation in the midst of an economic crisis is very susceptible to regimes that can promise immediate relief. With the high level of national pride in Germany it was relatively easy for people like Hitler to identify scapegoats for their economic woes while promising a return to glory.

"Fascism in Europe rose and spread quickly because of the ravages of World War I and the Political and spiritual vacuum they had left behind."

Certainly, many of the spiritual and moral guidelines for human behavior had been devastated by the horrors of World War I. Trench warfare and the use of poison gas introduced entirely new and painful methods for killing vast numbers of people in an almost indiscriminant manner. Survivors found that many long held institutions of belief and reason had been permanently violated; new systems had to be formed to fill the void left by the old ones, and to explain the awful brutality of the world. This general loss of faith can be reflected in the artistic movements of the time -- the modernists desperately searched for something, anything that could be held-up as a source of comfort and faith.

With an increasing number of people in post-war Europe having lost faith in Christianity one of the emerging institutions of belief was faith in science and innovation. As promising as this source of belief was, it was -- in many cases -- taken too far and trusted to explain too much. People had seen the power of direct application of science; they had seen the first truly chemical war, and they had also seen the improvements in living standards and increased productivity science could bring about. Yet, people had not yet learned that science, unlike religious faith, is not designed be trusted blindly. The search for faith in the years following World War I thrust science into forefront of human belief, and laid the foundations for the bigotry that was to follow.

Eugenics was a painfully backward application of science -- namely, evolutionary theory -- but it created a convenient scapegoat for the origins of fascist movements. In Britain the notion had been around for a long time. At the turn of the century the birth rate of the British middle class began to fall, which greatly worried many politicians for to reasons. "First was the fear that it might spread to the working classes, who were largely ignorant of the methods of birth control. . . . Second was the fear that if the middle classes alone continued to have fewer children this would have the effect of reducing the intelligent and enterprising section of the population. This stimulated a fashionable interest in eugenics -- the idea of improving the national stock by breeding the best elements, and preventing reproduction of the physically unfit and mentally backwards."

Generally, it was the elite of society who felt that they had the right to choose who could reproduce and who could not.

Fortunately, in Britain the movement never gained general support because the perceived population problem never came to fruition, but this was not the case in Germany. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman who later moved to Germany published the infamous book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. This book "can best be described as a mighty hymn to the superiority of the Teutonic people. . . . Within that wider category, moreover, the Teutonic or German People are markedly superior to all the rest. Thus Chamberlain's real point: that a racially pure German empire should, obviously, rule the world."

This book was one of the first to put to paper the notion of racial superiority, but it was not the last. It introduced an extremely attractive notion to people who had been downtrodden by the rest of the world -- it justified any future retaliation.

Chamberlain's ideas "gave high-octane fuel to the growth of the Nazi creed, providing for Hitler's theories in Mein Kampf just the right mixture of intellectual justification and high emotionalism."

Post World War I Europe was a fertile place for new theories to explain the world; notions of innate racial and class superiority came out of this draught of faith. Obviously this distortion of science created, for those who accepted it, a feeling that their enemies were something less than human.

Many British citizens firmly believed that the Irish were, in many ways, subhuman; yet Britain did not methodically exterminate the Irish as the Germans did the Jews. Additionally, "In 1863 Dr. James Hunt had dismayed his audience at a meeting in Newcastle of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by asserting that the 'Negro' was a separate species of human being, half way between the ape and 'European man.' Yet within a generation such views had become the conventional wisdom."

This point illustrates that racist views were prevalent in Britain as well as Germany and Italy, where fascist dictators actually came to power. Therefore, it would be false to claim that fascism did not come about in Britain because the British were free of bigotry, or that the ideology inherent in fascist states was foreign to the British mindset.

The fascist regimes that came out of the post World War I era were a reaction to a growing discontentment of the lower classes, and the reaction of the ruling classes against Communism. Upper class Europe during the Victorian era was able to maintain power through noble birthright. With the post war depression the dissatisfaction of the lower classes presented a very real threat to the upper classes -- the threat of Communist revolutions, like that in Russia, would strip the wealthy of every advantage they enjoyed. It was important, therefore, to relieve the economic pressures on the lower class while maintaining the upper class' position in society. Fascist governments are able to do this. "The rich were offered an end to the threat of socialism and communism, and the middle classes were guaranteed order. Even the working class was offered something. In its early days, fascism borrowed many of socialism's policies, like taxes on wealth, a minimum wage, and more government control over industry."

Thus with a few compromises, the social elite under fascism were able to protect themselves from violent social revolution and restructuring.

Unwittingly, under a fascist government the lower classes were maintaining the elite's position in society. But, by joining a fascist party they were also increasing their own power in a small way; this was because the methods employed by these parties encouraged violence as a means to control. So, it was relatively easy to find teams of angry youths willing to scour the countryside with sticks and knives to physically undermine all opposing parties. This offered a violent distraction for many in the working class who might have otherwise adopted a socialist ideology.

By 1919 the war had left the British Empire weakened, and increasingly vulnerable to chaotic uprisings from the socially discontented. The existing order tended to dismiss the grievances of these groups on the grounds that they were a vast conspiracy against Britain as a whole, but without any particular agenda. "Such attitudes, usually accompanied with an intense fear of Communism and its capacity to create mayhem everywhere, were prevalent among Britain's ruling class at the time."

This made Britain, much like the rest of Europe, prone to fascist movements; which assailed Communism while addressing the issues of the poor.

'During the 1920's one or two extreme right-wing organizations appeared in Britain including the Imperial Fascist League. They were essentially symptoms of the fears about Bolshevik subversion and nationalistic attacks on the Empire."

These groups were not destined to gain the power of a later organization headed by Sir Oswald Mosley: the British Union of Fascists, founded in 1932. Mosley was able to tap into the disillusionment felt by many veterans of the First World War, and the government's difficulty coping with the Great Depression. He "claimed that when the national government failed, his movement would step in to save Britain from Communism."

For the first two years of its existence the British Union of Fascists was successful in recruiting thousands of members in depressed areas across Britain. Their doctrines borrowed much from the established fascist governments in Italy and Germany, which Mosley visited himself. Oswald Mosley's wife, Dianna, was one of the few people in the world to be well acquainted with both Winston Churchill and Adolph Hitler.

The British Union of Fascists "received financial support form Mussolini, and adopted the idea of the corporate state."

Mosley also perpetuated the practice of finding racial scapegoats for economic instability -- he blamed the Jews, and endorsed Hitler's management of them. Of course, however, this was well before anyone became aware of the scale by which Hitler was massacring them.

Although the British Union of Fascists identified themselves as fascists it has been difficult for historians to clearly define what fascism truly was. The British form tried mostly to emulate the Italian model created my Mussolini. Stuart Hood described the general movement: "Fascism as a mass political phenomenon was the response . . . To a series of threats: recession, mass unrest, the Russian revolution, the organized working class and its left wing parties."

Despite the seeming abundance of forces pushing Britain towards fascism, by 1934 the British Union of Fascists was clearly losing power. A sharp decline in the movement's popularity occurred after a mass rally at Olympia in London, which escalated into a violent riot. "The violent methods alienated many of the respectable Conservatives and major newspapers such as the Daily Mail which has given Mosley favorable publicity."

Yet in truth, it is difficult to imagine that fascism failed in Britain because of an aversion to violence. The British built their empire with the barrel of a gun, and most of the young members of the British Union of Fascists were eager to participate in the "quasi-military" organization that encouraged the use of violence.

British history would indicate that fascism lost momentum for reasons other than their long democratic history. Historically, British ideology and pride came from their ability to dominate other cultures. Linda Colley describes some of the attitudes inherent in the formation of the British empire: "It means seizing land, planting it and changing it. It means employing guns, technology, trade and the bible to devastating effect, imposing rule, and subordinating those of a different skin pigmentation or religion."

The idea of violence, and threat there of, was precisely what made England a world power. So, it is likely that it was not the violence people associated with fascism that halted the movement in Britain.

Another major aspect of fascism was that it played upon a sense of lost national pride and humiliation. German and Italian citizens felt that their nations has fallen from glory, and been wronged by the rest of the world. This sentiment, coupled with the idea of racial superiority, urged the populous to fulfill their country's destiny -- which was, of course, to dominate the globe. For Britain, this was one major aspect for the recipe for fascism that they were missing: they had not been humiliated by the First World War.

Furthermore, although the other factors contributing to fascism in other parts of the world were in place, they were not as acute in Britain. "Unemployment in Britain was bad, though not as bad as elsewhere; there was poverty, dissatisfaction and industrial unrest, but the national strike of 1926, which lasted a matter of days, was a mild affair compared to Italy's 'Biennio rosso,' the 'Two Red Years' of 1920-22 that saw factories occupied and widespread strikes and demonstrations by agricultural as well as industrial workers."

The economic and civil factors that contributed to fascist movements were less strong in Britain.

Unlike the Germans or Italians, the British maintained the same parliamentary government through the First World War. Through this government the perceived threat of Socialism and Communism was virtually eradicated. Pugh writes, "Another part of the explanation for the survival of the National Government lay in the fragmented and demoralized condition of the left after 1931. For some Socialists the betrayal of his party by Ramsay MacDonald and the timid economic policy of his government called into question whether it was realistic to achieve socialism by any parliamentary methods."

With the Socialists virtually powerless in English parliament the threat to the ruling class was less than in nations with strong left wing political parties. Accordingly, the reactionary response to the Socialist threat was also less intense.

The economic turmoil that encompassed the world during the Great Depression was by no means felt uniformly. In addition to the demoralization the German people experienced from the end of the war, they were also forced to cope with economic sanctions and reparations. This made a reorganization of government essential in Germany. In Britain, on the other hand, even though wages fell, prices fell even faster and "as a result those in work, who formed the majority, enjoyed, on average, a rise in 17 per cent in real wages between 1924 and 1935."

Essentially, living standards rose in Britain even during the Great Depression. This was not only the result of an increase in real wages, but also a consequence of the decreased population growth of the middle classes. It might be noted that when this phenomenon was first noticed the government saw it as a problem, and tried to implement a program of reproductive selection. But by the time of the Great Depression, the decreased numbers of children families were having resulted in an increase in families' total living standards. With fewer children the average family had more money to spend on their existing children.

This also contributed to the rise in living standards in Britain, and made fascism much less of an economic necessity than in other nations

All of these factors made it very difficult for the British Union of Fascists to gain a strong hold on the public, or any real hold on the government. By the outbreak of the Second World War public opinion had fallen directly opposite to the Germans, Italy, and fascism. Propaganda became an advanced governmental institution, and aided in the demise of British fascism. Suddenly, patriotic posters and pamphlets appeared everywhere, and the notion of fascism became extremely unpatriotic. "These posters [played] on two psychological needs: the need for men and women to belong to a group, and the need for the group to have its own symbols, flags, badges, banners, uniforms, and colors."