Political Conversions: Going Fascist

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I'll participate in Donald's What Supplies Last.

Hello, my name's David Ronsman and this is Past Present Future, the history of ideas podcast.

Today, it's the start of a new series of conversations.

I'm going to be talking to the political historian David Clemperer about what we're calling

political conversions, the stories of people who have switched sides, switched ideologies,

swapped out one worldview for another.

We're going to be covering the last 100 years beginning in the 1920s and 1930s,

taking the story up to the present.

Today, we're talking about the switch from socialism to fascism and we're concentrating on one

notorious case in particular, the story of Oswald mostly.

David, we're going to begin this set of conversations about political conversions,

people who switched sides, instances of political vault fast, big turnarounds of people's

political outlook, with a notorious case, Oswald mostly. We're going to bring in some other

people too. Mostly is notorious and it's easy to sum up the big shift in 1930. He was a minister

in a labor government. By 1932, he was leader of an organization called the British Union of Fascists.

He was Britain's leading fascists and it happened pretty fast. But with mostly one of the

complications is that wasn't his only switch in his career. He was quite a shape shifting

politicians and one of the questions with mostly that we're going to talk about is how much

are these really big shifts, how much is there some underlying thread through his story.

We should start at the beginning. How would you characterize the kind of politician that Oswald

mostly was when he first entered politics, entered parliament, first made a name for himself,

because one of the things we need to say about him is he started out as a Tory. So we've got to

get from Tory to Labour to new party to fascist and beyond. How would you characterize his

political formation? So I think the crucial thing in understanding the early mostly is the First

World War and mostly comes into parliament in 1918 at the end of the First World War and he comes

in as a Tory or rather he comes in as a coalition unionist. So he's part of the Lloyd George

Coalition that wins the election in the aftermath of the First World War and mostly has served in the

First World War. He was in the trenches and in the Royal Flying Corps. For him that time in the

trenches really shaped his understanding of politics and why he was in politics and what he thought

politics should be like. I think absolutely central to understanding mostly his politics in this

period is that his political identity is more generational than it is partisan. He sees himself as

part of a new generation who have served in the war and are going to remake British politics and

he's inspired to some extent by Lloyd George. He really believes this idea of creating a land

fit for heroes but it's a kind of postpartisan way of understanding politics. He's going to come

in as part of this coalition and they're going to remake politics and it's going to be new and it's

going to be different. The platform that he stands on specifically he describes as a kind of

socialistic imperialism. So there's already that kind of strange blend of left and right and I think

one influence that it might be worth thinking about there is Joseph Chamberlain again someone who

crossed the boundaries of politics from being a radical liberal to eventually ending up in the

conservatives who had favored a program of social reform based on tariffs that were also going

to strengthen the empire. So mostly as channeling that he's channeling Lloyd George but he's also

channeling this new generation who've come through the First World War. So the war made him and

shaped him and he was broadly speaking anti-war at this point. One of the things he passionately

believed in was not just a land fit for heroes but we mustn't do that again as you say he was an

imperialist. He was also it feels to me a political type in the sense that he was good looking,

charismatic, extremely well connected. So even if there was this big generational divide,

he was born into privilege but he also married into even greater privilege. He married the daughter

of Lord Curson who was at various points, Viceroy of India, conservative foreign secretary.

So this is a very very connected guy and I feel like I recognize a political type which is there

are people who know they want to be in politics. They are ambitious, there are things that they

believe in and the things that they believe in don't necessarily obviously fit a particular party

mold. So in a way it doesn't matter that much which party they start out with and you occasionally

hear of these political types almost tossing a coin. But you've got to pick a party and he picked

the conservatives. I think what's unusual about him is he was very young, he was the youngest MP

in the House of Commons when he entered the Commons is that he switched so quickly.

In the sense such politicians do often end up changing sides but the first switch he made

from Tory conservative unionist to independent to labour, it happened pretty fast didn't it.

So what triggered it because for an ambitious young man quitting a conservative party when you're

the son-in-law of Lord Curzon it might be blocked your ambitions. That's absolutely right and he

was absolutely extremely well connected. I think from the moment he entered Parliament he was

interested in trying to move beyond the traditional political divides. He joined with new MPs

and a kind of parliamentary club that was seen by many people as the basis for a kind of new center

party. But then the thing that pushes him to break ranks and leave the conservatives is a very

specific issue which is Ireland. He is appalled by the way in which the British army and specifically

the irregular the black and tans are treating the population in Ireland as the British government

attempts to suppress the Irish Republican army and he attacks the government quite openly

on this issue. And I think that that's the kind of contingent thing that immediately pushes him

over but it's worth noting here that I think part of the story and part of the explanation has to

be that he is a young man in a hurry and he is someone who is very willing or even keen to tweak

the noses of the front bench to critique ministers. He'd already picked a fight with Churchill over

whether or not the British army's dress uniform should return to being read. You know,

not something that could be seen as a great issue of principle but something that showed that he

wasn't afraid to criticize people who it might not be a good idea to criticize and actually

kind of relished trying to make a name for himself and trying to have those fights but in the

specific instance it's this issue of Ireland that leads him to cross the floor of the house and go

into a position. But he starts as an independent he then joins the Labour party, stands as the

Labour candidate first against Neville Chamberlain loses that contest but runs him very close and then

wins a Labour seat. How much of this isn't simply young man in a hurry isn't simply wanting to

make a name for himself but beginning to lose faith in conventional politics as a means to achieve

the things that he believed he went into politics to achieve. So there is disillusionment with the

way that the British are behaving in Ireland and he's a unionist so he's doing this as a unionist

but he is shocked by the violence which is ironic given where he's going to end up. But to join the

Labour party Ramsey McDonald's Labour party which is after all a new force in British politics relatively

speaking the Labour party has never been in government before 1924. How much of it is his beginning to

sense that to make progress in British politics you're going to have to move outside of the

conventional bounds of what had been the traditional two party system the choice had been

liberal or conservative. Joseph Chamberlain was on those two sides of that divide. Joseph

Chamberlain never and never would have considered joining the Labour party. So how and when do you

think that more radical disillusionment with conventional politics entered Mosley's outlook and

is joining Labour part of that because Labour are not a conventional party at this point certainly not

for someone like Oswald Mosley. So I think with Mosley there's always a combination of personal

ambition and the desire for the new and I think you can see that desire for the new and for a new

kind of politics in his initial participation in the Lloyd George coalition. And the hope is in

1918 that this isn't just going to be a conventional conservative government that the coalition led by

Lloyd George is going to be something genuinely new and different and is going to be a departure

from the traditional pre-war party politics. And so when he becomes disillusioned with that there's

a brief moment when it looks like he's going to join the Liberals and the Liberals kind of see

him as as one of them they say well you know he's this aristocratic guy he is broken with the

Lloyd George coalition we're now his natural home and for a while he does seem to be cooperating

with the Liberals very closely in Parliament. But I think what draws him to Labour is ultimately that

Labour are the new and rising force and Mosley as someone who really wants to shake things up

and to kind of align himself with the tide of history. Labour in 1918 increases its share of votes

and seats but then in 1922 it does so very dramatically and it becomes clear that they're moving

towards a new kind of two party politics Labour against the Conservatives and I think that's the

context in which Mosley decides that as someone who who wants a new kind of politics and wants

something that is as he'd always sort of said more socialist that Labour is a place that it makes

sense for him to go. So in 1924 he joins the independent Labour Party the left wing of the

Labour Party which is often the way in for kind of more radical intellectual types and finds himself

in the Labour movement. And that socialism what is the economic underpinning of Mosley's version

of it and how much did it in this period overlap with what you might call mainstream

Labour thinking and not just Labour thinking as well we also have to remember it's not just him

who was frustrated with conventional politics it wasn't just Mosley who thought something radical

needed to happen. Where did his economic outlook fit in the spectrum of British political opinion

at this point? How much of an outlier was it? I think the first important thing to say is that

Labour at this point was really struggling to develop its own independent economic outlook.

Labour was a party that had traditionally been in the shadow of the Liberals

and had in some ways outsourced their economic thinking in the kind of short to medium term

to Edwardian liberalism. Labour knew what it wanted in the end it wanted a social

assistant and it knew what it wanted right now it wanted social reform but it wasn't very clear

what the kind of medium term economic agenda that was distinctively Labour actually was.

So there are a range of different ideas that are starting to emerge and when Mosley joins the

Labour Party he begins to play a key role in bringing together some of those different ideas.

So in 1925 when he is in Birmingham and just after he has lost the election

against Neville Chamberlain he puts together what become known as the Birmingham proposals

and he works with other people in the Labour movement in particular another aristocratic

intellectual who's moved from the Tories to Labour, John Strachey and they come up with a set of

proposals that draw on what would then some emerging ideas within the socialist movement

and from within British liberalism inspiring in particular by the work of Jaya Hobson

and this is the idea that the cause of economic malaise is under consumption

that in order to revive the British economy people need to consume more and specifically

the working class needs to be able to consume more and various people were beginning to push

these kinds of ideas John Maynard Keynes for one Jaya Hobson was another and was particularly

influential on Mosley and Mosley starts to combine this with another key idea which is

economic planning. Mosley comes to believe and this was a fairly radical idea in the 1920s

that the state could take an active role in planning the economy and specifically in

reviving the economy by using planning to revive domestic consumption. So the Birmingham proposals

centre on the idea that the state will take over the banking system and then use the banking

system to assign credit in such a way as to boost the purchasing power and living standards

of the working class and thus revive British industry. And so what Mosley is doing is he's

bringing together new but important ideas that are at that time circulating on the British left

and trying to craft a coherent package with them. At this point is it possible to identify

anything in it that might point to where he was going. So for instance this is also a protectionist

platform in some respects and this is an imperial platform too but one of Mosley's concerns was

that cheap labour cheap overseas labour would undercut the British working class.

Was this a programme designed to protect white working class Britons against cheap foreign

labour? Was it in any ways a programme that as well as being inspired by canes and other British

ideas had started to look to what was happening in Italy? Is there any sense at this point in which

we can see where he might be going or is that far too premature? I think at this point that would

be too premature. So while there are certainly some protectionist elements to Mosley's thinking,

this programme is not as protectionist as the later programmes he would push when in government

and then in the new party and in the British Union of Fascists. And this is a programme that

I think at this point Mosley is very much fishing within the pool of the British left for his ideas.

And Mosley is always throughout his career an imperialist and I think someone who we can see

always had a certain level of racist attitudes. And so that's certainly there but given the context

in which this programme was put together and the people he put it together with, specifically John

Straitey and other people within the ILP, I don't think it will be fair at this point to characterise

the Birmingham puzzles as the kind of syncretic beyond left and right programme that would eventually

become the basis of Mosley's politics. So the protectionist elements are much less substantial

than his later programmes and this is also a programme that frames itself as an advance towards

socialism. So it's not an alternative to traditional left-right politics. It's an attempt to give

socialism a short to medium term economic programme. And it probably also should be said so the term

fascism which we're going to come on to clearly does very much change its meaning from the 1920s

to the 1930s when Mosley was doing this Hitler wouldn't have entered his consciousness.

But people were very interested in Mussolini. Keynes was very interested in Mussolini's fascism.

It was one of the experiments in post-war politics that people were very curious to see

how it might go and whether there were any ideas and after all it itself came out of a form of

socialism kind of syndicalism, whether there were any lessons that could be learned there. So for

someone to be what you might call fascist curious in the 1920s by no means would put them outside

the pale of a political system in which people were looking for new ideas and fresh ideas.

But you said just there the proposals in 1925 didn't go as far not just as what he advocated for

the new party and then the BUF but even what he advocated in government. So in 1929 second

Labour government is formed and at that point mostly who I think had been hoping for one of the

big offices of state becomes a kind of minister with out portfolio but he is a government minister

in Ramsey McDonald's second government and we are on the cusp of the Great Depression.

What shifts in mostly politics when he actually experiences government from the inside under

very difficult circumstances? I think you're absolutely right to highlight that mostly was

somewhat disappointed with the position he found himself in. When he joined the Labour party he was

fated as this exciting new recruits, his aristocratic background meant that he was seen by many

people in Labour party as proof of the party's kind of respectability and proof that it was the

rising force and his success in running Neville Chamberlain very close in Birmingham and then in

winning a big majority in the smathic by-election in 1926 means that he is able to present himself

as this rising figure and so some people even think that he thought that he was going to become

foreign secretary in the government which was not the case and there's in fact a story from

another cabinet minister who went in to see Ramsey McDonald and this cabinet minister Avi

Alexander said that he would basically be happy with any position and McDonald said well that's

quite a contrast with the person who just went out and the person who just went out was

Mosley who was deeply dissatisfied with the position he'd got. But the position that Mosley

specifically got was to be Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a minister without

portfolio and not only cabinet but with special responsibility for unemployment. So this is the

issue that Mosley has seen himself as trying to solve the Birmingham proposals are designed to

get rid of unemployment and so this is exactly what Mosley wants to be working on but he's left in

this position where there's very little he can do and then the Great Depression hits and suddenly

the issue of unemployment goes from being one issue amongst many to being one of the central

issues of British politics because the numbers of unemployed people start rising rapidly into the

millions and in this context it really feels to a lot of people like Britain is entering a crisis

like British politics is entering a crisis and that something very radical is needed and this is

the context of which Mosley draws up what becomes known as the Mosley memorandum and this is a

new set of policies in some ways it is more moderate than the Birmingham proposals. It doesn't

involve nationalizing the banking system for instance so it's less socialist but it is more

protectionist and it involves a combination of putting up tariffs to protect British industries

establishing import control boards so that the state can plan what imports are allowed and at the

same time launching a program of public works designed to combat unemployment and boost living

standards. So again it's these two ideas that become central to Mosley's economic thinking which

protecting the British Empire as an economic space from foreign competition and at the same time

reviving the economy and combating unemployment by increasing domestic consumption and using the

state to do that, borrowing through the state to invest in these public works programs.

And the second part of that is it's straightforwardly Keynesian. I mean Keynes himself recognized it

was Keynesian at least to some degree the first part of it the imperialism could go in lots of

different directions but would Mosley at this point have looked like a Keynesian accolade within

British politics? Yes absolutely and he was writing to Keynes about this and often getting

Keynes as approval for specific aspects of his plans. This was a Keynesian program and subsequent

historians who have some of the very sympathetic to Mosley in this period. The historian Robert

Skydelski who wrote a book about the failure of McDonald's labor government to combat this crisis

and later a biography of Mosley sees Mosley as the hero of the story of the second labor

government who had the Keynesian program that could have resolved the crisis but wasn't allowed

to put it into practice. And so what Mosley has is a Keynesian program it's also a protectionist

program but there's also a third aspect that begins to make it more controversial which also

includes plans for parliamentary reform. Mosley becomes dissatisfied not just with the existing

political elites but also with the political system and he starts to see Parliament as an

institution that isn't functioning well and so as the Mosley memorandum develops as it's this

document that has been discussed in government mostly starts introducing ideas for streamlining

the process of government to enable it to tackle the crisis more effectively. And this is frustration

with parliamentary government a function of the crisis itself so at this period for some people

what was being revealed about democracy was that it was too slow it wasn't as dynamic as the

dictatorships Stalin Mussolini not yet Hitler but there was a sense that in this great competition

between democracy and dictatorship democracy was too slow too consultative too high bound

or was it that it wasn't representative in the sense that the people that he was

standing for the working people of Britain were not really well represented in the parliamentary

system the range of critiques of parliamentary politics at last period frankly in our period too

one is a frustration with process another is a frustration with representation is it possible

which of the two it was was it really the crisis that precipitated this shift in his position

to we need more streamlined executive government I think it is very much the former yes and I think

it is this sense of paralysis and slowness that frustrates him and if you think about his

specific situation he's there as a minister without portfolio drawing up plans trying to get them

considered trying to get them discussed and essentially hitting a brick wall because most of

the cabinet is not interested and most of them see him as some kind of upstart who has these

irresponsible ideas Philips node and the chancellor is very attached to fiscal orthodoxy

and thinks that the kind of borrowing that mostly is advocating would totally undermine

confidence in the British government's finances and be an absolute disaster and his ideas

are being discussed in cabinet and he can't participate in those discussions in the way he would

like and he finds that frustrating and in various ways there is sort of attempts to subvert this

so John Straitschi who at this point is his parliamentary private secretary and has worked on

these plans with him leaks them to the Guardian in early 1930 and that actually just totally backfires

because the result is that most of the cabinet discussion isn't of the substance of the plans

but of the fact that they have been leaked and so mostly is hitting a brick wall within government

which leads eventually to his resignation from the government in the spring of 1930.

Its frustration with democracy, its frustration with parliament,

is it also frustration with the Labour Party because within British politics it is often the case

I don't want to draw too many parallels between then and now but this is a feature of contemporary

British politics too that the Labour Party sometimes has a reputation as being the most

rule bound and in its way hardest to reform of major British institutions. He had his

memorandum, he had his ideas that he wanted to get adopted by his party. The party had a whole set

of procedures including its conference where these things can be blocked. There are in a way more

barriers within the Labour movement to getting ideas adopted than there are within other parties.

Was this frustration with democracy really frustration with the party that he had ended up in?

I think it was yes and I think there are a few different reasons for that. One of them is I think

the way in which the Labour Party was slow to develop the kind of politics that mostly wanted to see

but there's also a kind of generational frustration which is that mostly was running up against

a set of older people with a much deeper acculturation in the trade unions and in the Labour Party

who just didn't fit in with at all and were often very suspicious of him. But I think one of the

interesting things in this period is that in many ways mostly his position within the Labour Party

was extremely strong and there's actually no reason to think that his ideas were doomed within it.

So he resigns from government in the spring of 1930 and begins pressing for his ideas more

publicly. He struggles a bit with Labour MPs but at Labour Party conference in October 1930 he

does exceptionally well. His speech is cheered to the rafters by the delegates and when he puts forward

a resolution on his plans it is only very very narrowly defeated. I think the total vote count is

a million votes for mostly a million and a quarter votes against and the reason it's defeated

is the union bloc vote so the union leadership swing against him in favour of the existing leadership

but mostly has essentially carried the membership of the Labour Party in favour of his ideas.

But by this point he has become so frustrated with this culture that he's found himself in

so frustrated with the Labour leadership that he's not willing to wait and take advantage of this

position that he's got within the Labour Party is this very prominent advocate of these increasingly

popular ideas. Instead he resolves that he's going to break away from the party,

creates something new, creates something more to his taste. And that thing is then the new party.

He immediately runs up against another feature of the British political system which is it is a

first pass the post system so the creation of new parties is very difficult. Was there yet at

this point any sense that his frustration with Parliament was straying towards those forms

of extra-pollumentary politics that included people on the streets manifesting their frustration

in ways that go beyond votes at Labour Conference or public meetings in which you get a claim to

the rafters but actually we're starting to move towards the politics in mostly his mind

where a different kind of test of force is going to have to be manifested or is the new party still

just another instance of a British politician frustrated, personally frustrated, institutionally

frustrated wanting to create a new entity through which to win elections.

The new party lasts for about a year and the shift over the course of its lifetime

is very notable so I think it's worth sort of going through the timings quite slowly

and seeing how Mosley's thoughts and action evolves. So I think the first important shift is that

Mosley's idea of the new party is it's going to be something that isn't just

off the left and this means that as he is planning this party at the end of 1930

his ideas and his way of framing these ideas starts to change and they cease to become so socialist

and they start to emphasise the more kind of conservative or imperialist facets of his plans

a bit more because he's trying to build support beyond the Labour Party and beginning to get

a bit of hesitancy and uncertainty from people on the left the Labour Party who've been supporting

him in this battle within the Labour Party towards the way Mosley is framing it and he launches his

new party at the start of 1931 and the Mosley memorandum is effectively repackaged as a new policy

statement but it's described as a national policy so it's framed in these terms that are

beyond just being left wing and Mosley immediately struggles to attract very many Labour MPs so a lot

of the Labour MPs who've signed on to the Mosley memorandum he had 16 Labour MPs supporting him

only four of those actually jump ship with him and some of those don't stay with him very long

a good example of a Labour MP who backed Mosley's ideas but wouldn't leave the Labour Party is

Nye Bevan and so you have people at this are on the left who like these ideas but they're not

willing to break with the Labour Party and move to a new kind of politics and Mosley his politics

are evolving as he tries to form this party and the first thing his party does is it stands in a

bilection in Birmingham and the new party candidate does well but comes third and Mosley at the

count is met with hecklers and a very angry crowd of Labour supporters who say you've split the vote

you've allowed the conservatives to win this seat and Mosley turns to the people he's with who

include John Straiture who has been working closely with and he says that's the crowd who've

stopped us doing anything since the war and that I think symbolises the way Mosley's politics

was shifting in that he starts to see the people who had been his political allies the organized

working class as the obstacle to what he wants and so the new party becomes not just the advocate

of a different economic strategy or even of the kind of parliamentary reform he's now talking

about which is becoming increasingly authoritarian and centred on the idea of a small cabinet that

would rule by decree but it starts positioning itself in this syncretic way against the organized

working class as well as against the traditional capitalist interests and by the organiser working class

here we mean essentially the trade union movement the trade union movement and the Labour party

which he starts to see is increasingly controlled by the communists or not controlled by the

communists but infiltrated by the communists and so he starts to treat the movement he's been

part of very recently as something potentially kind of anti-national and the new party contains a

law of left wing people who become increasingly uncomfortable with this kind of rhetoric and

Mosley is also responding to the hostility that he has from the left so there's that by election

but increasingly over the course of the year when he's organising these rallies and he's a great

platform speaker so his main method of propaganda is to hold these rallies but he finds that they're

being disrupted often by communists but often by people on the broader left and it's at this point

that he starts thinking I need some kind of paramilitary force to defend my rallies against

these left wing activists and he starts recruiting a youth movement whose purposes are explicitly

to defend his rallies by force and as he's talking about this with his allies the potential

purpose of this begins to become a bit broader and they start talking about well if in this

moment of crisis British politics starts to really fall apart and there's a revolutionary situation

then maybe our paramilitary movement will be able to step in and save the situation

so over the course of the year the new party moves from a party devoted to a particular

political and economic reform project to a party that is framing politics in increasingly

apocalyptic terms and relying on groups of young men who are willing to commit violence to defend

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that you alluded to there that the great depression is getting worse unemployment is rising the

situation is becoming in many ways more unstable the labor government itself the minority labor

government is in the process of falling apart to be replaced by a new kind of national government

which isn't a labor government at all how much at the background of someone like mostly thinking

is the thought that actually the stakes are getting much higher and really there is a choice coming

in which the central bridge politics is going to be completely squeezed and actually it is going to be

paramilitary it's paramilitary so use the phrase a revolutionary situation and we've just started

talking only at this point in the story about anti communism as being one of the driving forces

of this movement that in the end British politics was mostly thought going to face a choice

between a communist revolutionary future and a rival revolutionary future had he started to think

in those for one of a better word European terms about British politics yes he absolutely had

and I think what's so striking is how quickly he starts thinking in those terms once he leaves

the labor party and once he is running his own new movement and I think there's a mixture here

of a kind of delusions of his own grandeur he's running a quite small movement that has managed

to come third in a by-election and yet he's thinking of it as a movement that's going to save

Britain in some kind of apocalyptic showdown but I think it is a mixture of the way the crisis was

deepening his own sense of his own importance but also his own anger and hostility at the different

political movements that he'd broken with and at the people who'd failed to support him so he

had thought when he left the labor party that there was going to be this great upsurge of support

from that cross the different parties and the various politicians within labor but also within

the liberal and conservative parties who'd expressed sympathy for some of his ideas or for his

dynamism would come and join him but of course they don't and he finds himself out on a limb

with a small group of supporters a group of supporters who interestingly are increasingly

right-wing often they're people who like him because they see him as a dynamic new force

rather than because they see him as the best rude socialism and so with this small group of

new supporters he just begins to see politics in a very different way and what I think is very

striking is how quickly that shift takes place and quite soon after that the new party ceases to

exist and mostly finds himself the head of something called the British Union of fascists is it

possible to say in that final shift whether he is looking to Germany or he is looking to Italy

the word fascist at this point still I think for most people in Britain has an Italian rather

than a German emphasis but from 1929 through to 1931-1932 Hitler's version has suddenly

started to dominate German politics as well is it possible to say at what point and to what extent

mostly starts looking to Germany for inspiration rather than Italy I think firstly these ideas are

very kind of diffuse in how people think about it the term fascist starts to get used by some people

for mostly in late 1930 well he's still in the Labour Party some people are looking at how he's

behaving and beginning to compare him both to Hitler and to Mussolini and then when he's in the

new party he begins to start showing some interest in fascism as a potential comparator movement he

talks about political modernisms of which the new party is one but the Kwame Tang in China is one

the fascists in Italy the Nazis in Germany at a Turk in Turkey all these are different things

that he's kind of looking at and going well these are the exciting new things and I want to be one

of the exciting new things so I think his first sort of turn towards fascism isn't really about

specifically going Italy we should do that or Germany we should do that but more there's this wave

of the future and I want to be part of it and there is this wave of the future that faces a rival

wave of the future which is called Bolshevism which is the other new thing and in the end politics

it's going to be a choice between these two radical futures yes absolutely and I think it's partly

due to communist activism against him that he starts to see the communist so in Britain are a very

minor political force there is not a mass communist party I think communist party has a membership

of about three to five thousand at this point but because they're very determined about heckling

his rallies he starts to see them as a fundamental threat and it's in fact in September 1931 amidst

the general election campaign the general election campaigner which the new party is going to be

completely wiped out it came much earlier than they expected to they weren't able to prepare

a campaign and the result is that mostly anti-Zalai's all lose their seats but it's in the midst

of this general election campaign at a rally where mostly faces heckling and attacks that he thinks

we're going to have to become fascist and it's after that that he goes to Italy initially

and it's Italy that he goes to to kind of study and decide that he's going to take the plunge

and start calling himself fascist as a fascist he then moves towards a platform that includes

anti-Semitism and the celebration of violence and these two things I think it's fair to say are not

present so in this journey that we've been describing from conservative to independent to labor

than from labor to new party from new party to fascist the anti-Semitism the violence the things

that we associate with fascism with the fascism of the 1930s is it fair to say these only come at

the end of the journey or are there signs earlier on the racism the celebration of force and in a way

of a kind of cruelty in politics is there evidence of that earlier is that sort of the final piece

that slots into place right at the end and makes him the figure that he is now remembered for in

British political history as well mostly rabble-rousing anti-Semitic fascist so I think with

violence you start to see that very clearly in the new party period when he starts to see politics

and it's much more kind of street oriented conflictual terms based on his experience of trying to

do these platform based rallies but I think we can more broadly point to something which I think

is very important to this which is the kind of masculinity of it all which is mostly as a former

soldier who is this idea of himself as a sort of manly virile figure and his rhetoric even before

he's become a fascist really reflects this I think there's a there's a quote when he's a new

party where he's calling for you know strong virile young man of all parties to come and join him

and that's not explicitly violent rhetoric but I think when you're talking in those terms you can

see that there's a kind of violence and a love for violence inherent there which then comes out

in a more definitive sense from 1932 when he found the British Union fascists and the anti-Semitism

anti-Semitism was widespread it's not like being an anti-Semite in 1930s British politics meant

that you were somehow way outside of a whole range of conventional attitudes but his violent

version of anti-Semitism is it actually the violence rather than the anti-Semitism that

makes him different I think the anti-Semitism isn't particularly present in the 20s it becomes

present when he's in the new party but I think that's largely through the influence of fascism

and fascism is this exciting thing to him and that so often contains anti-Semitism and it's

through deciding that he's going to emulate the fascists that he starts to embrace anti-Semitism

as part of his ideology and as part of his political toolbox and of course once he starts

calling himself a fascist once he found the British Union of fascists the people he's

surrounding himself with include some very extreme anti-Semites so it's no longer just

Oswald Mosley and some heterodox conservatives and laughwing members of the labor party

it's Oswald Mosley and a lot of people who've been calling themselves fascists since the late 1920s

or have been calling themselves Nazis since the late 1920s in many cases because of anti-Semitism

and so Mosley is coming to anti-Semitism through his interest in fascism but he's

joined by a lot of people who are interested in fascism because they're interested in anti-Semitism

I want to ask you in a minute about some comparable figures not in Britain so this is in many ways

a very British story and some of the dynamics of British politics are what shape it

but before we make this comparison with France with Belgium I mean there's the other thing to say

about Mosley's character it's not just his charisma his virility I mean he was notoriously

he was I don't know what the word is for this I want to use a very old fashioned word he was a

bounder I was going to say Cad yeah Stanley Baldwin called him a Roman which is one of my favorite

English phrases he was a Roman his love life was again to use an old fashioned term pretty

rickety before he ended up with Diana McFood Diana Mosley his first marriage to the daughter

of Lord Curson he also had a long affair with both her sister and her stepmother there's in fact

a a story that he was talking to his friend and he said I've had to come clean with Simmy with

his wife about all my different affairs and I've told her about every single one and she was so

upset and she went but those are all of my friends and Robert Boothby his friend and he's

recounting this to says why did you do that you know and you really told her about every single one

and he says well not her sister and her mother of law in fact but everyone else so how much of his

being frozen out because after all as you say it's very quick the move from possibly being the

future of the Labour Party or if not the future of the Labour Party possibly being the figure around

whom a new political movement could emerge that might be successful in democratic terms to

being a complete outcast and pariah which is of course where he ends up how much of that is

character and personality rather than ideas to the extent that and this is true of many people

of his political type other more conventional politicians are wary I want to use the phrase of

getting into bed with them politically anyway because these people are not to be trusted they are

not to be relied on if you are going to reinvent British politics he has the charisma he has the

ideas he might even be right about a lot of things although he ends up being wrong about almost

everything but he is a cat a bounder a Roman he's flaky he's not to be trusted he is a moral

impossibly even immoral he's a bad person and in politics everyone's bad to a certain extent

but some people stand out as being particularly unreliable do you think the aura around mostly

was part of what pushed him out I don't think that he was pushed out but I don't that you can

understand his transition without understanding it primarily in terms of his own bad character

leaving the labor party in the way he did was an act of colossal hubris and narcissism and I think

it is that hubris and narcissism that draw him towards fascism so I don't think it was the case that

he was shunned politically and that's what drove him out the reality was almost the opposite

he was very successful politically but he wasn't successful enough for his own liking he was doing

well within the labor party had he stayed in the labor party there's a world in which he could have

become leader of the labor party could have become prime minister but it wasn't happening fast

enough and it wasn't happening on his terms and for mostly it had to be fast it had to be now and

it had to be exactly on his terms and that is what drives him out and that is what makes him turn to

a creed that makes him the leader and the person whom everyone has to obey so I want to ask you

about two comparable figures and one of the interesting things about these three men so one is

Marcel Dair a French socialist who became a fascist another is Henri Demand a Belgian socialist who

became a fascist is people listening want to quickly Wikipedia them they all look very similar

they actually all look like a certain type of CAD or Boundary I don't know if the other two

were CADs and Bounders to the extent that mostly was but what they were all in their different ways

were people on the left of politics in the 1920s and or early 1930s through the crisis the crisis

of capitalism who embraced ideas like planning like deficit spending who wanted to tackle

unemployment because the fear was the alternative to that was something far worse maybe even a

Stalinist or communist takeover and in the case of both Dair and Demand who both were

advocates of what became known as planning I think it was called Plannisma a kind of continental

version of the planning doctrine they both also ended up as fascists can you see a pattern across

these three so we're not going to go into the other stories in anything like the same depth

but here are these three men who take a similar journey it's not quite as dramatic in the other

two cases as it is in mostly's case but of course in another respect it is even more dramatic

because unlike what happened to mostly which was to fight his fighting Britain in the 1930s to lose

it and then to find himself in a country that is at war with fascism and essentially to be in

turned these other two are in countries that are invaded by Nazi Germany and actually have

opportunities to collaborate do you think these stories are comparable that shift from a kind of

Keynesian planning socialist mindset getting frightened and frustrated with the failings of democratic

politics to fascism is there a pattern here what do you think we have to treat these all as

there are obviously differences between these three different stories and mostly is to some

degree the odd one out in that he's the only one of them who doesn't start in the labor movement

in a socialist party and he's also the only one who becomes a fascist before the war but I do

think there are important parallels in all three cases we have these young intellectuals who have

served in the first world war and have been very shaped by that experience of the war and come

into very traditional old fashioned social democratic parties and in the 1920s or three of them

are trying to develop new ideas about what socialism is about in the short to medium term

they are in parties that say that they're for revolution but not now they're not communists

these parties they're not saying they should immediately have an uprising but they are saying

that they eventually stand for a socialist system but to mostly day out and demand the question

what are we advocating in the short to medium term and they're all involved in efforts within

their party to come up with an answer to that and so all three come up with what we might see as

early versions of what became post war social democracy in the form of mixed economies economic

planning the idea of a system that sits somewhere between capitalism and a kind of fully socialist

system and all three get into fights with their parties over this in the context of the 1930s

so mostly is the first to leave his socialist party the Labour Party in 1931 Marcel Dayat gets

into a fight with the French socialists in 1933 instantly in his case it's over how to respond

to fascism and Dayat is arguing fascism has just taken over in Germany we are under immediate threat

democracy could collapse and we don't have an answer because we don't have anything to offer

people right now we only have a story about what socialism will be like in the future we don't have

something that we can say this is our answer to the crisis we can only say hold on and wait

for capitalism to fully collapse and then socialism will come and Dayat was saying to the people in

his party we don't have time for this we have to have an offer right now and we need to be learning

from the movements that do seem successful and so he was pointing to Germany and Italy and saying

we don't like these as political regimes but they do seem to have done something about the economy

they do seem to have found a way to use the state to counter the crisis and we need to learn from that

and this results in Dayat leaving the French Socialist Party and founding his own movement

about what's interesting is how like mostly once outside of the socialist party once he's

not within that broader left wing context it becomes much less clear whether his politics are

left wing or right wing now he stays in this kind of ambiguous liminal sort of heterodox left

position throughout the 1930s but when Germany conquers France in 1940 this is the kind of

trigger for him to then fully embrace fascism and say fascism is what is one fascism is a national

socialism and this is what we need to do in France and it's similar for demand in Belgium so I think

what we can treat all these men as is as an interesting window into the ways in which

European social democracy in the 1920s and 1930s was struggling to adapt the situation it was

facing fast enough with the result that a lot of its most ambitious and innovative intellectuals

look for new kinds of politics in the early 1930s so one to ask you about two things one of which is

is this a distinctively intellectual story in the sense is one of the things that marks these men

out is that they were men of ideas and that there aren't really comparable examples of more practical

politicians making this journey is there a reason to be suspicious of the intellectuals in politics

because they are prone to this kind of vault fast but also is it in each case also a story of

imperialism in the sense that this is starts out as a kind of socialism it's about making sure that

their nations are fit for the 21st century in which you have a mass industrial working class you have

extremely difficult economic conditions you have the risk of a communist takeover but these are

also all imperial powers including Belgium and in most of these case the imperialism is absolutely

central to the story in a way it's the strand that runs all the way through from him first going

into parliament as a Tory socialistic imperialist right the way through to him being a fascist he

still a fascist in the name of the British Empire is that true in the other cases as well should we

see this as a story of imperialist intellectuals of the left I don't think it is so true in the case

of the other two intellectuals in that I don't think demand or day at saw themselves as defending the

Belgian Empire or the French Empire they were operating in countries that had empires but these

empires were quite separate from what they were thinking about their views on colonial questions

were basically the views of the conventional centre left at the time which was we in theory

support some kind of liberal reform of the empire but we're really not thinking about it very much

so I don't think you should see those too as having a particular imperial dimension to their

thought I do think though that this is a story about intellectuals because I think what

frustrates these people is the intellectual inflexibility of the parties that they're in

their parties with fixed belief systems that in their eyes don't seem to be capable of being

adapted to the new challenges that social democrats were facing in the 1920s in terms of the

great depression and the rise of fascism in the case of dare and demand as you say it comes later

in a sense in both cases the full embrace of fascism only comes in the face of German occupation

but this is also a story about power it's a story about a kind of infatuation with power

it's true in mostly this case too one feature of fascism is a sort of intoxication with raw power

power in its rawest form we don't know what would have happened to mostly if Hitler had invaded

Britain successfully unsuccessfully he would have suffered the fate he did suffer but successfully

we don't know but in the case of the other two do you think this is also simply a story in which

their ideas proved adaptable and in some way superficial in the face of what they were really

interested in which was power and when they encountered power in its rawest form that's when they

made the final step I think that's right I think all three were very arrogant men who believed

that they were entitled to power and were very much grasping towards it and see fascism as the

thing that is going to give them power so Marcel Daye during the occupation of France is

continually hoping that the Germans will just put him in power and that the Germans will give him

France to reshape as he sees fit and I think it is also true that all three of these men are

intellectuals all three of them have serious ideas but when they break from the socialist

parties that they're part of their ideas become very vague very quickly so if you read Daye's book

from 1930 it's a very kind of serious thoughtful assessment of social democratic politics that I think

we can see a lot of parallels between what Daye are saying in 1930 and what serious British

social democrats were saying in the 1950s but if you look at what he's saying after he's left

the socialist party it's all become a lot more vague a lot more rhetorical the economic ideas

that were previously worked out in detail have become a lot more vibes based and he's no longer

saying well you know this is a kind of working class politics he's saying all the good people in

the nation can unite behind this very vague program so the kind of political precision really falls

away after they leave the party they're in and they start grasping around for political allies

it's the same with Mosley the Mosley memorandum is a serious policy document but the kind of

arguments he's making about economics once he's the leader of the British Union of fascists a lot

of the kind of superficial ideas of the Mosley memorandum are there but they're now put into this

broader framework that is much less clear about how this would actually work in policy terms

talked about a corporate state and it's very unclear what that actually would mean and likewise with

demand once he becomes a supporter of German occupation his politics become much more vague

much less clear all of these men were producing very detailed policy blueprints when they were

socialists but as soon as they leave the socialist party in the quest for power they just start

looking around for what can possibly take them there and in the case of debt and demand it was

the German army I should maybe say at this point that at the end of this series of conversations we're

going to talk about contemporary parallels how these stories play out in the 21st century so if

any parallels spring to mind among people who are listening we will come back to that because as

you were speaking then I did find myself thinking of one or two contemporary politicians but

I want to ask you one last question about this move to fascism because we can also misrepresent

it in the sense here we are we found three significant figures of the 1930s significant figures

first within socialist movements within their countries and then outside those movements who became

fascists but they were very much the exception there's something in common between these three but

it's only three there were others but this is the exception not the norm most people did not make

that move of course some people when the Germans invaded France invaded Belgium faced different

kinds of choices choices about collaboration but that's a different question this is not a question

of collaboration this is a question of an intellectual embrace of a set of ideas by people who had

previously believed some of those things but by no means all of those things so what do you think

it is it's very hard question to answer it's partly a question biography psychology luck

what do you think it is about these kinds of politicians that allows them to make that leap do you

think it is really a question of personality and personality type or do you think within that

constellation of ideas in the case of these three their frustration with the slowness of democracy

they're desire to plan in a way that allowed them to get a grip on a situation they felt was

running out of control their fear that other people would come in and get a grip the people who

in their minds were the enemy do you think within the constellation of ideas you would be able to

pull out a few and say if these ideas come together in this kind of situation that's what turns

these kinds of intellectuals fascists or would you say here's a story of three Romans I think I would

say something closer to the latter so I think we can say that there are particular constellations

of ideas that are more susceptible to being taken in a fascist direction but I think we should be

very wary of treating these ideas as inherently proto fascist and we can see that so many of the people

who in the thirties were following mostly following dare following demand even them following them

out of socialist parties don't become fascists at some point they say this isn't what I'm here for

and turn around and go back into the parties they were in before or do other kinds of

left wing politics but I think what we can see with all these three men is they are arrogant

ambitious men who feel frustrated who feel thwarted mostly thought he could solve British politics

and that older men were stopping him and getting in his way and not letting him do it. Marcel

Dea felt snubbed by the leadership of his party there's an argument that his break with socialism

was predetermined when he sent a copy of the book that he wrote in 1930 to the leader of the

socialist party with a kind of effusive inscription and got no reply and his book wasn't even reviewed

in the party's official paper and from that moment he was angry resentful and felt that he should

be listened to he had the right ideas and it was that I think that drove him out of the party and

drove him towards fascism as the thing that could give him the root power so I think this is a story

of arrogance and frustration and how people who have ideas that could be taken in a fascist

direction when they're arrogant and frustrated are led down that path. Given we spent most of this

conversation talking about mostly let's end with mostly because his story doesn't end in the 1930s

he has an afterlife including a post-war afterlife he tries to resume a kind of political career

and he becomes among other things very pro-European it's a European nationalism

but he is a European in the context of post-war politics. Is there a thread that runs all the way

through mostly his career so there is a temperamental thread he never stops being a wrong one I

think it's fair to say I can't comment on the second marriage to Diana Mosley but his character

type seems relatively fixed but is there a thread in the things that he's interested in and how

does he himself come to think about his own history and the way that his own history gets written

you've mentioned someone like Skydelski arguing that he's the lost hero despite his later fascism

he's the lost hero of the labor movement at the beginning of the slump in the government of 29

to 31 how does someone like Mosley come to think about to rationalize to explain his own past

is he still at the end of his life the hero of his own story absolutely he writes an autobiography

that's incredibly self-excolpatory and is full of quotations from people earlier on praising him

so when he writes about his resignation he just puts pages and pages of the letters he's received

praising his resignation speech so he's always trying to hold onto this idea that he could have

been this great thing and you get some historians who later almost validate this so Robert Skydelski

who was an interesting political figure in his own right leaving the labor party going into the

social democratic party in the 1980s then becoming a conservative and eventually becoming

a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn in 1975 Skydelski writes a biography of Mosley that almost vindicates

Mosley's own telling of this story where Mosley is the man who could have saved British politics

in the 1930s and then is tragically led down this dark path now I would say that's probably too

sympathetic an account of Mosley when that biography came out I think it was rightly condemned by a

lot of other historians as essentially serving Mosley's own narrative and I think that Mosley to

the end always tries to present himself as this kind of intellectual figure with these big ideas

so after the war it's European nationalism he takes this idea of a kind of protected economic

space that he previously talked about with the British Empire and tries to apply that to Europe

arguing that now that the British Empire no longer exists Europe needs to club together to

avoid both Russia and America in one national protected economic space but at the same time as

he's got this kind of intellectual self-presentation he is doing the dirtiest and nastiest kind of

politics so Mosley's post-war party the union movement talks about European nationalism but every

time it actually tries to do political activism in the streets or at the ballot box it becomes

about racism so Mosley stands for parliament in 1959 for the last time in Kensington North

explicitly on a platform of repatriating West Indian immigrants so there's always this kind

of double side of post-war Mosley oh I'm this wronged intellectual who could have saved everything

but at the same time I'm engaging in the nastiest kind of gutter racist politics and did he see his

fascist phase the thing for which he is remembered if you ask people now who or what was Oswald Mosley

if they've heard of him what they know him as is a fascist he was Britain's fascist he was

Britain's would be Hitler but did Mosley himself see that phase as just a phase in his own mind was

he in some ways just an accidental fascist he was a Mosley act he was the person who believed

the things that Oswald Mosley believed did he seek to distance himself from his fascism as something

that happened in the 1930s or was it always central do you think to his political identity it

remained central and what in fact he did was he tried to present fascism as the logical conclusion

of the politics he's always been advocating at the 20s and 30s he tries to present it as a story

of consistently really coming to its culmination in fascism which you know he later acknowledged

maybe Hitler wasn't perfect in every way but he doesn't disavow the basic ideological position

he'd come to by the 30s so not an accidental fascist an actual fascist

a reminder that there is a bonus episode out now available on ppf plus

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next time in political conversions i'm talking to David Clemper about a different set of journeys

from a similar period the 1930s and 1940s we're discussing people who became and then ceased to be

communists what caused them to start what caused them to stop that's next time this has been

past present future