I’ve taken to nicknaming Nigel Farage “Sir Oswald” of late in reference Sir Oswald Mosley, who led the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s. It helps me to relieve my feelings about the extremely right wing MP for Clacton with a touch of mocking humour, given that Mosley is sometimes portrayed as a bit of a joke.
But maybe the comparison should be less frivolous. I’ve come across an article in Jewish News, an updated version of the original, which was published in 2016. It features an interview with Willie Myers from Ilford, who was an anti-fascist activist in London at the time of Mosley’s BUF. At the end of the piece, Myers describes how the rhetoric of Farage, leader of UKIP at that time, made him feel: “When I shut my eyes and listen, all I can see is Mosley staring back at me.”
There are, indeed, some striking similarities between the 1930s British fascist and the leader of Reform UK, the latest vehicle for Farage’s giant ego and enormous gob.
- Like Mosley, Farage is a skilled nationalist agitator who contends that a timeless and contented Britishness and way of life must be defended against aliens who threaten it.
- Like Mosley, Farage comes from a privileged background, yet claims to be the voice of the masses.
- Like Mosley, Farage blames particular groups of people for Britain’s social and economic ills.
- Like Mosley, Farage advocates British isolationism – hence his championing of Brexit.
- Like Mosley, Farage presents himself as a fearless teller of truths about the country that the political establishment conceals. His baseless speculation that “the truth” about the suspect for the child-killings in Southport was “being withheld from us” is a good example.
Of course, there are differences too, some of them reflecting today’s very different world. For example, although Farage barks and struts as if dreaming of becoming a martial “strongman” ruler, he hasn’t set up an equivalent to Mosley’s paramilitaries.
Mind you, the gangs of thugs who’ve been smashing things up, assaulting police and attacking people they don’t like in various parts of England (and also in Belfast) in recent days, some of them proclaiming, as Farage does, “I want my country back”, have done much the same job as Mosley’s mob, except their targets have been Muslims and asylum-seekers rather than Jews.
How do the endeavours in London of the fascist aristocrat and the public school-educated GB News presenter compare? The BUF was the successor to the New Party, which Mosley formed in 1931, having resigned from Labour. The New Party contested seats in the general election held later that year, but didn’t win any seats. The following year Mosley, by this time convinced from visiting Italy that fascism was the way forward, brought a bunch of British groups together under his command and the BUF came into being.
Mosley’s mercurial career as an MP – both Labour and Tory – had seen him represent Midlands constituencies and, before that, Harrow, which in those days was very much a town in Middlesex. But the BUF headquarters, named the Black House, was established by the Mayfair-born baronet in the King’s Road. Soon after, he set up his Fascist Defence Force, successors to his “biff boy” New Party bodyguards, complete with troop-carrying vehicles.
At a rally at Olympia in 1934, attended by an estimated 10,000 people, these “blackshirts” set upon anti-fascist demonstrators with such violence that many Mosley sympathisers were put off, including the owner of the Daily Mail who had been keen on them before. As the BUF’s membership declined, Mosley’s extremism increased. The BUF urged voters to abstain from the 1935 general election. Its antisemitism intensified and its focus became the persecution of East End Jews.
It has been a fixed false belief among the Protest Left since roughly the 1970s that the “Battle of Cable Street” was the decisive event in Mosley’s ultimate failure. The reality is very different.
It is true that a formidable, impressive and perhaps unlikely coalition of Jewish East Enders, dockers, many of them Irish Londoners, and anti-fascists – a line-up that also included lots of women – gathered to block Mosley’s nasties. But the battling was between not the BUF and their opponents, but those opponents and the police, who persuaded Mosley to call off the march.
Mosley’s biographer, Robert Skidelsky has pointed out that this probably suited him – after all, he was due to get married the next day to Diana Guinness, née Mitford, at the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler in attendance. And after Cable Street, the BUF, far from disappearing, grew stronger and still more vicious.
The Jewish News article mention above was written to marked the anniversary of what happened very shortly after:
The following weekend witnessed the worst incidence of anti-Jewish violence in the interwar period, the infamous Mile End Pogrom. Around 150 to 200 fascist youths smashed up Jewish shops and houses, even throwing an elderly Jewish man and young child through a window.
The article also records that almost a year after Cable Street a “near identical battle” took place in Bermondsey, putting to bed any idea that the previous one had seen Sir Oswald off. Robert Philpot, writing in the Times of Israel, has summarised what happen:
“Mosley’s British Union of Fascists cleverly managed to turn defeat at Cable Street into a propaganda victory of sorts. They portrayed themselves as the innocent party whose rights to free speech had been denied by the ‘red terror’ of ‘Communist-Jewish violence,’ a police who had ‘openly surrendered to alien mobs,’ and ‘a government that cannot govern.'”
Who have we heard that type of rhetoric from lately?
The BUF’s membership rose and in the 1937 London County Council elections they mustered significant opposition to Labour in east London seats, capturing a fifth of the vote in some Bethnal Green wards. But the beginning of the end was nigh. The government accused of being unable to govern had already passed a Public Order Act to constrain the BUF. The Special Branch and MI5 had infiltrated it. The union became disunited, with some of its leading members splitting.
In July 1939, Mosley enjoyed his last hurrah – a huge “Britain First” rally at the then new Earl’s Court exhibition centre, in which he again attacked Jews but primarily lamented the decline of imperial Britain and argued against a war with Nazi Germany. It was a view that went out of style once Hitler, Mosley’s wedding day witness, started waging such a war against this country. Mosley and hundreds of BUF members were interned and the organisation was subsequently banned.
Today, immigrants and a British ethnic and religious minority are again being subjected to organised violence, albeit organised in a different way from in the 1930s. And another prominent, posh, populist national political party leader has been stirring the pot of malicious rumour and nativist grievance that fuels it, albeit today’s foreign fascist threats are further overseas.
The parallels are inexact in other ways. Half a century has passed since the National Front marched into Red Lion Square and made electoral inroads in Hackney and Tower Hamlets, it is 14 years since the British National Party was removed from Barking & Dagenham Council and 11 since the English Defence League last tried its luck in the East End.
But it was only in 2017 when a man drove up from Wales to mow down Muslims at Finsbury Park and only in 2022 when two Muslim men were attacked outside a community centre in East Ham. London’s Muslim Mayor continues to receive death threats. And Reform UK secured a significant 8.7 per cent share of the general election vote in London, rising as high as 28.4 per cent in one constituency. They also have a seat on the London Assembly.
Nigel Farage has characterised the recent street violence in Britain as not just the opportunist hate-driven actions of the far right but as a wider “reaction to fear, to discomfort, to unease” – to something he stopped short of actually naming, but everyone knew what he meant and he knew that they knew it. “Let me be clear,” he then said. In his sneaky way, he had been. But it revealed another difference between him and Oswald Mosley – Mosley was more straightforward.
So far, the new far-right violence in London has been restricted to Whitehall rather than unleashed on London communities. So far.
OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support it for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE. Threads. X/Twitter: On London and Dave Hill. Photo of Oswald Mosley from The Isis.