A Greater Britain
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A GREATER BRITAIN A Counterfactual History Ed Thomas A GREATER BRITAIN ED THOMAS Table of Contents Foreword ............................................................................................ viii Chapter 1 ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2 ................................................................................................ 7 Chapter 3 .............................................................................................. 13 Chapter 4 .............................................................................................. 20 Chapter 5 .............................................................................................. 29 Chapter 6 .............................................................................................. 42 Chapter 7 .............................................................................................. 50 Chapter 8 .............................................................................................. 59 Chapter 9 .............................................................................................. 68 Chapter 10 ............................................................................................ 78 Chapter 11 ............................................................................................ 93 Chapter 12 .......................................................................................... 108 Chapter 13 .......................................................................................... 124 Chapter 14 .......................................................................................... 136 Chapter 15 .......................................................................................... 144 Chapter 16 .......................................................................................... 168 Chapter 17 .......................................................................................... 187 Chapter 18 .......................................................................................... 206 Chapter 19 .......................................................................................... 222 Chapter 20 .......................................................................................... 244 v Chapter 21 .......................................................................................... 262 Chapter 22 .......................................................................................... 277 Chapter 23 .......................................................................................... 291 Epilogue ............................................................................................. 309 Appendix 1: The Mosley Cabinets ................................................. 321 Appendix 2: 1976- Where are they now? ...................................... 323 INDEX ................................................................................................ 331 List of Photographs and Maps First set of photographs: 1924-1935 .................................................38 Second set of photographs: 1935-1938 ..........................................102 Third set of photographs: 1938-1961 .............................................200 Map 1: The peace settlement in Abyssinia, 1935 ...........................64 Map 2: Spain, August 1936 ...............................................................71 Map 3: The proposals of the Birdwood Commission, 1937........135 Map 4: Central Europe, May 1st 1938 ............................................179 Map 5: Central Europe, August 30th 1938......................................211 Map 6: Central Europe, November 30th 1938 ...............................243 Map 7: The dissolution of Yugoslavia, 1938-9..............................260 Map 8: Europe in 1939 .....................................................................261 Map 9: Europe in 1950......................................................................308 Map 10: The world in 1976 .............................................................320 vi vii Foreword The modern attitude towards Oswald Mosley in Britain is a fundamentally self-satisfied one. The failure of British fascism is a comforting reminder that the United Kingdom is a special case; unlike on the continent, Westminster with her long parliamentary tradition, moderate political discourse and stable party structure was fundamentally infertile ground for fascist beliefs or anything approaching them. Put simply, fascism is somehow alien to the phlegmatic and sensible Englishman. This moral certainty is often expressed in a very British way; mockery. The uniforms, jackboots and ceremony of the Blackshirts and by extension the fascist movement in general are often seen as something worthy of ridicule. As PG Wodehouse had Bertie Wooster say to the thinly- disguised Oswald Mosley figure Roderick Spode in “The Code of the Woosters”; The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?' viii Popular anecdotes indulge this comfortable stereotype. One story goes that when a Lancashire fascist boarded a bus in uniform, many passengers offered him money assuming he was the conductor; others relate the story of when a band of Fascists kidnapped the communist leader Harry Pollitt on a train in Liverpool, apparently intending to punish him by forcing him to spend a weekend in North Wales. Even when Mosley’s political thought is taken seriously, it is dismissed as having had no influence, or for that matter substance. Wodehouse’s Spode, for example, is essentially a human gorilla devoid of anything beyond animal cunning. Bernard Levin wrote in the Times in the late 1970s that “The Fascist movement of the time offered little but Blackshirts and Jew-baiting”, and Oswald Mosley himself is remembered more in popular consciousness as a jackbooted thug rather than a serious politician, at home in a street-fight rather than in Parliament. The dismissal of Mosley as a violent thug deeply offended the man himself. As he commented in his autobiography My Life, “Why should a man with this electoral record suddenly take leave of his senses and with much trouble and some expense assemble the largest audiences seen in Britain, not for the purpose of persuading them, but of beating them up?” From the vantage point of the early 21st century, it is easy to regard Mosley’s entire career from the perspective of hindsight, characterising him as an extremist fool and brawler with few serious solutions to offer for the problems Britain then faced. But this is not how Mosley was viewed at the time. In the 1920s Mosley was the rising star of the British political scene, a man marked for greatness along with other young MPs such as Harold MacMillan, Aneurin Bevan and Anthony Eden. One journalist described him as “The most polished speaker in the House of Commons”; a contemporary account of his rapturous reception at a ix Labour Party meeting described how “a young man with the face of the ruling class in Great Britain but the gait of a Douglas Fairbanks thrust himself forwards... The song ‘for he’s a jolly good fellow’ greeted [Mosley] from two thousand throats.” Mosley’s views also had popular purchase. In 1930 he was elected to Labour’s National Executive Council and his ‘Mosley Manifesto’ was only narrowly defeated in a vote by the Party faithful. His mixture of Keynesian, ILP Socialist and protectionist policies appealed to a broad cross-section of the Party, and had he been a more patient man then the Labour leadership could have been his for the taking. As we know, things did not turn out that way; Mosley abandoned Labour in a fit of pique and subsequently began his long journey to the political fringes and infamy. But what if things had been different? On one level, this seems like a frivolous question. Yet counterfactual, or alternative, history can play an important role in the understanding of history, as well as providing entertainment. Several prominent historians such as Niall Ferguson, John Keegan and James McPherson have edited and contributed to compilations of counterfactual history essays, and recently the 'Quarterly Journal of Military History' published an entire issue devoted to the subject. Counterfactuals are also commonly employed by economists to estimate the effects of specific policies and programmes. This practice is not without its critics however. The Marxist historian E. H. Carr dismissed the idea as 'a mere parlour game' while his contemporary and fellow Communist E. P. Thompson went even further, lambasting the concept of counterfactual history as 'Geschictswissenschloff, unhistorical shit'. Is this judgement fair? It depends on the counterfactual. All too often, they can become a wish-fulfilment exercise, x where the politically motivated can look at the consequences had decisions been taken in the way that they had hoped for. The anti-clericalist Charles Renouvier’s 1876 novel Uchronie is a classic example of this problem. This book presents a counterfactual history of Europe where Christianity fails