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.13 While the increase in racialviolence against individuals remains of great concern, the roleplayed by organised racism remains problematic and difficult toenforce.Yet since 1995, when MI5 closed down its counter subversionbranch, the far right, like the extreme left, was no longer seen as athreat.However, recent evidence suggests that the authorities stilllike to be aware of developments on the farther shores of Britishpolitics.The recent coming out of Andy Carmichael, allegedMI5 agent and National Democrats infiltrator into the ReferendumParty, and the exposure of a plot to withhold nomination papersin West Midlands seats in the 1997 General Election, fits into thegeneral pattern of political surveillance of right wing extremism.14From the time of the British Fascists, when MI5 recruited itsDirector of Intelligence, Maxwell Knight, and the BUF when P.G.Taylor (James McGuirk Hughes) doubled as its Chief IntelligenceOfficer and as an MI5 agent, the authorities have always beenwell informed about developments within the extreme right, andhave used this knowledge to monitor and control events (most13R.Thurlow, The Secret State (Oxford, 1994) pp.328 331.14Sunday Times 27 July 1997. TERMINAL DECLINE?277notably in 1940).Often aided and abetted by private intelligenceorganisations, the authorities have found it much easier to infiltrateand manipulate right wing rather than left wing organisations.National Propaganda, and the Economic League, were sources ofuseful, and sometimes inaccurate intelligence for the authorities inthe interwar period, and Communist agents provided anti-fascistorganisations with much useful intelligence against the BUF in the1930s.The Board of Deputies of British Jews gave the Home Officemuch interesting intelligence on Fascist organisations in1939 40.15Similarly the Intelligence operations of the 43 group in MosleyBook Clubs and Union Movement in the 1940s and the activitiesof Ron Hill, as a Searchlight agent in the Nazi political fringeduring the 1980s, have helped weaken attempts to revive Britishfascism.16 Whether such intelligence gathering activities havealways provided accurate information may be doubted, but evenif that is the case, the exposure of either the agent or actions againstthe fascist tradition following intelligence activity, have led to anincreased degree of suspicion and division within racial populistor fascist movements, thus weakening racial nationalism.The British fascist political tradition, always a sickly growth,failed to recover from the war Britain fought to force the unconditional surrender of Hitler and Mussolini in 1945.Anti-fascism was no longer dominated by communists and their alliesbut now was a deeply engrained part of British character and thenational culture.If public opinion viewed fascism with a mixtureof fear, ridicule and indifference in the interwar period, after 1945racial populism and neo-fascism were movements beyond the pale,loathed by respectable society.15R.Thurlow, The Secret State pp.175 179, 203 213, J.Hope, British Fascism andthe State 1917 27: A Re-examination of the Evidence Labour History Review 57,3,1992,J.Hope Fascism and the State in Britain: The Case of the British Fascisti 1923 31 Australian Journal of Politics and History 39,3,1993, pp.367 380, J.Hope Surveillanceor Collusion? Maxwell Knight, MI5 and the British Fascisti Intelligence and NationalSecurity 9,4,October 1994, pp.651 675.16R.Hill and A.Bell The Other Face of Terror (London, 1988). Conclusion:The Sawdust CaesarsHistory always repeats itself.The first time as tragedy, the second asfarce.Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleonarx s view of the Bonapartist interludes in nineteenth-Mcentury French political history is distinctly appropriate forthe history of British fascism.Whatever one may think of the highlycontroversial personality of Sir Oswald Mosley, there is little doubtthat his involvement in British fascism proved the last straw forhis prospects of a potentially highly successful career within theorbit of high politics.The self-destructive side of his personality,his inability to compromise on issues of policy and principle, hisnotorious short temper and failure to suffer fools gladly, and hispoor judgement of men and events, represented the negative sideof a brilliant but erratic man.The establishment rationalized thesedrawbacks in terms of the narrow Nonconformist puritanicalmoral ethos into which the great liberal tradition of British politicshad sunk by the 1920s.As both Robert Skidelsky and NicholasMosley have pointed out, Mosley s revolt went beyond the refusalto play the game of party politics and was justified by him interms of the need not only for a revolutionary transformation ofthe political system but in the nature of man himself.Of course such views were utopian and unrealistic, given thestraitjacket within which the British economy and political systemoperated within the inter-war period.Mosley s chosen vehicle tospearhead the assault on the establishment, the British Union of CONCLUSION: THE SAWDUST CAESARS279Fascists, also failed to live up to such high expectations.It didmotivate an interesting collection of talented idealists and politi-cal mavericks who were attracted by Mosley s dream in the drabDepression years; it also drew a motley crew of cranks, anti-semites, petty criminals, opportunists, thugs and literal socialfascists who recognized an easy ride when they saw it
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Tematy
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Richard S Weiss Recipes for Immortality Healing, Religion, and Community in South India
Peter Richardson American Prophet, The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams (2005)
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