On the Left, when commentators are groping for an argument, it is an occasional theme is to attack the Daily Mail for having supported Oswald Mosley’s British Fascist movement for a time 80 years ago in the 1930s.
The line has become a standard Aunt Sally to provide prejudicial background in pieces about the Mail. Picking a piece from the front page of Google, here’s Anita Roddick on her own site back in 2006:
How tired I am of the pious pontificating of the Daily Mail towards the next move in my business life, and after their article on Saturday just look at what I’ve dug up about the Daily Mail and it’s historic link with Hitler’s Nazi party – what an anti-Semitic past it had.
when she quoted Ken Livingstone from the Guardian
Associated Newspapers has always led the charge against the policies that confront racism and anti-semitism. It praised the Blackshirts in the 1930s, and admits that as recently as the retirement party of the last editor of the Daily Mail, two of its staff dressed in Nazi uniforms and were not asked to leave.
Owen Jones has positioned the Daily Mail ‘campaigning for a Fascist State in Britain’ as a background feature in the possible ‘Death of British Democracy’ through over-zealous policing of political protest.
Owen also gives walk-on parts to policing of flying pickets in the Miners’ Strike, the (incorrect) use of Anti Terrorism stop and search powers against Walter Wolfgang, and the use of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 against persistent anti-Arms Trade demonstrators :
If you were a genuine democrat at the turn of 1937, you would have been scared. Fascism was on the march across Europe. Italy had fallen first; German Nazism had shut down the world’s greatest labour movement virtually overnight and was upping the persecution of the Jews; and a fascist-backed military coup against Spain’s left-leaning government had plunged the country into a nightmare civil war.
Here in Britain, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts – backed by the likes of the Daily Mail – were loudly agitating for a fascist government on the European model. Could British democracy fall next? Without the benefit of hindsight, and with the tragic complacency of many imprisoned (or dead) European leftists seared on to your recent memory, you could not be sure that the lights would not go out here, too.
He suggests that there’s a realistic parallel between the 1930s and now, as if there is some threat to democracy in the UK when protests with a record of turning violent are controlled.
The Daily Mail even gets a walk on part at media blog Enemies of Reason – and Steven Baxter is at least 7,940,287 times more sensible than Anita Roddick ever was:
It’s no different today, with many readers getting angry with the way the Mail reports the story and calls the EDL a ‘magnet for neo-Nazi thugs’ and compares them with Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts (who, as we all know, the Daily Mail supported back in the day, but that’s by the by).
- West End Front
I came across a counterpoint to the Mosley-Mail spectre, in a book by Matthew Sweet I’m currently reading: “The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London’s Grand Hotels” (*) highlighting casual Antisemitism:
“I am going back to a quiet family life, and shall do my best to forget what has happened in the past”, [Josephine] Green told the Daily Mirror, which pictured her sitting on the sofa of her parents’ home on Park Lane. The copy-editor chose to pull out, underline and embolden four words from the story – ‘Rich Jew of 75′ – a phrase calculated to invoke the disgust of the reader.
The three other most prominent elements on the page were a photograph of a Red Cross nurse tending a casualty on a rubble-strewn pavement , a portrait of a blonde seven-year-old pulled from the ruins of a bombed house , and a report from Glasgow about a pair of convicted war profiteers with the un-Hibernian names of Max Schönbach and Benjamin Brazil”.
This was 29 October 1940, and the paper was the Daily Mirror.
Similarly, while the Mail is made famous for a “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” headline in 1934 – which features in the Mail’s Wikipedia entry, the Mirror ran – in the same month – a piece entitled “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand”.
- Give the Blackshirts a Helping Hand
You won’t find it featured in the Wikipedia article about the Mirror, though.
So, am I defending the Mail?
No, just pointing out the weakness of any argument which has to pick up a label from almost a century ago to try and win an argument in 2011.
That no more wins a debate than does pointing out that John Reid or Lord Mandelson used to be Communists before they grew up, or that George Osborne had an interesting ‘dalliance’ at University.
I was going to put in a photo of the whole Mirror page in this article, but I was thwarted by our wonderful new British Newspaper Archive which was all over the media yesterday. The archive, created by the taxpayer-funded British Library from a taxpayer-funded National Archive, turns out to be charging taxpayers to look at the things which already belong to us. In any case, they have not yet reached 1940.
By contrast, the Library of Congress from the Land of the Evil Capitalists applies no significant restrictions to its online newspaper archive.
Back in 2003 the Independent ran an article by Chris Horrie, author of “Tabloid Nation: From the birth of the Mirror to the death of the tabloid newspaper“, which explored the subject of the Daily Mirror’s ‘forgotten’ history.
On Monday, 22 January, 1934 the Mirror ran the headline “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand”. The paper went one further than the Mail, urging readers to join Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and giving the address to which to send membership applications.
“As a purely British organisation, the Blackshirts will respect those principles of tolerance which are traditional in British politics,” the Mirror told readers, complaining that “timid alarmists” had “been whimpering that the rapid growth in numbers of the British Blackshirts is preparing the way for a system of rulership by means of steel whips and concentration camps”.
This was nonsense, the Mirror said, the result of ignorance of the reality of “Blackshirt government” in Hitler’s Germany: “The notion that a permanent reign of terror exists there has been evolved entirely from their own morbid imaginations, fed by sensational propaganda from opponents of the party now in power.”
The paper added that anyone who had visited Germany or Mussolini’s Italy “would find that the mood of the vast majority of their inhabitants was not cowed submission but confident enthusiasm.”
The Mirror’s Sunday sister paper, then known as The Pictorial, followed up with a Hello!-style picture essay showing uniformed blackshirt paramilitaries playing table tennis and enjoying a sing-song around the piano while off duty inside the Black House, Mosley’s barracks-cum-dungeon on London’s King’s Road.
The Mirror and the Pictorial also planned a photographic beauty contest aimed at finding Britain’s prettiest woman fascist – though Mosley personally objected to this, saying the paper was trivialising his movement.
This article has vanished from the Independent website, but not the Google cache – so I have uploaded a copy here.
(*) I recommend Matthew Sweet’s the book in small chunks; it’s an extended gossip about goings-on at high end hotels in the war years. A good one for the lavatory, like Private Eye, that is a bit much in chunks bigger than about 10 minutes.
Matt Wardman blogs at The Wardman Wire, on media, politics and technology, in addition to writing at the Raccoon Arms. Follow me on Twitter.
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Whilst I realise this is a semantic point, I do wish that people would understand that fascism does not necessarily include nationalist ethnic preference/cleansing…
The founder of modern fascism was Mussolini, and he gave a very good definition of the word, he equated it to what we now know as “corporatism”…
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
He then went on to practice this by forcing Italians into slavery to build factories for large Italian corporates like Alfa Romeo, indeed these slaves built entire towns like Sabaudia, where they were forced to drain the Pontine Marshes first.
Hitler did the same sort of thing, but he added the nationalist/ethnic dimension… he understood that to blame Germany’s ills on a particular “foreign” group, he appealed to some baser human instincts.
So I think that it is the “corporatist” dimension of fascism that our newspapers were supporting/espousing then… AS NOW, rather than the ethnic dimension.
Yesterday’s statement by Gideon did not cut public spending, it increased it, and this has been happening relentlessly since the unelected cabal that I know as the CONDEMolition commenced.
Instead, he attacked ordinary folk and directed the increased public spending at his corporate friends and his chums in the equally corporate/fascist EU. Not that I support the ever engorging public sector, I would rather see education and health etc. provided through private local companies/charities/co-operatives, even if they are funded through taxes… Also known as voucher schemes.
What he didn’t do was cut the £20 billion annual “climate change” bill, the £60+ billion “European Union” precept and compliance bill or the £11 billion “foreign aid” bill.
Of course the newspapers will in general be supporting this establishment tripe, as they always have done.
You’ll note that the Mirror piece was written by Lord Rothermere, famously pro-Nazi proprietor of… the Daily Mail. It was published a week after he wrote a piece in his own paper describing the BUF as “a well organised party of the right ready to take over responsibility for national affairs with the same directness of purpose and energy of method as Hitler and Mussolini have displayed”. Is the Mirror piece a reprint of this, or a rewrite? I haven’t found the full text of the Mirror article yet.
It is also clearly a guest article rather than the Mirror’s editorial line, although that doesn’t get the paper off the hook.
If you click through to the Indy article, there’s quite a bit more background. The piece was published after he had sold the Mirror, which is interesting.
Equally, after the Mirror went ‘working class populist’, it maintained certain similar lines – a historical echo of the BNP stripping Labour support?
Having said that – I’m not really that interested in attacking the Mirror.
Clearly the Mirror is no more supportive of Fascism (whether the old or new definitions
than is the Mail.
I’m more interested in how skeletons can be dug up to feed demon-stories, and become part of the discourse, and in how younger political generations believe political myths without too much question. Owen Jones does more than a little of this, and Occupy is saturated with credulous belief.
There was more in the piece on that aspect, but I edited it down for tightness.
Matt
@Matt Wardman…
“Clearly the Mirror is no more supportive of Fascism (whether the old or new definitions than is the Mail.”
If you are referring to my comment as being the new, check my reference, Mussolini made that comment, and there is dispute as to whether he originated it (maybe Bernays, or Gentile), in the early 1930′s… Before Mosley had even thought of the Blackshirts, or the Mirror/Mail demonstrated support for “fascism”.
Of course there are other aspects of fascism too, but none of them have any association with the right, they are all based on the concept that government might is right, and the people are wrong.
Taking a hard right turn into a winding lane…… I watched some of Paul McMullans testemony live at Leveson yesterday. I only planned to dip in and ended up watching the whole car crash. erm…..is he for real? Or is he a double agent? And what would his codename be??
In the meantime I need to wean myself off the live streaming of Leveson. It’s the crack cocaine of inquiries.
Two points – firstly @right_writes the Chancellor of the Exchequer is called George not Gideon. It does your argument – which might have some merit otherwise – no credit to be gratuitously offensive especially when it is done in the sure knowledge that there will be no comeback.
The other point is that the social democratic left between the wars was, other than organisationally, indistinguishable from the fascist left. Well-known socialists and progressives visited Germany and Italy and proclaimed their wonders under facsism – including G B Shaw ans H G Wells.
A look at the history of the National Recovery Administration – one of FDR’s creations – shows just how closely related the two creeds were back in the 1930s
Simon Cooke:
From Wikipedia:
“Originally named Gideon Oliver, he changed his name to George when he was 13. In an interview in July 2005, Osborne said: “It was my small act of rebellion. I never liked it. When I finally told my mother she said, ‘Nor do I’. So I decided to be George after my grandfather, who was a war hero. Life was easier as a George; it was a straightforward name.”
So that’s both then Gideon and George…
The reason I call him Gideon, is because he calls himself a conservative and he isn’t one of those either. In no way is it gratuitous, it’s deeply felt, I am offended by the pretence that his juvenile “Autumn statement” has anything to do with reigning back our out of control governments. Rather, it is a gratuitous attack on public services, which would be better off, if they were freed from that yoke, at the expense of their vanity projects.
However, I agree with your point that the fascist left is indistinguishable from the socialist left… Another semantic matter.
My moniker… right_writes, is not a statement that my opinion is correct, rather it is a descriptor of my political position of a right thinking conservative libertarian.
I recall reading through the censor Lord Chamberlain’s vetting of stage scripts for music hall acts of the 1940′s that I had seen to remind myself of what they must have been like. What was strange was the fierce control over stage business or wording to do with physical matters while jokes or sketches about other things went unremarked. There were a few about Yanks and Irish but very rarely other races except Jews where there were quite a number that mirrored routine anti-Semitism. That the Lord Chamberlain was approving these after early 1945 and the discovery of the Death Camps was quite remarkable.
They’re worried that the Daily Mail supported former Labour MP and member of the Fabian Society Oswald Mosley? Hmmm…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Mosley
Go on- you better check up on William the Conquor – a bit racist you know.
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