Category: Oswald Mosley
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When the fascists went to university (and the campaigns to keep them out)
Recently there have been several mentions of Oswald Mosley being invited to speak at universities in the early 1960s. One from a piece in The Times opining for the ‘lost days of campus free speech’ and then related to Max Mosley’s recent passing, who invited his father to speak in 1961 when Secretary of the…
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Two new opinion pieces on the history of fascism and anti-fascism
A quick post to let people know that I have had two opinion pieces published this week on the history of fascism and anti-fascism in Britain and Australia. Firstly, the Times Higher Education website published a piece on the pre-history of ‘no platform’ and the protests against far right speakers on university campuses in the…
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British fascists and the notion of free speech
Since the days of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, the far right have presented themselves as the defenders of free speech. Mosley argued that free speech was almost non-existent due to violent Marxists and that his paramilitary forces were the only thing defending free speech in Britain. Despite many politicians and journalists arguing that…
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From Olympia to Hyde Park: British anti-fascism in the summer of 1934
On 9 September 1934, a BUF rally at Hyde Park was opposed by a massive anti-fascist counter-demonstration, coming a few months after anti-fascists attempted to disrupt a BUF rally at Olympia and after a summer of similar confrontations across a number of metropolitan areas in England. This post is based on an early chapter from my book project…
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The history of racial violence in Britain: A short reading list
I saw this tweet during the week: Fifteen years ago, I taught a course on collective racial violence in the US. It is the only course I decided to never teach again. #Thread — Walter D. Greason (@WorldProfessor) August 13, 2017 And then tweeted this: Reading this & thinking about what would you include in…
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The Communist Party of Australia reports on ‘the Battle of Cable Street’
The importance of the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ for the Communist Party of Great Britain has been discussed elsewhere on this blog, but I thought readers might be interested in how it was reported on in the Workers’ Weekly, the bi-weekly newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia. On Friday October 9, 1936, the newspaper…
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Forming the National Front of Australia: ASIO and the fledgling far right group
On Saturday June 2, 1978, a group of nine people gathered in a room of the Southern Cross Hotel in the Melbourne CBD to launch the National Front of Australia (NFA). According to the ASIO informant, nine people attended the meeting, including several well-known far right activists, a 16 year old schoolboy and an undercover…
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Public engagement ftw!
Two guest posts by yours truly have been published in the last two days. The first is on my research into the UK perspective on the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975 and has been published by The Conversation. The second is on Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and their view of Australia as…
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Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa in the Far Right Popular Imagination
In the aftermath of the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, it has emerged that the killer had been photographed in clothing bearing the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. While a lot has been written on this in the last two days, I thought I would post this on how these regimes (and…
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The Communist Party and Mosley’s Union Movement, 1947-51
News came through this week that veteran anti-fascist campaigner Morris Beckman had died. Beckman had been involved in the 43 Group, a militant anti-fascist organisation set up in the late 1940s to combat Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement. The 43 Group worked alongside the Communist Party of Great Britain to fight the UM in the late…
New Historical Express 