Orwell and Mosley: After the War

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My previous two articles looked at Orwell’s description of a Barnsley meeting addressed by Oswald Ernald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists; and at Orwell’s mentions of Mosley up to the end of World War Two. Here I look at Orwell’s Collected Works references to Mosley after the war.

I Belong to the Left. On 17 August 1946 Orwell wrote an article “The Freedom of the Press”. It was intended as a preface for Animal Farm which was first published in London on 17 August 1945 and in New York on 26 August 1946. This intended preface was never used by Animal Farm’s British or American publishers, and was finally published in the Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times in 1972.

In this article Orwell wrote that the allegedly left wing enemies of free speech argued that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. He quotes various instances of this attitude such as it was used again as a reason for yelping against Habeas Corpus when Mosley was released in 1943.

Orwell argued that such people fail to see that if you encourage totalitarian methods the time will come when they are used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists.

For instance, shortly after the ban of the Daily Worker (the Communist daily) was lifted on 26 August 1942 , Orwell had addressed a meeting of mainly working class and lower middle class intellectuals at what he called a South London, Workingman’s College. Several of them told him that they thought that lifting this ban was a great mistake as it was a newspaper of doubtful loyalty and it was wartime.

This meeting was held on 9 September 1942 and was attended by about a hundred people six of whom spoke supporting continuing the ban. Only one women stood up for the Daily Worker and two people jeered her for this. The college was Morley College. It was founded in 1889 in Lambeth as the Morley Memorial College for Working Class Men and Women, by Emma Cons a philanthropist. Its building was funded by an endowment from Samuel Morley a woollen manufacturer, newspaper owner and Radical Liberal MP, who had died in 1886 aged seventy seven.

Despite having good reasons to dislike the Daily Worker, which had more than once libelled him, Orwell defended lifting the ban. He wrote that where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learnt it from the Communists themselves. Tolerance and decency were deeply rooted in Britain but they still had to be consciously defended.

The case of Mosley illustrates this. In 1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release, was partly factitious and partly a rationalisation of other discontents.

On 7 December 1945 Tribune published Orwell’s article “Freedom of the Park”. In it Orwell described the police bias against left wing street newspaper sellers even under a Labour government. He wrote that the police have:

Generally shown a tendency to side with those whom they regard as the defenders of private property. There were some scandalous cases at the time of the Mosley disturbances. At the only big Mosley meeting I ever attended, the police collaborated with the Black-shirts in “keeping order”, in a way in which they would certainly not have collaborated with socialists or communists.

Smothered Under Journalism. In his summer 1946 London Letter in the American Journal Partisan Review Orwell wrote that: There has been some slight activity on the part of the Mosleyites and other Fascist groups, but there is no sign that they have any mass following.

It is what I think. On 25 October 1947 Orwell wrote a letter to Julian Symons discussing the Jewish boxer Ted “Kid” Lewis. Orwell discussed Lewis’s boxing career and association with Mosley. This had started when Mosley founded the New Party but continued for some time after Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists.

On 4 January 1948 Orwell wrote to George Woodcock the Secretary of the Freedom Defence Committee (the FDC), of which Orwell was Vice Chair, that:

I hope the FDC is doing something about these constant demands to outlaw Mosley and Co. Tribune’s attitude I think has been shameful, & when the other week Zilliacus wrote in demanding what amounts to Fascist legislation and the creation of 2^nd class citizens, nobody seems to have replied. The whole thing is simply a thinly desired desire to persecute someone who can’t hit back as obviously the Mosley lot don’t matter a damn and can’t get a real mass following.

Konni Zilliacus was born in Japan in 1894. His father was Swedish-Finnish and his mother part Scottish and part German. By 1948 he was Labour MP for Gateshead. He was one of a small group of Labour MPs who opposed Ernest Bevin’s foreign policy and wanted a more conciliatory approach to Stalin. Konni Zilliacus was expelled from the Labour Party in 1949 and lost his seat in 1950.

George Orwell said that Fascists and Communists hid behind democratic safeguards to try and destroy democracy, but one had to distinguish between real and theoretical threats. Nobody should be persecuted for expressing an opinion however anti-social and no organisation should be suppressed unless there is a substantial threat to the stability of the state.

The October 1948 issue of Commentary carried Orwell’s article “The Labour Government after Three Years”. He wrote that: Mosley is again active and anti-semitism has increased over the past year or two, but the growth of a serious Fascist movement is not to be feared at present, because without the break-up of the old parties the potential membership for it does not exist.

Our Job is to make life worth living. George Orwell’s last mentioned Mosley in the May 1949 Partisan Review. Ezra Loomis Pound, an American poet, had admired Mussolini in the 1920’s; supported Mosley and wrote for Mosley’s review the British Union Quarterly in the 1930’s; lived in Italy during the Second World War; broadcast for the Nazis during the war and publicly gloated at Nazi atrocities; was tried for treason by the Americans in 1945; was found insane; and was confined in a lunatic asylum.

In February 1949 Pound was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry for The Pisan Cantos.(Yale University awards the Bollingen Prize for the best new volume of work or lifetime achievement by a poet. Ezra Pound was its first recipient. It was awarded annually until 1963 when it began to be awarded every two years. It is still awarded.)

An April 1949 Partisan Review article criticised this award. In May 1949 it printed Orwell’s reply that he disliked Pound’s poetry; but the award givers were right to do so if they thought Pound was a good poet. Pound was evil, however, and they should have made this clear when they gave it him. Ezra Pound was released from mental hospital in 1958. He died in 1972 aged eighty seven.

Conclusion. Oswald Ernald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists never got anywhere electorally. Fascists, though, do not always come into power constitutionally. Even if one excludes military dictatorships such as Pinochet’s Chile and Franco’s Spain fascists do not necessarily need electoral support. In the last free Italian elections before Mussolini seized power his party got six percent of the vote. In elections held after he seized power he got twenty five percent of the vote but a rigged parliamentary system he had introduced gave him the majority of seats.

Fascist movements can expand quickly. In 1928 German elections the Nazis only got two point six percent of the vote. The last elections before they took power were held in November 1932. They got more than a third of the vote; the highest total of any party. This is as high a percentage as the Labour Party received in this year’s 2024 general election. The Labour Party has let itself to be voted out of office and will do so again. Fascist governments by definition do not. If a government holds free elections and honours their results it is not fascist however much one dislikes its policies.

Finally a note on free speech. A great American judge said that it does not mean the right to shout Fire in a crowded theatre. Unless of course there is a fire. And means that politicians such as our current house should never be immune from criticism.