Fascist in the Family by Francis Beckett review – Britain’s far-right tradition

How remote are the blackshirts of the 1930s from today? Biographies of John Beckett and ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ explore the history of fascism in the UK

ohn Beckett was a loving father who dreamed of sending his son Francis to a top public school. The family didn’t always have money, but he took pains to furnish his son with the sort of patriotic books considered improving for a boy in 1950s Britain: Kipling, Chesterton, Belloc, Waugh. Yet he also, without comment, once gave his son a copy of Mein Kampf. He could recite the music hall lyrics of his childhood and shared the casual racism of his white middle-class neighbours, but he was also prone to more sustained outbursts; the young Francis grew up “certain, in some way that I cannot now pin down, that the Jews falsely pretended they had been persecuted in Nazi Germany”. Once, when Francis was young, the family left their house to find “Fascists Go Home” painted on the wall opposite.

As Beckett recounts in his biography of his father, these were the twilight years of a man who had begun his career as a talented young Labour MP before he became a leading member of the British Union of Fascists. He was interned during the second world war and kept under surveillance by MI5 for the rest of his life, which his son believes contributed to his mental decline. Even so, it was a gentler fate than that of his close colleague in the BUF, William Joyce, who was convicted of treason in 1945 for his part in the “Lord Haw-Haw” propaganda broadcasts from wartime Berlin and hanged at Wandsworth prison the following year.

Joyce’s story is retold in Searching for Lord Haw-Haw by Colin Holmes; the two books are part of a wider series of historical studies of the far right. They help make the case that far from the 1930s being, as Holmes puts it, “a small tear on the smooth fabric of British politics”, there exists a home‑grown fascist tradition that is shaped by and informs the wider political currents around it. They also wrest control of memory away from the apologists and sympathisers who would have you believe that British fascism was never as extreme as its European counterparts.

Holmes dispels such myths with a thorough account of Joyce’s life and ideas. Raised in Ireland by fiercely unionist parents, as a teenager he worked for the Royal Irish Constabulary’s auxiliary division, formed to help the British state in its attempt to crush the IRA. As a young man in London, he drifted – rejected from the army, medical school and the Foreign Office – until he found a home in the nascent fascist movement. There, his racist, nationalist and anti-leftwing views were nurtured by upper-class reactionaries, including some Conservatives.

In 1932, Joyce joined the BUF and became its director of propaganda. He worked closely with Oswald Mosley during the movement’s expansion among the middle classes, when the newspaper baron Lord Rothermere openly flirted with supporting the cause, and through its attempt to recruit working-class followers that ended in defeat by anti-fascists at the celebrated “battle of Cable Street”. Sacked by Mosley in 1937, he formed the pro-Hitler National Socialist League. In the summer of 1939, just before war was declared, he left for Berlin via contacts he had cultivated in the years before.

Holmes shows how antisemitism was an important part of the BUF’s ideology from the outset and that Joyce played a particularly toxic role in pushing it to further extremes, as well as providing a key link between the regime in Berlin and its sympathisers in Britain. He tries a little too hard to conjure a sense of mystery about Joyce’s life, and I’m not sure there needs to be a grand psychological explanation for why he held the views he did. White British superiority was the official ideology of empire, while antisemitism and a contempt for democracy – even admiration for Hitler – were ideas that circulated within interwar Britain. A society that contains such ideas will also contain people who act on them.

At a time when nationalism is on the rise, both books show us fascism was never simply something to be fought abroad

John Beckett’s story provides a more perplexing tale, and his son portrays an easily distracted man, driven by a strong sense of injustice but impatient with the compromises of social democratic politics. From an upbringing of “lower middle class jingoism” in Edwardian west London, he was radicalised by the first world war and formed the National Union of Ex-Servicemen, a leftwing campaign group that worried the government so much it founded the British Legion as a way to dampen the subversive potential of demobbed soldiers. Encouraged into Labour by Ramsay MacDonald, he showed a flair for political rhetoric, as well as a taste for confrontation, and was elected to parliament in 1924.

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Francis Beckett is the biographer of several former Labour leaders and he vividly charts how his father’s shortcomings, combined with the twists and turns of the interwar left, led him towards fascism. He campaigned against war profiteers (one of whom, a Liberal MP, happened to be Jewish) before falling out with the Labour leadership and becoming a leading leftwing rebel, later re-emerging as a member of the BUF in 1934. There, he edited the party’s newspapers until he too fell out with Mosley and followed Joyce into the National Socialist League. As war with Germany unfolded, Beckett campaigned for “peace” via a network of Anglo‑German friendship associations that were largely a pro-Nazi front, but also included some communists and pacifists – until his work was cut short in 1940 when the Churchill government rounded up more than 700 fascists as the threat of German invasion loomed.

Throughout his account Beckett is at pains to show how these decisions depended to some degree on circumstance (his father may have been doubly motivated to join the BUF because a failed theatre venture had rendered him bankrupt and Mosley offered a salary), while remaining clear about John Beckett’s failings. He may have been a socialist, but only in strictly nationalist terms; his antisemitism may have been based on resentment of “Jewish” financial control but he was happy to work with the likes of Joyce. There’s a further twist here: long after his father died, Beckett discovered that his mother had been Jewish, cut off by her orthodox family for marrying out – something concealed for the duration of their marriage. You can sense Beckett wrestling with this paradox throughout the book, and near its end he tells us it’s the one thing he wishes he could ask his father about.

One reason for writing this book, Beckett says, is because the second world war is starting to slip from living memory and the lessons bear repeating for a younger generation. At a time when patriotism, nationalism and white resentment are at the forefront of the political conversation in the UK, both these histories offer a reminder that fascism was never simply something to be fought abroad, but to be confronted on British shores. Destructive nationalist movements will take new forms, not directly comparable to those of the past. But the jump from “take back control” to “enemies of the people” to “death to traitors, freedom for Britain” is perhaps not as large as we would like to believe.

• Daniel Trilling’s Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right is published by Verso. Fascist in the Family: The Tragedy of John Beckett MP and Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce are both published by Routledge. To order copies for for £16.99 or £14.99 respectively go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/25/fascist-in-the-family-francis-beckett-review-searching-for-lord-haw-haw-colin-holmes