New Historical Express

An on-going research interest of mine is on the demographics of the far right in Australia and Britain. Below is an excerpt from a literature review discussion from a longer paper.

There are a small number of studies that have attempted to examine the socio-economic demographics of the far right in Australia and Britain across the twentieth century. The scholarship on inter-war far right in both countries has concentrated on membership because these groups focused on extra-parliamentary activity, rather than electoral politics. However these have always been approximations as attempts to gain accurate records of far right groups is difficult to obtain, due to their semi-clandestine nature. Regarding Britain, Thomas Linehan has written, ‘[t]he history of British fascism shows that support for home-grown fascist parties straddled social-class boundaries and that workers were just as liable as members of other social-class groups to succumb to the far right’s various messages’.[1] Scholars, examining the far right in both Britain and Australia in the 1920s-30s, have long debated the possible cross-class appeal of fascism and paramilitarism during these decades.

Keith Amos’ 1976 work on the history of Australia’s New Guard movement under Eric Campbell states that the founders of the New Guard in 1931 were ‘nearly all ex-officers in their late thirties with middle-class backgrounds’.[2] Citing the NSW police, Amos writes there were ‘few young or old men in the movement’, with ‘at least 25 per cent of members [being] ex-servicemen’ and ‘all occupations’ being represented in the New Guard.[3] Contemporaneously, the newspaper The Sun characterised the New Guard as being ‘composed of a wide cross-section of society including clerks, bank managers, labourers, small shopkeepers, accountants and barristers’, but Amos argues that it was unlikely that the New Guard had much support from workers.[4] Amos cites the New Guard’s Francis De Groot as claiming that the group’s Sydney City locality being composed of ‘about 200 members who were mostly Caretakers of City Banks, Insurance Buildings and such… positions usually held by retired Army and Navy Non-Commissioned and Petty Officers’.[5]

Discussing the literature that exists on the New Guard, Matthew Cunningham’s 2015 PhD thesis notes that the work of Humphrey McQueen, William Tully and Phyllis Mitchell all ‘contended that the proletariat was sparsely represented in the movement’, although notes that Jean O’Mara and Andrew Moore had found pockets of working class support for the New Guard, particularly in the Five Docks locality and in some right-wing trade unions like the Railway Service Association.[6]

Despite these small areas of working class support, the consensus is that the New Guard was ‘overwhelmingly a middle-class organisation’.[7] Andrew Moore wrote that while ‘the New Guard involved more workers than some accounts would allow’, the fact was that ‘Australian fascism was shaped by its lower middle class, small shopkeeper hegemony’.[8]

Cunningham’s study of the wider right-wing citizens’ movements in Australia and New Zealand during the inter-war period also highlights the middle class composition of these groups. Looking at the leadership for three groups, the All for Australia League, the Australian Citizens’ League and the Citizens’ League of South Australia, Cunningham shows that the leaders were significantly middle class, with those in professional, business and commercial occupations being the majority in all three (72.7 per cent for the All for Australia League, 60 per cent for the Australian Citizens’ League and 65.7 per cent for the Citizens’ League of South Australia).[9] The All for Australia League leadership had some from the manufacturing business (11.3 per cent) and workers (10.4 per cent), while the other two had significant minorities of farmers/pastoralists (25.4 per cent for the Australian Citizens’ League and 13.7 per cent for the Citizens’ League of South Australia) and workers (14.1 per cent for the Australian Citizens’ League and 19.2 per cent for the Citizens’ League of South Australia).[10]

Comparison could be made with the membership of the New Guard and the British Union of Fascists, which according to Amos, was ‘probably never more than half that of the New South Wales’ New Guard’,[11] but still the largest far right group in British history. There have been several studies that have explored the class composition of the BUF. Looking at the profiles of 103 figures in leadership positions within the BUF in the mid-1930s, W.F. Mandle stated that the ‘composite fascist leader in 1935’ would be a ‘man in his late thirties, educated at a public school who had served in the great war as an officer’, who was also be ‘widely travelled’ and middle class.[12]

In 1972, Robert Benewick argued that the BUF was ‘popularly identified as a middle-class movement’ and while it made some gains amongst the unemployed, it found ‘little success in the most distressed areas such as Scotland, South Wales, or the North-East’.[13] Benewick reaffirmed Mandle’s suggestion that the BUF leadership were ‘for the most part solidly middle class in terms of occupation’, but qualified this by also writing, ‘[h]ow far the social composition of the leadership reflected that of the membership is unknown’ as most records were seized by the British authorities in 1940 and remained closed when Benewick was writing.[14]

In 1980, Stuart Rawnsley’s study of the membership of the BUF argued that Mosley’s party was able to recruit in the early years from those who were unemployed or fear unemployment, with cotton workers particularly sought after in Lancashire.[15] Rawnsley quoted from several BUF leading figures that suggested that the working class made up a significant part of the BUF, with district members reportedly being ‘mainly millworkers and mechanics’ in Blackburn, with ‘a sprinkling of small shopkeepers and business people’, alongside ‘as much as 40 per cent of the local membership’ in Hull being ‘working class and unemployed’ and ‘large numbers of working-class people’ in the BUF in Lancaster.[16] But Rawnsley wrote that the BUF was unable to make much headway with the ‘organised sections of the working classes’ and therefore, ‘[t]he working-class recruit was typically one who had not been educated in the labour movement’.[17]

As well as the unemployed workers, especially in the North, Rawnsley saw that self-employed people turned to the BUF. This, Rawnsley wrote, ‘cut across class lines and included working-class people who attempted to start one-man painting and decorating businesses or window-cleaning rounds, owners of small shops and garages, and also taxi drivers.’[18]

A more recent study of BUF membership is by Thomas Linehan, who challenges ‘the classical view of fascism as essentially a middle-class revolt and tendency to describe fascist joiners in terms of a single stereotype.’[19] Linehan analysed a sample of 311 Mosleyites in East London and South-West Essex and found ’36 per cent were unskilled and semi-skilled workers and 15 per cent were skilled workers (“lower class”)’, alongside ‘lower and intermediate white collar employees’ (14 per cent), ‘self-employed merchants’ (14 per cent) and ‘independent master craftsmen’ (‘nearly 8 per cent’).[20] Linehan argues that these last three categories were from ‘the “lower middle and middle-middle class”, in terms of social class’, meaning that in his overall figures, ‘the largest grouping… in respect to social class’ was ‘the “lower class” element’ (51 per cent), compared with the ‘lower middle and middle-middle class’ (39 per cent).[21]

In 1995, Roger Griffin suggested that the ideal type of fascism ‘has no specific class basis in its support’ and that ‘the middle classes were over-represented in the membership of Fascism and Nazism… because specific social-political conditions made a significant percentage of them more susceptible to a palingenetic form of ultra-nationalism’.[22] Further research is required, if possible, to determine whether Griffin’s thesis can be ascribed to those who joined far right groups in Australia and Britain in the same period.

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[1][1] Thomas P. Linehan, ‘What Happened to the Labour Movement? Proletarians and the Far Right in Contemporary Britain’, in Nigel Copsey & David Renton, British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) p. 16.

[2] Keith Amos, The New Guard Movement 1931-1935 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976) p. 26.

[3] Ibid, p. 44.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Cited in, Ibid.

[6] Matthew Cunningham, ‘The Reactionary and the Radical: A Comparative Analysis of Mass Conservative Mobilisation in Australia and New Zealand During the Great Depression’ (Victoria University of Wellington: Unpublished PhD thesis, 2015) p. 156.

[7] Matthew Cunningham, ‘Australian Fascism? A Revisionist Analysis of the Ideology of the New Guard’, Politics, Religion and Ideology, 13/3 (2012) p. 382.

[8] Andrew Moore, ‘Workers and the New Guard: Proletarian Fascism in New South Wales, 1931-1935’, in Greg Patmore (ed.) Transforming Labour: Proceedings of the Eighth National Labour History Conference, p., 244.

[9] Cunningham, ‘The Reactionary and the Radical’, p. 148.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Amos, The New Guard Movement, p. 110.

[12] W.F. Mandle, ‘The Leadership of the British Union of Fascists’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 1966, p. 369.

[13] Robert Benewick, The Fascist Movement in Britain (London: Allen Lane, 1972) p. 112.

[14] Ibid, p. 127, p. 129.

[15] Stuart Rawnlsey, ‘The Membership of the British Union of Fascists’, in Kenneth Lunn & Richard C. Thurlow, British Fascism: Essays on the Radical Right in Inter-War Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1980) p. 160.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Thomas Linehan, British Fascism, 1918-39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) p. 164

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Roger Griffin, ‘General Introduction’, in Roger Griffin (ed.), Fascism: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) p. 7.