Series glosses over the real Mosley
Mosley
A Channel Four production
With Jonathan Cake and Jemma Redgrave
ABC TV
Sundays beginning September 20, 8.30pm
The screening of this four-part drama series on the life of British fascist Oswald Mosley spawned numerous articles in the British press about the man who wanted to be Führer and enslave the British people. The British press did not always see it that way.
The slow, poisonous, drip-drip of historical revisionism crept into much of the media's assessment of this great historic failure. Mosley would no doubt smile if he could see the furore that he continues to create, even in death.
The Channel Four series is based on Nicholas Mosley's two biographies of his father, The Rules of the Game and Beyond the Pale, both published in the early 1980s. Nicholas Mosley also acted as a consultant to the program.
Mosley is portrayed as a charismatic politician who could have been great if had he chosen a different path. It is true that the series shows him to be Machiavellian as he switches from being a Conservative MP to Labour, then forming the New Party with socialists such as John Strachey.
Modern-day fascists will no doubt squirm as they watch the first part and see Mosley supporting the Irish Republican cause after being appalled by atrocities committed by the "Black and Tans", under orders from the British government.
The first episode paints Mosley as motivated by a hatred of war due to his experiences of the horrors of the trenches in World War I. Recent documents unearthed by the Daily Telegraph show that this was little more than rhetoric, for his personal experiences of war were limited.
The series depicts Mosley's political odyssey, as he joins the Labour Party, denounces the notorious Zinoviev letter as a forgery, is elected to the national executive committee of the Labour Party and supports the miners in the 1926 general strike.
There is no doubt this is a strong attempt to create a rounded picture of Mosley. The problem is that showing Mosley as the playboy that he was for nearly three of the four episodes, before getting to what he was truly known for, his fascism, does not engender a greater understanding of the man, or British fascism.
The upper-class twit is shown as a womaniser and a dilettante, the theme that runs throughout being that he is charming but misguided, a gentleman but "a bit of a bounder and a cad".
There are three main criticisms that can be levelled at the series: first, Mosley is portrayed as a man with greater qualities than contemporaries would ever have given him credit for; second, his anti-Semitism is glossed over; and third, ending the series with his internment during WWII stops far short of the end of the story.
The question of Mosley's anti-Semitism is very important. It is true that his public utterances stopped short of the street songs of his followers, with their infamous cry "The Yids, the Yids, we've got to get rid of the Yids". But what could Mosley have possibly been talking about, before the period of large-scale non-white immigration into Britain, when he talked about deporting "aliens" and standing up for the "Englishman"?
The scene of Mosley in Germany witnessing a Jewish woman having her shop smashed up and being forced by Nazis to clean up the pavement hints he had some remorse. Coupled with his imprisonment, the series portrays him as redolent with doubt as a fascist.
If the series had at least had a postscript then we would have seen that this unrepentant fascist encouraged his followers to resume activities immediately after WWII, while he was in self-imposed exile in Eire and France.
By 1947, Mosley had returned to the streets of Britain to carry on his anti-Semitic crusade. By the late 1950s, black immigrants had become his main target. Surely, the series could have shown a glimpse of this pathetic creature unable to resist stirring up further racial hatred some 40 years after he had started it in London's East End.
There is one final thing that both the British press and the program makers conveniently to forget. Mosley's movement became known as Union Movement after the war, and is often referred to as the British Union. It should be remembered by its full title, the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists.
[Abridged from the British anti-racist monthly Searchlight. For subscription details visit <http://www.s-light.demon.co.uk/>.]