‘Every time they made a Communist, they made a Fascist’: The Labour Party and Popular Anti-Fascism in the 1930s

Abstract

For far-Left critics, the Labour Party contributed little if anything to the 1930s struggle against fascism. Repeatedly, the Labour establishment spurned invitations by the Communist Party (CP or CPGB) and Independent Labour Party (ILP) to form either a united anti-fascist proletarian front or an anti-fascist People’s (or Popular) Front. Following events at Olympia on 7 June 1934, the National Joint Council (NJC), representing the Labour Party, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and the Trades Union Congress (TUC), ‘repudiated entirely every form of organised interruption at fascist meetings’.2 At regular intervals, the Labour Party’s rank-and-file were told to refrain from agitating against Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), whether in Hyde Park in September 1934, in the East End in October 1936 or at Bermondsey one year later. The Labour establishment — Morrison and Dalton on the National Executive Committee (NEC); Bevin and Citrine on the TUC General Council — insisted that confrontational anti-fascism would advertise the BUF and that ‘the silence of the absent’, to borrow the words of one contemporary journalist, was a ‘strong refrigerator’.3 When BUF activity and support subsided towards the end of the 1930s, it was ‘no thanks to the Labour Party and trade union leaderships’, one Marxist historian felt compelled to write.4KeywordsTrade UnionCommunist PartyLabour MovementLabour PartyLabour EstablishmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.