British Union of Fascists

The British Union of Fascists ( BUF) was a British fascist political party of the 1930s.

Foundation

After his New Party in 1931 remained without electoral success, the former Labour MP Oswald Mosley went on trips to study the new political movements of Benito Mussolini and other fascists. He then decided to combine the existing smaller, ultra-nationalist and fascist groups in his homeland and founded for this purpose in 1932, the British Union of Fascists. Mosley looked in the Italian " Duce " Mussolini -like role and also formed the BUF the fascist movements in Italy and other European countries after.

Ideology

The BUF was aligned anti-communist and protectionist. They called for the abolition of parliamentary democracy and the creation of a corporate state. According to the company, the BUF had up to 50,000 members. In the early years it was supported by the Daily Mail; this support went to the headline Hurrah for the Blackshirts! . Among her followers were the novelist Henry Williamson and military theorist John Frederick Charles Fuller.

History

Mosley led early one black uniforms for his party, the so-called Blackshirts. However, not least because of the marches of the Blackshirts, the party garnered from many sides only scorn and derision. The anthem of the BUF as the Nazi Horst Wessel song intoned.

Despite significant, sometimes violent resistance by Jewish, communist and various democratic organizations, the BUF was able to build strongholds in East London. Over the years, the BUF increasingly brutal and anti-Semitic, which removed them from their supporters in the middle class ever was. In a major event of the fascists in London's Olympia on June 7, 1934, there was a mass brawl, as the Blackshirts interferer wanted to throw out of the hall. These events and the intra-party " purge " of Adolf Hitler in Germany, the so-called Röhm - Putsch, led in 1934 to the fact that the BUF lost most of their supporters, so that they could not even participate in the general election of 1935. Mosley comforted his followers in order to wish to participate more successful at the next election.

The number of members shrank to 1936 to less than 8,000. The principal activities of the BUF were in the aftermath marches and demonstrations. The British government saw them as after all, so dangerous that in 1936 the Public Order Act enacted, a law that banned political uniforms and restricted freedom of demonstration. In a racially motivated brawl, the so-called Battle of Cable Street in October 1936, Mosley and his followers were forced by superior numbers of opponents to retreat.

1936, the name of the party was extended at the instigation of William Joyce, known as a demagogic orator member of the BUF, on British Union of Fascists and National Socialists.

Mosley and 740 other fascist leaders were interned during World War II, the BUF banned in May 1940.

Any comeback attempts Mosley in the postwar period were without any success.