Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s

Extremism was on the march across continental Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet Britons chose a different, more moderate, path. Alwyn Turner explores why the posturing and rants of would-be dictators largely fell on deaf ears between the wars

A photo collage featuring three images. On the top left is a black and white photograph of a group of men and women pulling an aeroplane. On the bottom left is a black and white photograph of five men, three in military uniform, standing outside a hut that is advertising fish and chips. On the right is an image of a large group of soldiers walking through a city, holding large flags.

Published: February 16, 2026 at 3:30 PM

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“Is this the age of dictators?” asked veteran journalist Sir Sidney Low. He was writing in September 1923, the month in which a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in Spain. At the same time, Benito Mussolini was reinforcing his new dictatorship in Italy, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was shaping the nascent republic of Turkey, and disruptions – including those fomented by Hitler’s Nazis – were building to a climax in Germany. Taken together, these developments led Low to wonder whether the world might be witnessing “the general decline of parliamentary institutions”.

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Over the years that followed, his comments were to become commonplace. By 1938, there was autocratic rule in more than a dozen European countries across the continent, from Portugal to Poland and beyond to the Soviet Union. Even in some countries that remained democracies, substantial anti-democratic elements were growing in power and influence: in the 1936 Belgian elections, the far right won nearly 20 per cent of the vote, while the Communist Party took 15 per cent in French elections that year.

In Britain, however, there was no equivalent body of support for extremism in the interwar years. There was, of course, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under the leadership of Oswald Mosley – a Conservative MP who then sat as an independent before switching to Labour and eventually finding his way to fascism. But Mosley was never more than a peripheral figure. At its peak in mid-1934, the BUF briefly numbered around 45,000 members. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never got above 20,000 members in the 1930s. By comparison, the Labour Party claimed up to half a million members, and there were 6 million trade unionists. The CPGB’s best electoral showing came in the 1931 general election when it fielded 26 candidates, averaging fewer than 3,000 votes each – 0.3 per cent of the total – while Mosley’s New Party got 0.2 per cent. In 1935, the BUF didn’t even put up candidates. It’s not that Britain narrowly escaped the extremism that swept across Europe in the interwar years – it never came even vaguely close.

A black and white photograph showing a large group of people, dressed in long coats, scarves and hats marching through the street. They all have sad, concentrated looks on their faces

The National Hunger March (1932) saw men and women converge on London from around the country. The Great Depression caused a great deal of hardship, but Britons weren’t as badly affected as many other nations (Image by Getty Images)

Safe across the water

There were multiple reasons why Britain didn’t succumb to the appeals of fascism or other extreme ideologies. There was the security of being an island, and the stability of a long existence as a nation within fixed borders. There was the fact that, horrific as the numbers of British fatalities were in the First World War, they were dwarfed by those of other combatant nations. Similarly, although the Great Depression brought hardship to many, Britain was not affected as badly as other countries.

There was also the nature of the Labour Party, committed to the parliamentary process, as were the trade unions. And indeed the nature of the Conservative Party under the One-Nation leadership of Stanley Baldwin – as well as the electoral system that made it so difficult for rival parties to emerge.

In his 1937 account of life in the industrial north, The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell made the suggestion that “cheap luxuries” kept the working class quiescent. “It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution,” he wrote. But low-level consumerism was not unique to Britain. If the country chose “to make the best of things”, it was surely because the national culture was already averse to radical disruption.

It’s relevant, for example, that this was the great era of voluntary associations. There had been working men’s social clubs in industrial towns and cities for decades, but numbers grew substantially in the aftermath of the First World War. By 1922, its diamond jubilee year, the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union could boast 2,300 affiliated clubs with more than a million members. The Women’s Institute, which was founded in Canada and had reached Britain during the war, grew in the 1930s to around 300,000 members. Rotary Clubs, founded in Chicago, had around 19,000 members, and the League of Nations Union more than 400,000. Perhaps most important of all was the British Legion, which merged various ex-servicemen’s groups in 1921. Within a decade, it had a membership of 300,000 – around one in 10 of those who had served in the forces.

A black and white photograph of five women standing around a long table with a white tablecloth on it. There are various items on the table, including some wicker baskets and a set of scales. The woman in the centre, an older woman dressed in dark clothing, is holding up a bunch of carrots

Members of the Women’s Institute gather at a garden show in 1922. By the end of the 1930s, Britain’s WI had grown to around 300,000 members (Image by Getty Images)

Beyond these big networks, Britain nurtured a vast array of local societies and groups dedicated to single interests: photography, prison reform, amateur dramatics, vegetable growing, jazz records and a thousand other issues and hobbies. What they had in common, pointed out the novelist Phyllis Bentley, was a high level of self-regulation. “Each of these societies has a properly elected committee and chairman,” she wrote, “and conducts its business by means of an agenda, a proper procedure of moving and voting resolutions, an annual report and a balance sheet open to all members.” The British, she observed, were a people “unexcelled in the proper conduct of public business by entirely voluntary but strictly self-regulated methods”. This was the institutionalised form of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”, a term coined by the philosopher and politician to express the importance of societal bonds formed at a local and family level.

There were also political clubs – some 2,000 Conservative, nearly 1,000 Liberal, the early stirrings of Labour – but it was the institutions that weren’t based on party that really mattered. The non-aligned status of the various societies allowed for diversity of opinion, and for finding common cause. The societies operated on the basis of cooperation and coalition. It was from voluntary societies and trade unions, argued Baldwin, that the people had learned “the elements and principles of a democracy” which “they will never let go”. Democratic practice was thus embedded in everyday life, far beyond politics.

Cultural caution

Indeed, there was a striking absence of politics in British social life, and even more so in cultural life. The cinema, for example, was regulated by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), a body whose only remit was not to offend and which approved nothing more provocative than resilience in the face of adversity.

The espousal of doctrines of revolution or free love were banned, as were “references to controversial politics”, including “relations between capital and labour”. So a proposed movie of Walter Greenwood’s Depression-era novel Love on the Dole was rejected by the BBFC for having “too much of the tragic and sordid side of poverty”. Permitted, however, was the comedy Off the Dole in which George Formby was “sacked” by the Labour Exchange after four years of not working, and which displayed nothing more contentious than the gentlest of political satire. (“A member of parliament is a man who gives your life for his country.”) Also banned by the BBFC was anything “calculated to wound the susceptibilities of foreign people”, as well as “the insistence on the inferiority of the coloured races” and “scenes calculated to inflame racial hatred”.

It was a very British take on censorship, quite unlike that of most European countries. It wasn’t any particular political viewpoint that was banned, but politics as a whole. “We may take pride,” said Lord Tyrrell, president of the BBFC, in 1937, “in observing that there is not a single film in London which deals with any of the burning issues of the day.” The BBFC had been established – and was still run – by the industry itself and, although its writ was never challenged, it had no statutory authority. This system of self-regulation was, acknowledged Labour politician Herbert Morrison, “a curious arrangement” but, he added, “The British have a very great habit of making curious arrangements that work very well.” In any event, it was surely preferable to the intense government control seen in Germany under Joseph Goebbels, or in Russia, where the head of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumyatsky, was executed as a traitor in 1938 for not doing his job well enough.

Reithian values

An equally curious arrangement governed the BBC, founded in 1922, which operated first as a private company and then as a public-service corporation under royal charter. It had a monopoly on radio broadcasting in Britain and became the most significant cultural institution in the country. By the end of the 1920s there were 3 million radio licences, 9 million by the end of the thirties – virtually every household in the country had a radio. It was a little odd, though. Even in its early commercial days, the BBC was never a conventional operation that responded to audience demand. Nor did it ever become an organ of government. Instead, general manager (later director-general) John Reith created his own vision of public service broadcasting, and mostly resisted external pressure from those who wished to shape this new medium.

A black and white photograph of a man wearing a white shirt, dark sweater vest and striped tie, sitting at a desk with papers in front of him. To the right is a large microphone with the letters BBC on the front

Announcers such as Alvar Lidell (above), the man who told the nation of Edward VIII’s abdication, were trusted figures whose work helped bind the nation together (Image by Getty Images)

There were restrictions, of course. Like the cinema, radio was not a place for disruption. The government, explained Reith, had given “an explicit instruction to avoid anything in the nature of religious, political or industrial controversy”. There wasn’t even a great deal of news. The newspaper industry, fearful of being made redundant, successfully lobbied the government to ensure that the first radio bulletin of the day wasn’t broadcast until 7pm, so that it wouldn’t harm sales of morning or evening titles.

That curfew was broken – never to return – during the nine-day General Strike of 1926, when independent newspaper production was suspended and the radio became the chief source of news for many. During the dispute, Reith complained about the government – “I do not think they treat me altogether fairly,” he wrote in his diary – but he strove to keep coverage calm and detached. Even in this moment of national crisis, the BBC was not a propaganda station – largely because Baldwin overruled those in his cabinet (most notably Winston Churchill) who wanted to commandeer the airwaves.

More broadly, as political coverage expanded, the BBC allowed for a variety of voices but had a clear bias towards parliamentary democracy: communists and fascists were seldom heard on the radio. It was ecumenical but definitely mainstream. So too was its approach to religion. Despite his own Presbyterian faith, Reith believed that religious broadcasting should be based on “a non-sectarian Christianity, confined, in respect of doctrine, to those simplest essentials to which all Christians of the west can adhere”.

With only one national channel, augmented in most regions by a local station, the intention was to occupy a shared middle ground. As with the cinema, there was no wish to ruffle feathers. And, also like the cinema, the BBC was essentially self-regulating.

A black and white photograph of a man in uniform holding tightly onto the raised arm of a woman, who is holding a gun above her head. She is dressed in a collared shirt and long skirt. Behind them is a set of windows

Catherine Lacey stars in Judgment Day in 1937, at a time of tight control over what could be seen on theatre stages (Image by Getty Images)

For other cultural forms, there existed a patchwork of censorship that had evolved over generations without any sense of logic or coherence. The London stage was under the tight control of the Lord Chamberlain, while variety theatres were overseen by local councils. Books and exhibitions required no prior approval but were subject to the Obscene Publications Act. The Post Office was empowered to intercept mail, and customs officers to seize material brought in from abroad.

None of this was draconian. It simply smothered: a comfort blanket that insulated against conflict. The resultant lack of cultural engagement with burning political issues on stage, screen and radio was part of the reason why the country felt – and was – so much more stable in the 1930s than most of Europe. Culture in Britain was far quieter than in its neighbours.

There was something more that underpinned these cultural manifestations: a conviction that dictatorship ran against the grain of the nation. “Autocracy is abhorrent to the British mind,” wrote a columnist in the West Sussex Gazette in 1933, “and the kind we see in operation in Germany seems to us almost incredible.” The totalitarian state, with its intrusion into private life, offended a culture that had always prided itself on privacy and independence; somehow, it all looked so alien.

The leader-worship accorded to Hitler, Stalin and their ilk – the ubiquity of their images on posters, placards and public portraits – felt wrong. That role was already taken by the monarchy, whose iconography was woven into the social fabric, from the national anthem to banknotes and coins, postage stamps and pillar boxes. The words “an English Hitler”, reflected novelist Louis Golding in 1931, were “comically contradictory of each other”. (Which didn’t stop people from trying them out: the previous year, Labour minister Arthur Greenwood had used precisely that phrase to describe Winston Churchill.)

A black and white photograph of a man dressed in a black uniform with a wide belt around his waist. He is standing above a crowd, shouting out to them with his right arm raised and curled towards his face

Oswald Mosley, far-right leader of the British Union of Fascists, addresses his supporters. The party never won a single parliamentary seat (Image by Getty Images)

No need to get shirty

Equally alien, if not downright silly, were fascism’s quasi-military uniforms – all those monochrome shirts. “The number of nations that may be led to salvation, generally an undemocratic salvation, need to be limited only by the number of colours that shirts may be dyed,” mocked the Roscommon Herald. They became a standing joke in the literature of the time. There were Green Shirts in John Buchan’s 1935 novel The House of the Four Winds and again in Richmal Compton’s William the Dictator, White Shirts in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (both 1938), and unspecified Imperial Shirts in Agatha Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940).

Best of all, in his 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse introduced Roderick Spode, a parody of Oswald Mosley who leads the Black Shorts. As Gussie Fink-Nottle explains: “There were no shirts left.” In the same book, Wodehouse ridiculed “those pictures in the papers of dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words”.

That was another part of the problem with such figures: the posturing and the bragging rants looked out of place in a British context, in the same way that fire-and-brimstone evangelicalism doesn’t work in a home counties accent. When Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, he replaced his conventional tweeds and suits with a black polo-neck sweater tucked into black trousers, held up by a wide black leather belt, and his onstage persona adopted a more declamatory tone and exaggerated arm gestures. But he looked unconvincing, as though he was playing a dictator in an amateur dramatics society show.

A black and white photograph showing a short man in a suit and bowler hat walking in an exaggerated manner, arm in arm with a taller woman dressed in a long coat. They both look excited. Behind them is a large crowd of people, cheering the on

Irene Dipper and Billy Pease do ‘The Lambeth Walk’ in London, 1938. While the song was wildly popular in Britain, in Nazi Germany it was labelled “degenerate” (Image by Getty Images)

If there was a single cultural symbol of Britain’s instinctive distrust of the dictator, it was perhaps ‘The Lambeth Walk’ – the song, and accompanying dance, that swept the country in 1938. A highlight of the musical Me and My Girl it was a simple and instantly catchy tune that cried out to be whistled cheerily by postmen and plumbers. The lyrics were even simpler, notable for the shout of “Oi!” and for the happy-go-lucky bridge: “Everything free and easy; do as you darn well pleasey.”

The song seemed to speak of a people free from an overbearing state – an anomaly in an increasingly authoritarian world. And it was embraced across the whole of society – danced, according to Mass Observation reports, “in Mayfair ballrooms, suburban dance halls, cockney parties and village hops”.

Some 350,000 copies of the sheet music for ‘The Lambeth Walk’ were sold in Britain in its first year, and it was exported successfully, too. It was recorded by dozens of artists including American bandleaders Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington, as well as Europe’s greatest jazz group, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. As the continent lurched towards another conflict in the year of Munich and the idea of “peace for our time” proved illusory, The Times predicted that the song would “be the ‘Tipperary’ of the next world war”.

In Nazi Germany, however, the song encountered stiff opposition. It was banned at the Shrovetide Carnival festivities in Munich and at the University of Heidelberg – where Joseph Goebbels had been awarded his PhD – and Hermann Göring reportedly forbade Luftwaffe bands from playing it. “This is degenerate music and the people who dance it are also degenerate,” thundered Der SA-Mann, newspaper of the Brownshirts.

From a British perspective, this was a fundamental clash of cultures and values. “There is nothing free and easy in Nazi Germany,” said the Liverpool Echo. “‘The Lambeth Walk’ must seem out of place in the land of the goose step.”

If that comparison seems a little fanciful – perhaps trivial – it made sense at the time. And even Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, drew exactly the same conclusion. “I understand that Hitler regards the Lambeth Walk as too democratic a dance for Germany,” he said. “All they can do there is the goose step.”

Alwyn Turner is senior lecturer in cultural and literary history at the University of Chichester. His new book is A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars (Profile, January 2026)

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This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine

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