Hurrah for the Blackshirts! by Martin Pugh

Author:Martin Pugh [Martin Pugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2006-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

Churchill argued that all concessions were futile: ‘The truth is that Gandhism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed. It is no good trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him with cat meat.’23 Yet Churchill and Lloyd overlooked the implications of their uncompromising tactics: ‘Do you think a democracy will stand for the necessary measures?’ enquired Lord Middleton.24 He was doubtless correct that a prolonged attempt to suppress a huge nationalist movement by force was too high a price for the British electorate to pay for the maintenance of the status quo. For the fascists, however, such calculations offered further proof of the flabbiness of democratic politics.

The National Government shocked its critics by drawing up a sweeping scheme based on the federal system outlined at the Round Table Conference, including an Indian electorate of over thirty millions, full self-government at the provincial level, and an elected parliament in which the princes were to be represented. ‘The general idea may be right,’ complained the Duke of Atholl, ‘but it never was anticipated that it should be galloped at this pace . . . You cannot give nations complete control straight away, but it must be given in small homeopathic doses.’25 Opposition to the scheme was so bitter that it was not passed until 1935. The parliamentary resistance was coordinated by the India Defence League which some eighty Tory MPs and many peers joined; the leading rebels included Lord Lloyd, Sir Henry Page Croft, Churchill, the Duchess of Atholl, Lord Lymington, Patrick Donner and Colonel John Gretton. Though overshadowed by Churchill, Lloyd and Page Croft were the most effective leaders because of their impeccable record of loyalty to the empire and to the party. It was Lloyd who led the attack at the Conservative annual conferences in 1932 and 1933 where he adopted an increasingly apocalyptic view of British policy, characterising it as the withdrawal of the Roman legions and the start of a general decline of British military power. Lloyd pointed bluntly to the connection between the Indian controversy and the alarming rise in the popularity of the BUF during 1934: ‘You cannot be surprised if the Conservative Party will not look after the interests of this country as well as of India, that more and more people in this country will prefer a blackshirt to a White Paper.’26

Lloyd’s views on empire, democracy, the depression and rearmament were so close to those expressed by Mosley that he was expected to end up in the fascist camp. He became the target of Douglas Jerrold of the English Review, Lady Houston of the Saturday Review, and of the perennial rebel, Lord Beaverbrook, who wanted him to start a new party. The eighty-three-year-old Lucy Houston was one of the most eccentric figures operating on the far right of politics in this period. In 1926 her husband, the steamship owner Sir Robert Houston, had died, leaving her six million pounds which she distributed lavishly

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.