Teenage by Jon Savage

Author:Jon Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

... Out of Bounds will openly champion the forces of progress against the forces of reaction on every front, from compulsory military training to propagandist teaching.

This manifesto was barely circulated before the press jumped on it, with headlines like “RED MENACE IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.” Communism appeared to be entering the heart of the establishment, and Churchill’s opportunistic “Red Nephew” was quite happy to assist the process. Writing for a national newspaper, Romilly played the extremist card: “Youth has a clear choice, there can be no halfway house. Either they must side with the parasites and exploiters to ‘make the world safe for plutocracy,’ or with the working class to smash the capitalist system and lay the foundations of the classless society.”

The vibrations of polarized violence reached their first climax in June 1934, when Oswald Mosley held a mammoth blackshirt meeting in London’s huge Olympia hall.49 This was designed to mark a crucial turning point in his party’s history. With the Hitler and Mussolini regimes securely in power, Mosley had adopted key elements of their iconography and worldview: the ritualistic staging, the fears of American mass culture, the scapegoating of designated outsiders. The British Union of Fascists also capitalized on the generational hostility to bourgeois society, full of compromise and decadence.

The BUF was a young movement, with an estimated 80 percent of mem-bersunder thirty.50 Its most important constituency was the same class that had provided crucial support for Hitler, skilled and semiskilled workers. With a significant take-up in the industrial North as well as London’s East End, it was designed to appeal to the unemployed. With Nazi brutality as yet unexposed, Mosley set out to seduce the disaffected within a highly charged atmosphere. With his regimented squad of “biff boys” dressed from head to toe in black, Mosley well understood the combination of violence and sexuality.

At Olympia, this highly charged atmosphere erupted. The problem for the protestors was that, according to Harry Daley, the police on duty had been told “not to interfere” in what had been organized as a private event. The result was that every time a heckler or protestor stood up, “the ushers in force pounced on the offender and carried him from the hall.” Groups of blackshirts then violently attacked “the defenceless hecklers, who could do nothing but stand and cover their bowed heads with their arms and hands until they fell to the ground.” Daley recalled that “nobody had ever seen anything like it.”

Olympia occurred at the BUF’s first membership peak—up to 50,000 in mid-1934—and set a precedent for political violence. Most large-scale BUF events followed a similar pattern: heavy policing outside and “fascist discipline” inside the hall. In Liverpool, the protests were organized by the local Anti-Fascist Committee, comprised of Communists, Labour Party members, and National Unemployed Workers’ Movement representatives. This collaboration reflected the Comintern’s new Popular Front policy: the alliance of left-wing groups to stop Hitler and even defend democracy.

However, the violence at Olympia finished off any chance of the BUF achieving conventional electoral

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