Fascism, Women and Democracy – by Mosleyite veteran Norah Elam
Many British publications and institutions – including the National Archives, British Library, and universities throughout the UK – are celebrating Women’s History Month.
But few are likely to mention the fact that Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was supported by many of the women who had previously been active ‘suffragette’ campaigners.
Among them was Norah Elam (1878-1961) who was imprisoned in 1914 for her militant campaigning in favour of votes for women, and was interned at the same London prison – Holloway – in 1940 because of her active role in Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
Though she lived with fellow Mosleyite Dudley Elam (who was similarly interned without trial under the notorious Regulation 18b) and she took his name, Norah was never actually married to him, as she could not obtain a divorce from the husband she had married in 1909, so legally remained Norah Dacre Fox.
Alongside her prominent role in the women’s section of the BUF, Norah Elam was also a militant campaigner for animal rights and against vivisection.
As part of H&D‘s contribution to Women’s History Month – and as a tribute to those women who continue to play important roles in the intellectual and practical leadership of racial nationalism – H&D is republishing online this essay by Norah Elam, first published in The Fascist Quarterly in 1935.
Fascism, Women and Democracy
“Experience shows that in all countries today democracy can develop its nature freely, the most scandalous corruption is displayed without anyone considering it of use to conceal its rascalities… Democracy is the land of plenty dreamt of by unscrupulous financiers.” – Georges Sorel, Reflexions sur la Violence.
To a genuine cynic who lived through the struggle for votes for women from 1906 to 1914, no spectacle is more diverting than the post-war enthusiast whose one obsession seems to be the alleged danger to enfranchised women in a Fascist Britain.
This unsuspected solicitude finds its most insistent champions in unlikely places, and those who were so bitter against the pre-war struggle have today executed a complete volte face. Our new-found patrons are second to none in their determination that women shall be denied nothing in principle, even if in practice they are to be denied most things essential to their existence.
To the woman who took part in that historic fight, and, regarding the vote merely as a symbol, believed that with its help a new and a better world might be possible, this kind of patronage is as distasteful as was that of a generation ago. She thinks, and with some justification, that it is humbug that those who in all those weary years never raised a hand to help her, but on the contrary were wont to describe her as an unsexed virago or a disappointed spinster, should in the hour of success endeavour to exploit her sex in the interests of a reactionary and decadent system. Such effrontery is possible only because those who resort to it entirely misunderstood and still misunderstand the meaning of that struggle, and construed the demand for political liberty as a desire for personal licence.
The time has come when the principles which underlay that remarkable and determined manifestation for ordered change, not only in the position of women but in the accepted attitude to them, should be restated.
What was it then, which underlay the passionate stirring that moved the hearts of thousands of women, and guided their heads, in those stormy years? It was not, as so many imagined, the ignoble desire of individual sex-interest, nor a struggle on behalf of women for their own sex alone. On the contrary, from the leaders to the most humble of the rank and file it was the fundamental belief, that in a world peopled by men and women and under a political system controlling the destinies of both sexes, the country which shut out from its councils the influence, viewpoint and talents of more than half its people, would be to that extent handicapped in working out the best system of government. If men were the victims of chaotic economic conditions, women suffered with them. If the social conditions under which men dragged out an almost hopeless existence were intolerable, they were equally so for their womenfolk.
Looking round on the great cities of their land, from north to south and from east to west, they saw housing conditions which man and woman agreed were a disgrace to modern civilization; watching the labour market, they gazed with apprehension on the spectre of insecurity which haunts the wage-earner and which is inherent in the old system. In the political field, they noted that, both in Home and Foreign policy, affairs were being conducted in such a manner as to strike terror into the heart of any person who cared deeply for Britain or realized the decadence that had already begun its erosion upon all parties of the State. They rose to demand that women should be called in on equal terms with men, to lend a hand before it was too late.
This uprising was in short a challenge to the old antagonisms and a call for co-operation in the corporate body of the State.
In this conception of practical citizenship, the women’s struggle resembles closely the new philosophy of Fascism. Indeed, Fascism is the logical, if much grander, conception of the momentous issues raised by the militant women of a generation ago. Nor do the points of resemblance end here. The Women’s movement, like the Fascist movement, was conducted under strict discipline, and cut across all Party allegiance; its supporters were drawn from every class and Party. It appealed to women to forget self-interest; to relinquish petty personal advantages and the privilege of the sheltered few for the benefit of the many; and to stand together against the wrongs and injustices which were inherent in a system so disastrous to the well-being of the race. Like the Fascist movement, too, it chose its Leader, and once having chosen gave to that Leader absolute authority to direct its policy and destiny, displaying a loyalty and a devotion never surpassed in the history of this country. Moreover, like the Fascist movement again, it faced the brutality of the streets; the jeers of its opponents; the misapprehensions of the well-disposed; and the rancour of the politicians. It endured the hatred of the existing Government, and finally the loneliness of the prison cell and the horror of forcible feeding. Its speakers standing in the open spaces and at the street corners were denied the right of free speech; it champions selling their literature spat upon and reviled; its deputations were manhandled. Suffragettes became the sport of any rowdy who cared to take the law into his own hands. To make the analogy the more exact, no calumny was too vile and no slander too base to set about the moral character of its leaders, or the aims and objects of the women who owed them allegiance.
Thus it came about that women welded together in such association had no illusions about political and party shibboleths, and when the sacred words “Democracy” and “Individual Liberty” were a commonplace on the lips of their detractors, they remembered that these things were done under a Liberal Administration, and by the champions of a Party which had made the democratic system the summit of its political wisdom. That under it, they were classed with criminals, lunatics and children. They argued and with some cogency, that if this were democracy then women had little to hope for from it.
Their experience as outlaws from the democratic system was as nothing compared with that which faced them, when they found themselves honoured citizens under its doubtful protection. They had earned, it is true, the right to individual liberty for a very brief space once every five years, but when they had put that fatal cross upon the ballot paper and closed the door of the polling booth behind them, from that moment they found themselves completely helpless before the democratic machine.
Though we shall be told that this was what we had fought for, a moment’s reflexion will show that this was regarded as but the symbol. Women never made the fatal error of imagining that because men voted they were necessarily free. It is the mark of the unintelligent woman today to suppose that a woman is free because she also votes, or that democracy can ever offer anything but the careful and organized exploitation of men and women who suffer it to exist.
Given the vote on a limited basis at the close of the War, women were also granted the right of entering Parliament, and the election in the late autumn of 1918 gave them their first opportunity. The Party system was already beginning to show the first signs of decay, and by the inexorable law of retributive justice, the Party which had given birth to democracy in Britain was in full retreat before its ungrateful offspring. Nevertheless, women in the first flush of their triumph turned to the then existing parties either as voters or prospective candidates.
My own distrust of Party politics made me chary of turning in this direction, and I preferred to stand as an Independent, going down with all the other women candidates on this occasion, save one. The exception was the Sinn Fein Countess Markievicz, who though a notorious and avowed enemy of Britain, found it a perfectly simple matter under the democratic system to secure election to the Parliament of the country which she had openly boasted that she would destroy, disintegrate and discredit. She was, if I remember rightly, returned unopposed. The next example was hardly more encouraging, for the first woman to be elected for an English constituency was an American-born citizen who had no credentials to represent British women in their own Parliament, save that she had married a British subject who found himself forced to the Upper House on the death of his father. Detractors of the Women’s Movement pointed with a hardly disguised satisfaction to this denouement, and were at pains to hold up this lady as a sorry specimen of feminine irresponsibility. They need not have been so personal, for she was no better and no worse than any other woman elected to the British House of Commons, as a result of years of effort and struggle of the militant women. It is a sorry fact, though none the less true, that the subsequent election of Party women to Westminster has not made one tittle of difference either to men or to women, and though many able women have joined the ranks of our elected representatives their influence has been wholly negligible on the destinies of Britain or her Empire. They, like their men colleagues, are simply cogs in the Party wheels of the democratic system, marching into the lobbies at the crack of the Party Whip, helpless before the Juggernaut of the official machinery which rolls on, crushing all initiative and independence before it, and reducing every person who owes it allegiance to a mere cipher for the carrying through of its policies and its measures. And if this be true of Parliament – and who can deny it? – it is even more true of the woman voter. She, too, is caught up in this inexorable system, a veritable slave to her Party organization.
To those who challenge this, the question must be put: What power has the woman member or the woman voter, under the present system, to alter any one policy of any government yet elected? Does the most enthusiastic admirer of the present system allege that women, no matter to what party they belong, are satisfied with the existing position of this country? Are they willing to see economic conditions whereby the employment figures have reached the incredible total of between two and three millions remain unchanged? Do they rest content with the spectacle of those derelict areas which strike despair into the heart of every living person? Are they indifferent to the decay of the agricultural districts and the plight of the farming industry and unconcerned with the appalling housing conditions which all parties alike deplore?
Turning to the vast field of Imperial and Foreign politics, is it to be contended that the bulk of British women desire to see the disintegration of the Empire, or the orientation of the present foreign policy of the alleged National Government, whereby pacts and commitments are being made in their names and in secret with the avowed enemies of this country, while at the same time we are being left defenceless, not only for the purposes of our own immediate defence, but if the need should arise to honour those commitments? Do we indeed know to what we are being committed; what this policy of collective security involves, or what is the sinister power which dictates it? “Democracy is the land of plenty dreamt of by unscrupulous financiers,” says Georges Sorel. Have enfranchised women any power to check a Home or a Foreign policy dictated for the purpose of making that dream a living reality? Let it be remembered that when the time comes to foot the bill, we shall be driven as sleep to the slaughter, helpless before the results of these policies. What is the value of so-called freedom if it cannot give us the power to alter these momentous issues?
If it be true that the average woman voter wants none of these things, why, if she be free under the democratic system, does she permit them? If she possesses this freedom, is she not doubly and trebly guilty in suffering them for one hour longer? This is the test of her claim to a responsible part in the government of her country. If she has gained the necessary power and liberty under the existing system, the charge that she is incapable of playing a citizen’s part in the affairs of her country, and is in fact unfitted for responsibility, is proved up to the hilt.
None of these things is true. The truth will be found in the fact that there is no freedom either for men or for women under the present antiquated system. What fetters both men and women is that the Party system is in decay, and this is the more noticeable since the granting of adult suffrage under an unbridled democracy. Throughout the world the same decadence has set in, by the inevitable march of time and circumstance, the change from a world of poverty to a world of boundless plenty makes ordered planning not only requisite but vital to existence. Under these changes the methods of the old world are obsolete and must give place to the new. If women are to be worthy of their place in the councils of the nation, they must face as realists the new world conditions which are gathering round them. Sooner or later they must choose. The decision is momentous, for upon it will depend the status of women for a considerable period of time. It is therefore no light matter that they should weigh well in the balance the history of the world.
There are two courses open to women. The first is that she should struggle on with the decaying system of the old world, content to be the handmaid of the professional politicians of the various parties to which she attaches herself. Of this it may be said that she has given it a long and faithful trial, and that if under it she could have accomplished any practical change in the direction of social, political or economic freedom, she has lamentably failed. She must now consider whether the fault lies within herself or within the system to which she still clings. In this connexion she will note that the separate parties are themselves gradually disappearing. The Liberal Party has passed into the twilight of the past; the Conservative Party is in rapid disintegration, and we know upon the assurance of its own Leader, that there is no hope of its regaining its independence. The same fate awaits the Socialist Party, since it too must travel along the same road which has sucked the other two parties under the quicksand of Social Democracy.
She must therefore look for some better system; one more in accord with modern conditions. What is to take the place of the tottering edifice of the past?
Every student of politics realizes that the issue now lies between Fascism and Communism. So far as British women are concerned, Communism makes little appeal. To go no further, it is the philosophy of destruction, and is the negation of the natural instincts of womanhood. It is the antithesis of every principle and practice which women value and require.
Fascism seems to be the only solution. It has within it every principle peculiarly suitable and adaptable to the genius of the British character. It offers real freedom and liberty to all men and women of goodwill towards this country. Lest there should be any misunderstanding, we shall define these so often loosely-used terms, in words with which no democrat will quarrel, for they are taken from that apostle of unadulterated democracy, John Stuart Mill.
“The sole end,” he wrote, “for which mankind are warranted individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others.”
This is precisely the Fascist conception of individual liberty, and it is obviously a conception that so far as women are concerned gives them every opportunity that they can legitimately require in their future status as women citizens. In no other system are these principles embodied. Moreover, in the machinery of the Corporate State, Fascism assures women an equal status with their menfolk, for it holds within it the only means whereby they will be enabled to direct and control the conditions under which they shall live; thus Fascism alone will complete the work begun on their behalf by the militant women from 1906 to 1914. In addition, it will rescue them from the vitiated atmosphere of corruption inherent in the Party system, and for the first time it will give an opportunity, through the machinery of their own special Corporations, tackling with some hope of success those great questions which so closely concern their own and their children’s lives.
In the economic field it will assure security with equal pay for equal work, that eternal bone of contention which has rent the sexes asunder with such dire results to industry.
In the social sphere, it removes all class barriers, while in the political, it gives justice and equality for the first time in the history of the Women’s struggle.
And most important of all, Fascism comes to lay for ever the haunting spectre of war, by removing the fundamental causes, which exist and have their being in Internationalism, an instrument forged for the purpose of enabling “unscrupulous financiers” to take advantage of that “land of plenty” called “democracy” of which they dream.
To enable all this to be accomplished, Fascism will require that women equally with men should offer a disciplined cooperation in the welding together of an ordered State, and Fascism will rightly lay upon all the citizens of the State the responsibility and the duty of working in harmony, not in the interests of any section or class but for the benefit of all its people. It will call upon women as upon men, to subordinate all selfish individual privileges, that the less fortunate may under its protection be safe from exploitation.
This is Fascism. All else is mirage. Is it to be said that British women cannot rise to this great occasion in the history of their country? Those who would bid them reject this opportunity are the enemies not alone of women, but of all progress and of civilization. Those women who endured the ordeal of the great struggle of pre-war days have at least learned the right to challenge the people who once again would enslave them in the subjugation of the past, and fetter them within a system which denies them all opportunity to play an honourable part in the necessary reorganization of their country. British women have never failed or faltered when Britain has had need of them. They too, with the men of their generation, will raise aloft the banner of British Fascism, and bearing it high above the turmoil and sordid quarrels of the Party system, will hasten that day which shall see their nation reborn. In that triumphant hour, they will have truly earned the proud right to pay homage to a regenerated and Great Britain, and to rest at last within the Peace, Security and Prosperity of her Sovereign People.
Jewish lobby seeks to censor BBC
Desert Island Discs is one of the longest-running radio series in the world, having recently celebrated 80 years on the air since its first broadcast in January 1942. As all British readers will know, the programme features a different guest each week who is asked to select eight records, one book, and one ‘luxury item’ they would choose if ‘cast away’ on a desert island in the manner of Robinson Crusoe.
More than 2,300 episodes are now available on the BBC website, but last weekend the Sunday Telegraph focused on just one of them: broadcast in November 1989 when the ‘castaway’ was Lady Mosley (the former Diana Mitford), widow of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.
This theoretically conservative newspaper seems to have joined forces with the Anglo-Jewish lobby to complain that the Mosley episode of Desert Island Discs is freely available for today’s listeners without any “introductory warnings that it may contain material of an offensive nature”.
Government ‘anti-semitism’ adviser Lord Mann told the paper: “It would be appropriate to put a warning in relation to this broadcast and the holocaust denial that is spewed out by Mosley.”
And Dave Rich from the Jewish lobby group Community Security Trust kvetched that Lady Mosley’s “anti-Jewish animus and her admiration for Hitler shine through. Most objectionable of all is her denial that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. The whole package could not be more repulsive. There is no mention of any of this in the blurb that promotes the episode on the BBC Sounds website.”
Rich’s organisation CST was founded and is chaired by Gerald Ronson, a veteran of the violent Jewish ‘anti-fascist’ 62 Group, some of whose history will be exposed in a forthcoming two-part review article in Heritage and Destiny Issues 107 and 108.
There is no law against ‘holocaust denial’ in the UK and the problem seems to be simply that Lady Mosley attempted to give truthful answers to questions about her attitude to the Third Reich. Speaking of Adolf Hitler she said: “He had so much to say, so interesting, so fascinating… I can’t regret the relationship.”
And when pressed about the ‘Holocaust’ she replied: “First of all, after the war, I simply didn’t believe it, having been in Germany … And it was years before I could really believe that such things had happened.”
Pressed further as to whether she now believed in the extermination stories, she replied: “I don’t really, I’m
afraid … believe that six million people were … I just think it’s not conceivable, it’s too many.”
For today’s fanatical Zionist censors, even this now classes as ‘Holocaust denial’. Just what are they afraid of? H&D readers will soon find out…
Max Mosley, 1940-2021
Max Mosley, son of the former government minister and British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Mosley, died last night at his Chelsea home, aged 81. He had been ill with cancer for some time.
During the early 1960s Max was an active member of his father’s Union Movement and was election agent for UM candidate Walter Hesketh at the Manchester Moss Side by-election in November 1961. In later years he was best known for his role in the organisation of motor racing, where he pioneered important improvements in driver safety, and for his campaigns against tabloid newspaper intrusion into private lives.
Max was himself targeted in March 2008 by Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, which reported his encounter with five prostitutes, one of whom turned out to be married to an MI5 employee.
H&D Assistant Editor Peter Rushton first met Max Mosley during an Oxford Union Society tribunal in 1986. In tribute to Max Mosley’s memory, we today republish online Peter Rushton’s review of Max Mosley’s autobiography. (The review first appeared in H&D Issue 73.)
Ave atque vale.
Many happy returns – John Bean
The editor, assistant editor and all the staff at H&D Towers, would like to wish our oldest subscriber (by two months) – John Bean – a very happy 93rd birthday.
John was born on June 27th, 1927 in Carshalton, Surrey. The family moved to Blackfen, near Sidcup in Kent, where at the age of 13 he suffered the trauma of being bombed out of the family home in February 1941.
Aged 18, John began his National Service in 1945. He was largely apolitical, although he had briefly flirted with communism whilst at school, calling for support for the Soviet Union. Initially he was a trainee navigator in the RAF Volunteer Reserve.
Later as a sailor in the Royal Navy. John became a radar mechanic and was placed on HMS Bulawayo, a fleet supply ship which made several visits to Trinidad until the end of his naval service in June 1948.
He briefly lived in India during 1950, working as a chemist in a paint factory, although he failed to settle and returned to Britain six months later.
Upon his return, John began to attend meetings of the Union Movement, being attracted by the ‘Europe a Nation’ policy and by the time Oswald Mosley had spent in prison for his beliefs. John initially served as a member of the Special Propaganda Service, the main duty of which was to sell copies of the party’s newspaper Union.
Soon however he became a leading figure active on behalf of the UM in the East End of London, before being appointed to head a branch in Putney in 1952. Despite these advancements, John grew disillusioned of the UM’s chances of making any real headway and he left them altogether in February 1953. A brief stopover in the local Conservative Party in Barnes followed but lasted only two months.
After a spell on the side-lines he then linked up with Andrew Fountaine, who had been attempting to form his own party, the National Front, and began to produce a journal, National Unity.
His work attracted the attention of A.K. Chesterton and, with the National Front idea failing to get off the ground, he decided to join the League of Empire Loyalists, serving as its Northern Organiser and then in the HQ in London. Continuing to produce his paper, now called The Loyalist, John soon became frustrated at both the lack of political activity and the links to the Conservative Party that were the hallmarks of the LEL.
He left in 1957 to set up the National Labour Party with Fountaine. Fountaine, a Norfolk landowner from a rural landowning family, was officially President of the new group, but was largely a figurehead: control actually lay with John.
The NLP gained a few minor results in elections but was always destined to be a small fringe movement, and as a result John decided to merge his party with another LEL splinter group, the White Defence League in 1960 to form the British National Party.
John Bean was made leader of the party upon its foundation. Early in the group’s life, both John and former White Defence League leader Colin Jordan were approached by Oswald Mosley, who offered them roles in his Union Movement if they agreed to its subsuming the BNP, but both men rejected the offer.
Initially gaining some support in London, the party soon ran into trouble when it became clear that Colin Jordan was emerging as its spokesman. A journalist commented in 1962 that Jordan was becoming the British Adolf Hitler. John jokingly responded to the Daily Mail reporter that that made him “the British Joseph Goebbels”. Despite this, John soon clashed with Jordan over his extremism and before long Jordan had left to form the National Socialist Movement, taking emerging figures John Tyndall and Denis Pirie with him. Matters had come to a head at the party’s national council meeting in 1962 when John proposed a motion to condemn Jordan’s open support for National Socialism. It was passed 7 to 5, but the party immediately split as a result, albeit with around 80% of the membership remaining within the BNP. John had blamed the associations with National Socialism that Jordan and Tyndall brought for the party’s marginal position in British politics.
At the 1964 general election John Bean stood as BNP candidate in Southall and obtained 3,410 votes (9.3%), the highest post-war vote for a minority party at that time. Another BNP candidate picked up nearly 2,000 votes in Deptford. In 1966 he again stood in Southall, but his vote fell to 2,600. With BNP membership only marginally increasing, John felt the need to try to create a nationalist front with like groups and arranged, with the help of Ted Budden, a private meeting with his old mentor A.K. Chesterton and a spokesman of the Racial Preservation Society. The result of the meeting was the founding of the National Front in 1967.
John became something of a peripheral figure in the NF, as the BNP element was somewhat side-lined. He held the post of Deputy Chairman of the Executive Directorate, a body which was largely subordinate to the Policy Directorate and stood as second candidate for the Ealing constituency in the 1967 Greater London Council elections until resigning in 1968. Still an NF member, he was recalled to positions of minor influence from time to time until 1972 when he largely ceased active involvement. Retreating into political retirement, his membership lapsed in 1977
He emerged only briefly to lend some support to his old friend Andrew Fountaine’s NF Constitutional Movement and to take part in the Countryside Alliance March of 1st March 1998 – which was also attended by supporters of Nick Griffin, by then inside the BNP.
John eventually ended his retirement after the political fall of John Tyndall and joined the British National Party under the leadership of Nick Griffin. He became an active official of the BNP (mostly in administration) and was a candidate for the party in the 2004 European elections, where he was seventh on a list of seven candidates for the Scotland constituency.
He formerly ran his own website, but then wrote a regular column for the main BNP website, and served as editor of BNP magazine Identity until March 2010.
Due to dissatisfaction with his leadership, John demanded that Nick Griffin resign as National Chairman and focus more on representing the North West region as an MEP.
In May 2011, John endorsed Andrew Brons (the BNP MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber) in his challenge for the BNP leadership. He made significant contributions to the Brons team web site, including articles on ‘Genetics and Inheritance’ and ‘Nationalism and a European Confederation’. He subsequently became involved in Brons’s party the British Democratic Party, established in February 2013.
John lived in London, and later Suffolk, before retiring to Yorkshire to live nearer his expanding family – three grandchildren, and five great grandchildren (so far!).
During periods away from politics John wrote four books.
Ten Miles from Anywhere (Hedgerow Publishing 1995), looked at the changes in a Suffolk village from the beginning of the 20th century.
Many Shades of Black, (New Millennium 1999), was Bean’s political memoirs up to that date.
His first novel Blood in the Square, which fictionalized some of his political experiences in the 1960s.
And in August 2016 his historical novel Trail of the Viking Finger (Troubador Publications).
Mosley’s Irish home for sale
The 12-acre postwar home of Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley has been put on the market by its present owners.
Ileclash is close to Fermoy, Co Cork. It was the second Irish property that the Mosleys owned, having first purchased Clonfert Palace, a 17th century house in East Galway, in 1951.
Lady Mosley’s sister and brother-in-law had already moved to Ireland, and by 1951 it had become clear for various reasons that Mosley’s postwar political revival was running out of steam. A second Mosley revival began at the end of the ’50s, but for the rest of his life (from 1951 to 1980) he and Diana lived in Ireland or France, with occasional visits to London.
Clonfert was severely damaged in a fire at the end of 1953, and at the start of 1955 Mosley bought Ileclash, a 19th century mansion near the River Blackwater, 25 miles north of Cork. It became the Mosleys’ summer home for several years.
Several controversial European political figures settled in Ireland after the war, though recently released Irish government documents show that (despite having remained neutral during the Second World War and having maintained diplomatic relations throughout with National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy) Ireland’s prime minister Eamon de Valera discouraged prominent national socialist immigrants.
In October 1945 and April 1946 de Valera twice rejected applications by dissident, anti-Hitler national socialist Otto Strasser to take up Irish residency, writing “in present circumstances, it is not possible to accede to your request”. Similar rejection letters were sent to Léon Degrelle, former leader of the Belgian national socialist Rexist Party, who had led an SS Division on the Eastern Front.
Degrelle later settled in Spain, while after a decade in Canadian exile, Otto Strasser eventually returned to Germany.
As British citizens, the Mosleys could not be denied the right of residence in Ireland.
Carl Harley: 70+ years in British nationalism!
We greatly regret to inform readers that H&D‘s second-eldest subscriber Carl Harley died on Saturday 22nd February, aged 89.
Carl Harley, who lived in Highgate, North London, was a long-standing H&D subscriber. He was not afraid to put his hand in his pocket, and sent H&D a donation a couple of times to help us keep going.
Cattle die, and kinsmen die,
And so one dies oneself;
One thing I know that never dies:
The fame of a dead man’s deeds.
We are grateful to Bill Baillie of the Nation Revisited and European Outlook blogs for this memory of Carl Harley’s lifelong commitment to our cause, first published in 2016.
Carl Harley – the man who recruited John Bean
I first encountered Carl Harley and John Bean at a National Labour Party meeting in Trafalgar Square in 1959. I was there as a schoolboy, on a bicycle, with my mate Paul Barnes. But I didn’t get to know them properly until the BNP camp held in Norfolk in 1962.
Carl Harley was born in Greenwich on 26 June 1930. He was a member of the Mosley Book Club in 1947 and joined Union Movement on its foundation in 1948. He did his National Service in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps from 1948 to 1950. When he came out of the army he was appointed organiser of the Lewisham branch of Union Movement, where he signed up a young man called John Bean before going to Manchester to help Jeffrey Hamm.
He fondly remembers his old comrades; Alexander Raven Thomson, Victor Burgess, Peter Lesley-Jones and Pat Dunigan; but he disliked Alf Flockhart. In 1958 he joined John Bean’s National Labour Party which merged with Colin Jordan’s White Defence League in 1960 to form the British National Party. In 1962 Colin Jordan broke away to form the National Socialist Movement. Carl tried to persuade John Tyndall to stay with the BNP but he decided to join Colin Jordan. Thirty-five years later, whilst writing to thank Carl for a donation, JT acknowledged his mistake.
Carl was a founder member of the National Front in 1967. He followed Andrew Fountaine into the NF Constitutional Movement in 1979. The NFCM was absorbed into John Tyndall’s British National Party in 1984. Carl stayed with the BNP until John Tyndall was ousted as leader in 1999.
Today he subscribes to Heritage and Destiny and keeps in touch with old friends all over the world. When I interviewed him for this article he was reading Jewish Supremacism by David Duke.
Carl Harley was not an armchair patriot. He was an organiser of branches, a public speaker, a builder of platforms and scenery, a painter of banners, a printer and distributor of leaflets, a campfire cook, a writer of letters, a security guard, a receptionist and a willing helper. I am glad to call him my friend.
