in Italy , too , the part played by some of the provocative post-war striking , openly aimed at factory-expropriation , in bringing adherents and factory- and landowner-subscriptions to the fascists , is often ignored so that the story only seems to begin with the otherwise inexplicable lorry-forays against red centres , already in 1921 rising to anarchic heights . of course , the Italian governing classes were to pay dearly for the mingled cynicism and cowardice with which they finally allowed the apparatus of state to pass into the hands of the leaders and organizers of the huge bands of street-fighters at whose illegalities they had winked so long . the whole world was , in fact , destined to pay for , before long , there were to be growing apprehensions among the advanced as to whether Mussolini &apos;s success would not attract power-hungry imitators in every land . in Germany , for example , the ambitions of Adolf Hitler were certainly stimulated , and in that suffering country there had already been such threatening displays from the frustrated right as the Kapp putsch of 1920 , the Erzberger murder of 1921 , and the Rathenau murder of 1922 . the attempted Nazi seizure of Bavaria , when it came in November 1923 , enlisted Ludendorff &apos;s support . and it was not insignificant that the daily mail should publish , in 1923 , its own version of Italian Fascismo &apos;s history and that the labour publishing company should issue a very different account . as September 1923 had seen a Spanish army coup sweep aside the politicians and institute , without any obvious sign of public displeasure , the authoritarian r&amp;eacute;gime of Primo de Rivera , the I.L.P. &apos;s urge to issue Matteotti &apos;s the fascisti exposed , during 1924 , becomes more explicable . yet Matteotti &apos;s murder in June 1924 , a worse and more widely-resented scandal than any he exposed when alive , failed ultimately to weaken the fascist grip on Italy and may in the long run have served to strengthen it . certainly , a third dictatorship appeared when General Pangalos seized control in Greece during the summer of 1925 . all this , as it turned out , was not yet the primary danger to the advanced and to their social democracy . Pangalos &apos;s dictatorship , after all , was short lived , and Primo , in Spain , never built up and doubtless despised , the Mussolini demagogy , complete with fighting street-rowdies . in fact , despite some ominous undertones even in Britain and France , not to mention Mussolini &apos;s increasing grip of Italy , it might be assumed that democratic prospects were on the mend between 1925 and the great economic blizzard which began towards the end of 1929 . it was when German unemployment began rising again catastrophically in 1930 that Hitler , whose denunciation of Jews , Versailles , and traitors , sold to Moscow or the entente , had become part of the German political scene , scented his first chances of establishing an altogether more formidable dictatorship than Mussolini &apos;s . and the street-fighter apparatus which some German capitalists , fearful of communism and Moscow , helped him to perfect , began to assume , in the S.A and the S.S , forms destined to leave the Italian models far behind . already by the summer of 1932 , a possible storm troopers &apos; transfer from the harrying of communists and Jews in the streets to operations on the Polish and Czech frontiers was being taken seriously at the German war department . by 1932 , of course , English theorists of the left had been speculating for some time on how a British dictatorship threat might come to be used against them and , in point of fact , several times during the 1920s Winston Churchill had been cast for the part of the British Mussolini . but there were mockers among them who claimed that the British ruling classes would never have to meditate the risks of calling in fascism if the labour movement allowed itself to be run out of power as tamely as had been the case in 1924 and 1931 . these mockers of gradualism were in favour of assuming in advance that yet another conspiracy would be attempted against any third labour government , even if possessed of a majority , and that such a government was therefore entitled to arm itself with drastic emergency powers usable against all manner of capitalist sabotage . it was a most dangerous line of advocacy , almost certain to lead not merely to fascism but to bloodshed and the complete antagonization of still important radical forces , yet for a time it became the policy of the socialist league led by Stafford Cripps . there had been radicals who had prophesied that labour would itself breed British fascism &apos;s would-be leader , and they had been able , as justification , to point to Mussolini &apos;s violent socialist past and to Hitler &apos;s description of what he stood for as national socialism . and , of course , it provided an additional reason for radicals to refuse absorption into the labour movement to find its most discontented wing , after 1931 , forming Mosley &apos;s new party or entering Cripps &apos;s socialist league or , finally , like John Strachey , preaching a break-away into Leninite communism . as Mosley might well have become a man of destiny if Hitler &apos;s success against Britain had been greater than it was , some remarks on his strange political career between 1918 and 1930 are justifiable . the heir to a baronetcy and considerable wealth , he had , after some service in France , entered the coupon parliament at the age of twenty-two and married Lord Curzon &apos;s daughter in 1920 . but , before long , the urge to make a mark had led him on to activities on the Irish question which his brother-conservatives found unpardonable , and after four years as conservative M.P for Harrow between 1918 and 1922 , he had to overcome party resistance to retain his seat in the Bonar Law parliament as an independent conservative . by the time of the first labour ministry in 1924 , he was lending labour independent support for some time before he announced his conversion . thereafter he fought his way back into the House for Smethwick as a socialist , was admitted to the friendship and confidence of MacDonald and accompanied him on a continental tour in the autumn of 1928 . when he entered MacDonald &apos;s second government as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with a place on Mr Thomas &apos;s committee for combating unemployment , there were already those who predicted that he would succeed to the party leadership . possibly his ultimate chances were made no worse by the fact that he resigned in May 1930 when , despite growing unemployment , he found virtually all his suggestions , summarized in the once-notorious Mosley memorandum , treated as inadmissible . Mosley &apos;s long and pertinacious struggle during many ensuing months to convert the leadership or force its hand , with back-bench aid , had some remarkable features - particularly during the Llandudno conference of October 1930 and at the extraordinary meeting of the parliamentary labour party held on January 27 , 1931 . it was , to some extent , because he came so near to dividing the party dangerously between Mosleyites and the rest that the leadership succeeded in defeating him and never more effectively than when urging , privately , that Mosley was merely a rich young man whose ambition was over-reaching itself . Mosley persisted , until March 1931 , with the effort to create an action group within the party but , under the frown of official disapproval , its numbers sank from forty to twenty . when the final break came , only six members in all were available as the foundation of a new party and the six included Mosley himself and his wife , Lady Cynthia . the election of October 1931 , moreover , came in circumstances peculiarly unfavourable to the new party which polled badly and lost all parliamentary representation . though a great deal is still fundamentally unexplained in the story of the new party &apos;s evolution towards an Anti-Semitic fascism , it is not impossible to find some guidance by checking the twenty-four constituencies before whom new party candidates placed themselves . Stepney and Whitechapel were two of those constituencies destined , before long , to supply a steady stream of blackshirt recruits and to become the nucleus of metropolitan fascism , and both those areas had , for a couple of generations , heard much complaint of Jewish immigrants , Jewish employers , Jewish business methods , Jewish landlords , and much else . it only needed reports of what the nazis were doing , especially after Hitler became Chancellor , for blackshirt contingents to become available not merely in the East End , but in Islington , Hackney , Stoke Newington , and many other quarters of London where there were prosperous Jewish businesses and yet much native unemployment and distress . of course , the very name blackshirt , and the uniform , is an indication that it was Mussolini , rather than Hitler , who was being originally imitated . and though some of Mosley &apos;s action associates like Oliver Baldwin and John Strachey were shocked into a complete break with him when they first discovered him sanctioning , in his party &apos;s rooms and meeting-places , exercises in physical force , there was a possible defence in the plea , that after he had left the labour party , Mosley &apos;s own meetings were broken up by dangerous mobs , and that in Birmingham and Glasgow police protection had to be secured . it has , of course , been the fashion of communists and fascists to demand complete freedom of speech and assembly for themselves until they are prepared to destroy it and all the other democratic liberties by force . and the radical tradition of tolerance for the extremest views is so strong in Britain that matters have normally reached a dangerous stage before any widespread assent can be obtained for coercion . and if reds were still , in 1934 and 1935 , being allowed to experiment unceasingly with organizing unemployed marches and demonstrations that might become something more , the case for exceptional vigilance and severity against the blackshirts was correspondingly weaker . yet by 1934 a British fascist movement of some potential strength was certainly being reared , already capable of attracting support from those who feared red plans and activities and wanted Britain rescued , besides , from the depths , as they considered it , of the ignoble pacifism to which radicalism and socialism had brought the country . the most formidable patron the blackshirts acquired , for a time , was the great newspaper magnate , Lord Rothermere , though he finally shrank , under the stimulus of an enormous roar of progressive indignation , from the odium of swallowing virulent Anti-Semitism with his Anti-Bolshevism . as Rothermere put it himself : I refused to give more than ordinary publicity to Sir Oswald Mosley &apos;s blackshirt movement the moment I discovered it had an anti-Jewish bias . I supported it at first with the idea of promoting a right wing appanage of the conservative party , which should form a counterblast to left wing activities . Mosley &apos;s correct procedure was to develop a youth movement inspired by anti-Bolshevist ideals , instead of basing himself on continental models which , obviously , would not appeal to our British mentality or temperament . yet if he withdrew special patronage from Mosley &apos;s blackshirts , Rothermere had an obvious admiration for the services he considered Hitler and Mussolini to have rendered their countries as well as a readiness to lead a great air-rearmament campaign which constituted him one of the hopes in Britain of those who wanted the country to be at once too strong and too friendly for the dictators to dream of attacking . it was , perhaps , as well therefore for the general cause of progress in Britain that all parties in parliament decided that they had had enough of provocative fascist tactics in the East End after some notorious affrays in October 1936 faced a dismayed nation with the prospect of a repetition in Britain of full Nazi-style street hostilities . and Sir John Simon &apos;s public order bill , to ban the wearing of uniforms in connection with political objects and the maintenance by private persons of associations of military or quasi-military character , was , if specially welcome to radicals and socialists , hardly opposed during its rapid progress through parliament in November and December 1936 . fascism , however , if deprived of one of its most dangerous and provocative means of display , remained a possible peril to progressives till the fascist dictators were defeated and destroyed . yet for years the destruction that finally overtook the fascist dictators seemed most unlikely and the chances to be the other way as the notorious case of the Spanish progressives seemed to show between 1936 and 1939 . 