“Happy Warriors” of the Left: #Milifandom, Politicised Masculinity and 1930s Anti-Fascism

But the Sun, the Mail and the Telegraph continued unabated, attacking the Labour leader right up until the day of the general election. Before the disastrous exit poll,[6] there had been no dramatic shifts in support and even leading Conservative pollster, Lord Ashcroft, said such attacks were failing to convince wavering voters.[7]

Miliband’s struggle to come up with a humble, yet statesman-like variant of masculinity in the face of right-wing denigration has an odd historical parallel. Almost eighty years ago, the anti-fascist left faced a similar dilemma. How could anti-fascist men create their own masculine identity that opposed the imperialism inherent in the notion of the English gentleman, and the ‘new fascist man’ ideal of their arch-enemies?

Britain in the 1930s found itself in a politically polarised Europe and facing the increasing likelihood of war. These “Happy Warriors” of the Left faced far more extreme smears except from the far-right rather than the centre-right. Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) was a movement obsessed with masculinity. The BUF’s fascist masculinity was “the ethos of public school masculinity as a political programme” and, like public schools, aimed to create men at the peak of “masculine fitness”.[8] They vitriolically attacked political rivals like the left-leaning liberal Bloomsbury group, a group of writers and artists the BUF saw as “[e]ffeminate [c]owards”.[9] They saw their masculinity as under threat from “the anaemic city clerk, the Bloomsbury poet... and the pale pink politician”.[10]

Anti-fascists reversed this aggressive hyper-masculinity to attack the BUF. For them, such an image was just the ‘for-King-and-Country’ English gentleman on steroids. They perceived in the ‘new fascist man’ the figure of the school bully, “what are Hitler, Mosley or Mussolini like, more than... big backward boys...?”[11] While the BUF looked forward to a world where “[t]he full-blooded virility of the warrior” was put to use “conquering fresh fields”, the anti-fascists repudiated the cult of the hero.[12] At the same time, they did not shirk from fighting for their ideals when it came to it in the Spanish Civil War. The story of the international anti-fascist response to Spain is well known. Many on the anti-fascist left, including poet Stephen Spender and communist and rebellious public school-boy Esmond Romilly, went to fight for the Spanish Republic.

Esmond Romilly, the communist nephew of Winston Churchill who ran away to fight in Spain, wrote that “[n]o attempt is made to romanticize” any whom he fought alongside. [13] They were “by no means fearless fanatics but very ordinary people drawn from every section of society.”[14] Poet Stephen Spender put it in more harrowing terms “The dead in wars are not heroes: they are freezing or rotting lumps of isolated insanity.”[15] Spender wrote that when he came back from Spain, he was more than ever behind the cause of social revolution. He was impressed by the “emotional honesty” of the Spaniards who fought for what they believed in with “few heroics, no White Feathers, and genuine hatred for the necessity of war”.[16] Spender and Romilly argued that anti-fascist men could fight for what they believed in and still oppose authoritarianism, militarism and even, paradoxically, war if it meant the forces of social revolution could triumph over fascism and imperialism. They saw in anti-fascist men their own “happy warriors”, albeit warriors that were actually at war, rather than just fighting a general election campaign.

This anti-fascist image of masculinity, cultivated by Spender, Romilly and others, was compromised by the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the beginning of the Second World War and the fall from grace of the Soviet Union with the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The optimistic democratic movement in Spain had been defeated and the choice was now whether to join the British establishment’s war on fascism or to continue the fight against both. In addition, the Soviet Union’s alliance with Hitler over the invasion of Poland meant the leading light of the international left had allied itself with the world’s most belligerent fascist regime.

The stakes for Miliband were considerably lower than they were for Romilly and Spender who faced lonely death in a foreign country. There is, however, a peculiar similarity between these anti-fascists stressing their convictions over their fighting ability or their masculine prowess and Miliband casting himself as a leader without the looks or charisma of his opponents but “[w]ith the sense of principle needed to stick to those beliefs and ideas even when it is hard.”[17] As analysts and party strategists pick over the ruins of Miliband’s campaign to find out what went wrong, we shall no doubt soon find out whether it was the failure of Miliband’s “happy warrior” against Cameron’s elder statesmen persona that contributed to the Conservative’s surprise victory.