1930s British state suppressed Left activism while tolerating fascist violence.

Evidence

Of course, it was all delusion. There was, in the 1930s, little that was quaint or liberal about British politics or generous about the British state. While it was true that in a small niche of British society the Popular Front and its Third International allies flourished, that radical writers and artists could produce political and literary journals such as Storm, Cambridge Left, Left, the Left Review, New Verse, and others, that such weeklies as The Tribune or Claud Cockburn’s The Week could be published, that the Left Book Club could be organized, and drama groups like Unity Theatre and the Group Theatre could perform, that mass mobilizations like the unemployed of the Jarrow Crusade (1936) could demonstrate, and thousands volunteer for the Spanish Civil War’s International Brigade (some 2,762 were thought to have gone to Spain, 1,762 wounded, 543 killed), it was also true that power in British society was being employed for other things. In the streets, Sir Oswald Mosley’s tens of thousands of British Union Fascists exacted a terrible physical toll on antifascists, and destroyed shops like those in London’s Mile End Road owned by Jews. Julian Symons recalled: “Certainly the police force, never notably sympathetic towards Left-wing movements, seemed always to assume very readily the task of protecting the Fascists from opposition.” But the official faces of British politics were no less venal. In 1936, at its Edinburgh conference, the Labour Party had “turned its back on the needs of republican Spain,” and even earlier the National Government embarked on a “neutralist” course between fascist states and their victims. Yet the same state had no pretensions toward neutrality where its Empire was concerned. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1236