"The Code of the Woosters" tells us why fascists can’t get a foothold in Britain

Roderick Spode

Thanks to Biased BBC, I’ve just listened to a BBC radio programme presented by Trevor Phillips, the “chair” of the Equality and Human Rights Commission entitled No Extremists Please – We’re British!, in which he asks why racist politicians never seem to gain a foothold in this country.

I wouldn’t bother listening to it if I were you: it is full of clichés, lazy liberal "thinking", scaremongering and displays a complete absence of intellectual rigour. But I’ve worked with Trev, and none of that’s a surprise. Neither are the leadenly ineffective attempts at “smart” writing – the BNP has been so unsuccessful in elections, Phillips tells us, "that some people think their initials should stand for 'Bigots – Null Points'”. Er…?

Having told us that “anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-EU parties are on the march” across Europe (yes, we all remember how Polish and Ukrainian neo-Nazis terrorised foreign fans and players at the Euros), Phillips peevishly demands to know why Britain’s racist politicians aren’t doing as well as their continental counterparts. “I’m... a scientist, and like all scientists, I want to know why.” Apparently he studied Chemistry at Imperial College. 

Two questions – as far as I’m aware, Phillips has spent the last four decades as a TV journalist and quangocrat. In what way, exactly, is he currently a scientist? Does he spend his evenings surrounded by Bunsen burners and test-tubes and submitting articles to scientific journals? And if he can so style himself, can I call myself a philosopher because I was awarded a degree in the subject 36 years ago? Second – are scientists any more interested in finding out why things are as they are than artists, writers, journalists, civil servants, or accountants? 

Anyway, our “scientist” proceeds to examine a number of possible reasons for Britain’s extremelessness (displaying not a scintilla of a hint of scientific method in the process).

Is it because Britain defines itself as the destroyer of Nazism in WWII? Or because the Brits are simply too "nice" to fall for hysterical rabble-rousing? Is it because our first-past-the-post political system makes it’s impossible for radical parties to turn widespread support into genuine power? Or Is it because we haven’t had a civil war or revolution for over 300 years, and so stability has become part of the nation's DNA?

The monarchy doesn’t get mentioned – Phillips is a lefty, after all – but I would have thought the Glorious Revolution of 1688, 1689’s Bill of Rights, and the 1700 Act of Succession might have had something to do with it. Apart from one or two notable exceptions, Britain’s been pretty lucky with its kings and queens - and their consorts. And there have been some pretty damned fine politicians (for instance, Pitt the Younger, Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher) in amongst the Gordon Browns and David Camerons.

But, just as important as monarchs and politicians, I reckon, is the British sense of the ridiculous. Anyone who has read – and laughed at - P.G. Wodehouse’s 1936 comic masterpiece, The Code of the Woosters, will understand why this country is unlikely to end up supporting populist extremists. Here’s how Bertie Wooster deflates the would-be dictator, Roderick Spode, Bt, 7^th Earl of Sidcup, the leader of the Black Shorts, (evidenlty modelled on Sir Oswald Mosley, the Labour MP who founded the British Union of Fascists): 

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?" 

Hardly a scientific explanation, I know, but a damned sight more convincing than anything Trev manages to come up with.

The only interesting thing about the radio programme is its failure to mention the group of fascists who are seeking to destroy Britain’s tolerant democracy with a peculiarly vile form of theocratic totalitarianism  – the Islamofascists. If a modern writer were to make fun of these nasty, ridiculous fanatics in the way Wodehouse dealt with the Mosley and his thugs, he’d be vilified by our liberal media, charged with hate crime and undoubtedly sentenced to death by the Nazi Party's true heirs.

If we can't go on making fun of perfect perishers, Britain will really be in trouble.