Andrzej Olechnowicz

Civic leadership and education for democracy: The Simons and the Wythenshawe estate

Manchester Corporations Wythenshawe estate was famous in the 1930s, and its fame was largely due to the efforts of Sir Ernest Simon, a prominent Liberal businessman. This article examines how his developing ideas of leadership and civic responsibility in a democracy shaped his judgement of Wythenshawe. In the 1920s, he regarded Wythenshawe as a triumph of imaginative municipal leadership in the face of the indifference of central government. By the 1930s, however, he saw Wythenshawe as, potentially, a danger to democracy. The estate was a one-class area of people with no spontaneous commitment to democracy. They were, in fact, vulnerable to the mass appeal of fascism. This had to be guarded against by the promotion of education in citizenship in schools and community centres. As a consequence, Simons assessment of Wythenshawes success or failure was determined as much by the ideological conviction, common in his class, that the working class were not fit citizens, as by the quality of life made possible by the estate.

Labour Theorises Fascism: A. D. Lindsay and Harold Laski

This chapter engages with three strands of recent historiography. The first is David Renton’s distinction between ‘anti-fascists’ and ‘non-fascists’ whereby only organised, active resistance counts as ‘anti-fascism’.2 The second is the common view that Continental labour parties failed to prevent the rise to power of fascism because they were ‘ideological’ and subservient to the Comintern’s reckless and opportunistic manipulation of ‘Marxism’.3 In the most crass hands this becomes a wholesale condemnation of Marxism as an intellectual project,4 even a wholesale denigration of the ‘entire anti-fascist tradition’.5