The New Party was a political party briefly active in the United Kingdom in the early 1930s. It was formed by Sir Oswald Mosley, an MP who had belonged to both the Conservative and Labour parties, quitting Labour after its 1930 conference narrowly rejected his "Mosley Memorandum", a document he had written outlining how he would deal with the problem of unemployment.
On 28 February 1931 Mosley resigned from the Labour Party, launching the New Party the following day. The party was formed from six of the Labour MPs who signed the Mosley Manifesto, although two resigned membership after a day and sat in the House of Commons as independent MPs; Strachey resigned in June. The party received £50,000 funding from Lord Nuffield and launched a magazine called Action, edited by Harold Nicolson. In addition, Nicolson produced a New Party propaganda film titled Crisis and aimed to get it shown in the cinemas but the censors banned the film as it was considered it would "bring Parliament into disrepute" due to its depiction of MPs asleep on the benches. In the event the film was only shown at New Party meetings. Mosley also set up a party militia, the "Biff Boys" led by the England rugby captain Peter Howard. The New Party's first electoral contest was at the Ashton-under-Lyne by-election in April 1931. The candidate was Allan Young, and his election agent was Wilfred Risdon. With a threadbare organisation they polled some 16% of the vote, splitting the Labour vote and allowing a Conservative to be returned to the Commons. Two more MPs joined the New party later in 1931—W.E.D. Allen from the Unionists and Cecil Dudgeon from the Liberals. At the 1931 general election the New Party contested 25 seats, but only Mosley himself, and a candidate in Merthyr Tydfil polled a decent number of votes, and three candidates lost their deposits. Mosley's New Party general election campaign received prominent press coverage in various national newspapers during 1931 with the Manchester Guardian reporting that "The stewards were wearing rosettes of black and amber - the Mosley colours. Busy bees, hiving the honey of prosperity? That may be the symbolism of it."
Policies
The New Party programme was built on the "Mosley Memorandum", advocating a national policy to meet the economic crisis that the Great Depression had brought. Mosley's desire for complete control of policy making decisions in the New Party led many members to resign membership. He favoured granting wide-ranging powers to the government, with only general control by Parliament and creating a five-member Cabinet without specific portfolio, similar to the War Cabinet adopted during the First World War. His economic strategy broadly followed Keynesian thinking and suggested widespread investment into housing to provide work and improve housing standards overall, while also supporting protectionism with proposals for high tariffs walls.
Demise
Following the election Mosley toured Europe and became convinced of the virtues of Fascism. Gradually, the New Party became more authoritarian, with parts of it adopting overtly fascist thinking and the wearing of Greyshirt uniforms. The New Party's sharp turn to the right led previous supporters such as John Strachey and Harold Nicolson to leave it. In 1932 Mosley united most of the various fascist organisations in the UK, forming the British Union of Fascists, into which the New Party subsumed itself. An unrelated New Party was launched in Britain in 2003.
