Black shirts and white No Mean City gave no

How the aristocratic leader of British

Afew momentous hours pitched the leader of Britain’s fascists against the socialists of No Mean City. And the socialists won. Oswald Mosley and a band of supporters arrived to speak to a crowd of thousands assembled in Glasgow Green on September 20, 1931, and it did not end well.

Mosley, leader of the New Party before it became the British Union of Fascists, the Black Shirts, the following year, dreamed of becoming Britain’s dictator but his speech ended in violence and disorder as left-wingers, reputedly aided by members of the city’s notorious razor gangs, drove him out of town in disarray.

Both Mosley, who had been a Labour MP but was inspired by the rise of Hitler to form his own anti-semitic party, and the razor gangs will feature in the eagerly-anticipated fifth series of Peaky Blinders, starting tonight on BBC1, when Tommy Shelby and his Birmingham crime clan will come across both as their family saga continues.

Shelby, played by Cillian Murphy, is now a Labour MP alongside Mosley, played by Sam Claflin, but it was not the fictional Blinders the British fascist faced in Glasgow but a real and far more dangerous threat.

Dr Gavin Bowd, author of Fascist Scotland, a history of the far-right north of the border, said Mosley’s visit ended in turmoil.

He said: “Significant disturbances took place at the next New Party mass meeting, in the Flesher’s Haugh, Glasgow Green.

“To cries of ‘Traitor!’, Mosley made his way to the platform, where he railed against ‘the old men of British politics’, left and right.

“He denounced the ‘schoolgirl hysterics’ of the House of Commons, and called for protection of workers. “There was then a stampede towards the platform. Mosley and his supporters made to leave, but they were attacked from behind with razors, ‘life-preservers’, which were leather coshes, and missiles.”

Trade unions, socialist and communist groups – rather than Birmingham gangsters – were likely behind the violence, according to Professor Henry Maitles, author of Blackshirts Across The Border, a history of the British Union Of Fascists in Scotland.

“What Glasgow Green suggested was there was very strong opposition to what Mosley was proposing,” he explained. “Every time the British Union Of Fascists (BUF) tried to organise in Scotland – whether it was Glasgow, Edinburgh, Wishaw, Aberdeen, Motherwell or Wick – anti-fascists would oppose them.

“But the rest of these events weren’t ‘razor-ganged’ – Glasgow Green is the only one where this happened. There