Pre-war activity Russell was active in politics for much of his life. In his youth he flirted with
socialism and even
communism but soon abandoned these in favour of
Social Credit, establishing his own National Credit Association to promote the ideology. He addressed the membership of the
New Party about Social Credit but the scheme was not taken up by Sir
Oswald Mosley's group. Russell also frequently visited the Canadian province of Alberta where the Social Credit party led by a fundamentalist Protestant
William "Bible Bill" Aberhart had won the 1935 election. However, Aberhart was unable to execute the Social Credit platform as the Dominion government used its disallowance power under the British North America Act to block Aberhart's proposed radical changes. The way that the Social Credit government of Alberta failed to carry out its program was understood by Russell not as due to the BNA act, but rather to a supposed conspiracy to impoverish the masses. He admired the growing fascist movements in Europe and wrote in the
New English Weekly in support of the
Anschluss in 1938. In a series of letters to the editor of
New English Weekly, he wrote that he was considering cancelling his subscription because of its criticism of the Nazi regime. In one letter dated 7 April 1938 he wrote: "Hitler is supported with enthusiasm by large sections of the population because he gave German youth faith and hope in the future, restored their self-respect, and did much to reduce unemployment". The driving force behind the BPP was
John Beckett, a former
Labour Member of Parliament who had also been a member of the
British Union of Fascists and the
National Socialist League. According to his son,
Francis Beckett, John Beckett did not have much real devotion to the unassuming and uncharismatic Russell but was attracted to the BPP as much by the Marquess' money as any real conviction, Beckett himself being virtually penniless at the time. Lord Tavistock was the president of the BPP, but most of those associated with the party came from the left. The platform of the BPP called for "the right to security and social justice", the "abolition of a financial system based upon usury which perpetuates social and economic injustice", the "security of labour in its industrial organisation", the "abolition of all class differences", the "safeguarding the employment and integrity of the British people against alien influence and infiltration", and the "abolition of all military alliances and political and economic commitments which may involve this country in wars which in no way affect the security and national independence of our peoples". Philby in his 1948 memoir
Arabian Days wrote "...I was approached by Lord Tavistock, John Beckett and Ben Greene of a new and small organisation called the British People's Party, with those general outlook I had no sympathy, though I fully and cordially agreed with the anti-war attitude. Eventually I agreed to fight the Hythe by-election". and had been close to that semi-clandestine group since its establishment in 1937. In the early months of the Second World War, he attended several meetings of leading figures on the far-right that Domvile had organised, although he was largely unenthusiastic about this initiative. Russell chaired the British Council for Christian Settlement in Europe, established immediately after the declaration of war and featuring an eclectic melange of fascists, fascist sympathisers and committed pacifists. He was a committed pacifist across the board, rejecting war entirely, in contrast to Beckett and several other leading members of the group who were explicitly opposed to war with
Nazi Germany rather than to war as a concept. During the early days of the war, Russell was also courted by the
British Union of Fascists (BUF), who had changed their name to the British Union, and held meetings with
Neil Francis Hawkins, the group's Director-General. He had earlier been a sometime member of the
January Club, a BUF-linked discussion group. He had grown close to BUF member
Robert Gordon-Canning, and under his influence even came to write for the BUF's newspaper
Action. Nonetheless, in private BUF leader Sir Oswald Mosley dismissed Russell as "woolly-headed." Tavistock engaged in a lengthy correspondence with the Foreign Secretary,
Lord Halifax over the justice of the war, starting on 18 January 1940. He blamed the war on Poland, writing that he could not understand why during the Danzig crisis, Halifax had not pressured the Poles into accepting "Herr Hitler's extremely reasonable March proposals." Tavistock portrayed Hitler as a victim as he continued: "We should not forget that even in our our boyhood the German Jew was a by-word for all that was objectionable; that there is good evidence of unfair treatment by the Czechs of German minorities and ample evidence of unjust and even brutal treatment of the Germans by the Poles". One of the leading members of the British Union was Edward Godfrey whose political views the Special Branch of Scotland Yard described being less with the British Union and "more with the Duke of Bedford". The Special Branch described Godfrey in May 1940 as "an embittered and class-conscious proprietor of a chain of fish and chips shops...who is bitterly opposed to the war and violently anti-Jewish". On 20 May 1940, a meeting was called at the Dover Castle pub in Bethel Green to discuss forming the British National Party to be led by Godfrey and which was to be funded entirely by Bedford's wealth. At the meeting, Ben Stokes of the BUF who was acting as Godfrey's agent stated that a "monster meeting" would be held in London sometime later that spring under which the new British National Party would be unveiled. Stokes stated that the executive council of the new party would consist of the Duke of Bedford, the military historian General
J. F. C. Fuller, Captain
Bernard Acworth,
Lord Sempill, the writer
John Middleton Murry and
Lord Lymington. A MI5 report noted that every name on the list belonged to the F3 category, which MI5 defined as "terrorism, excluding Irish terrorism". The plan came to naught when Mosley insisted on being the leader of the new party as a condition of having the BUF join the British National Party while Godfrey continued to insist on his claim to be the leader and that Mosely should step aside. Leading figures were interned under
Defence Regulation 18B although Russell was not among their number. Russell's nobility helped to ensure that he avoided arrest along with other far-right leaning noblemen such as the
Lord Lymington, the
Duke of Buccleuch, the
Duke of Westminster, the
Earl of Mar,
Lord Brocket,
Lord Queenborough and others. His personal links to Foreign Secretary
Lord Halifax also helped to ensure his freedom. He wrote a series of letters to Halifax in the early days of the war expressing his admiration for Hitler and urging him to use his influence to bring the war to a swift conclusion. Bedford was, however, placed on the "Suspect List" by
MI5 as some within that group suspected that, in the event of a successful Nazi invasion of the UK, Russell might have ended up as Governor of the territory or even Prime Minister of a puppet government. Under the suspect list, Russell was to be arrested immediately without charge in the event of a German invasion as a potential traitor and collaborator. Beckett however was among those held, and Russell attempted to intervene on his behalf, assisting Beckett's common-law wife Anne Cutmore in a letter-writing campaign to secure his release. When Beckett was released Cutmore again asked Russell, by then Duke of Bedford, for help as they were penniless and he agreed to allow them to live in a cottage in the village of
Chenies, at the time entirely owned by the Duchy. He would continue to underwrite the Becketts until his death in 1953, even purchasing a large house in
Rickmansworth for the family's use in 1949. On 18 November 1941, speaking in the House of Commons, the Lord Chancellor,
Sir John Simon, noted that the duke was lucky to be British as he noted "If he was a German and was in Germany, and if he gave expression to the reverse opinion and denounced Hitler and all his works, and found excuses for Hitler's enemies", he would have been sent to a
concentration camp or executed. On 3 December 1941, Bedford took up his seat in the House of Lords, and immediately attracted attention for a series of speeches that condemned the Churchill government and the war. His speeches in the House of Lords were noted for their pro-
Axis tone as he blamed the war on "the attempt by the moneylending financers and big business monopolists to destroy the relatively sane financial system of the Axis powers". Bedford used his great wealth during the war to fund a number of fascist groups such as the British National Party and the
English Nationalists Association. The British historian Richard Griffiths noted that the groups that Lord Bedford funded were "remarkably unsuccessful", which led him to suggest that the way he poured millions of pounds into such groups reflected his convictions rather than any hope of power. In a letter to the pro-Nazi historian Sir
Arthur Bryant dated 5 July 1944, Bedford bemoaned that the Allies were winning the war. On 12 April 1945, he learned that American President
Franklin D. Roosevelt had died. In an obituary of Roosevelt published in
The Word magazine, Bedford gloated over his death and wrote that Roosevelt had been "an inveterate and unscrupulous war-monger and a tool of Big Finance". On 30 April 1945, he learned that Hitler had committed suicide. In an obituary of Hitler published in
Talking Picture News, Bedford wrote that "Hitler's virtues had caused his destruction to be ordinated by the financers of the City and Wall Street using the politicians as their puppets". In contrast to the gloating, cheering tone in his obituary of Roosevelt, there was a sad, dejected tone to his obituary of Hitler. On 8 May 1945, he responded to the news that Germany had surrendered by writing that the war was "a glorious victory" for "Soviet tyranny and Big Finance".
Post-war Russell re-established the BPP in 1945, the group having been in abeyance during the later years of the war. Party activity was limited and often restricted to irregular party functions hosted at the Becketts' house in Rickmansworth. Increasingly associated with the
anti-Semitism espoused by leading BPP figures, Russell stated that the figure of six million Jewish deaths in
the Holocaust was "grossly exaggerated" and argued that a figure of 300,000 concentration camp deaths, drawn from all those interned rather than just Jews, was more likely. He also denied that any concentration camp had a gas chamber, claiming they were just showers. ==Personal life==