Talk:Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies

First Comment

The OMS (organization for the maintenance of supplies) was a mix of toffs and blacklegs. There is a section of Brideshead Revisited where Charles Ryder comes home from France and his artistic pursuits to "help with essential supplies". He joins 'Boy' Mulcaster on milk delivery. They race to Commercial Road when they hear of a prospective punch-up. My own father drove a bus in Edinburgh, transporting nurses and other 'essential' workers. He said that buses would often return without a single window intact. -- Unsigned April 2008

Novels are not a WP:RS on history, as they are liable to be written with point of view. Furthermore, it is a common part of the novelist's armoury to exaggerate the facts. Peterkingiron (talk) 12:50, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

POV issues

This article may be guilty of expressing a left-wing point of view on the subject. I have come to this view , after considering the references to Fascists. The article, British Fascists says that its members "were not however permitted to join the government's official Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (set up to mobilise a non-striking workforce) without first relinquishing Fascism. As a result a further split occurred as a number of members, calling themselves the Loyalists and led by former BF President Brigadier-General R.B.D. Blakeney, did just that." The organisation was set up by the Home Secretary. This seems to have been because, the Prime Minister had concluded that the state was not ready to face a General Strike at the Beginning of August 1925, at least partly because it could not mobilise volunteers without declaring a State of Emergency (Renishaw, General Strike (1975), 121-4). It looks to me as if the whole thing was set up under government auspices, but at arms' length from the government. Since it was intended to oppose union action, it was innevitably right wing, but that does not make it fascist, even if the British Fascists may have tried to infiltrate it. I am not an expert on this period and would like to see other comments before altering this article or that on OMS. Peterkingiron (talk) 12:50, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

 Done I have researched the subject, though perhaps perhaps not looked at as much literature on fascism as might be desirable. I have not looked at Dorrill or Perkins, and wonder whether these books may not be expressing something less that a NPOV on the subject, or may be confusing what the British Fascists would have liked to have done with what they were in fact able to do. Peterkingiron (talk) 15:21, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Dorrill is a senior lecturer at Huddersfield University and Perkins is a veteran journalist with the BBC and a number of British newspapers. Their books are WP:RS defined. Neither book, nor this article, claims that the OMS were fascist, this article merely including the claims made by the CPGB and the Daily Express as it would be remiss to ignore these. The British Fascists article on here (which is mostly my work from a number of years ago) is woefully incomplete and overhauling it has been on my to do pile for a while. Note that in the 1920s the group was not, despite its name, fascist in the conventional ideological sense but has rather more in common with the right of the Conservative Party. It would be the early 1930s before it fully took on fascist ideology and by that point the group was on its last legs anyway. But I will make significant edits to that article in the next few days so bear with me on that one. Keresaspa (talk) 21:00, 7 February 2012 (UTC)