History
This chapter reflects on the ways state and society in Britain have had both a positive and a negative impact on curbing the extreme right. It reflects on how policies around immigration have helped normalise extreme right prejudices, and also comments on the ways the state has limited the political space for extreme right activism, including the Prevent Agenda. While the state is important, it also highlights the ongoing role of Britain’s diverse civil society in responding to the issues posed by the extreme right. It identifies antifascist and related antiracist traditions, set across a range of important organisations, and reflects on how solutions empowering communities have been successful in changing attitudes. Finally, it argues that developing a multicultural liberal democracy should be an important animating factor for those wanting to limit the impact of the extreme right.
This chapter explores the types of people drawn to extreme right activism, and stresses there is no single class or type of person the movement appeals to. Rather, it suggests the extreme right offers an alternate community bound by an emotional regime in which a diverse range of people with shared grievances can feel connected to a wider community of activism. It draws on ethnographic analyses of extreme right groups, including the National Front, the British National Party and the English Defence League. It also argues that, while these activists demonstrate genuine political concerns that should be listened to, it is highly problematic to present them as reflective of the communities they are active in. The extreme right’s activists are outliers, not typical of their communities.
This chapter examines the ways violence and the extreme right have often been intertwined. It reflects on the history of extreme right violence, and how this has changed over time, and also the ways the threats from lone actors have grown. It explored the idea of brakes on violence that can restrict aggression from groups, and stresses that fringe activists not only act violently in ways that are inspired by the wider movement, but also that elements of the wider movement celebrate these attacks. As such the extreme right fosters a potent ecosystem steeped in justifications of violence, and while groups tend not to direct aggression, they help sustain an environment likely to produce unpredictable violent attacks. Finally, it documents the wide range of violent attacks from the British extreme right since the 1990s.
The first political organisation in Britain openly to proclaim itself to be a fascist party was founded on 6 May 1923 by the then 28-yearold Rotha Lintorn-Orman. The fledgling fascist party would refer to itself as the British Fascisti during its first year of life, an indication of its founder's admiration for Mussolini's new fascist experiment in Italy. Most historians of the BF agree that, from its formation until 1926, there was very little evidence of fascism in its ideology or programme. The IFL had a relatively coherent ideology and was more an overtly fascist party than most of its native contemporaries, including the British Fascisti. Its doctrine of Nordic supremacy and racial anti-semitism provided the IFL with much of its ideological coherence. Most historians of British fascism have discounted the significance of the IFL.
This book provides a clear and accessible guide to the essential features of interwar British fascism. It focuses on the various fascist parties, fascist personalities and fascist ideologies. The book also looks at British culture and develops the knowledge of undergraduate students by providing a solid source of background material on this important area of interwar British history. The focus on fascist culture throws new light on the character of native fascism and suggests a potentially rich vein of new enquiry for scholars of British fascism. The book considers the membership strength of Britain's interwar fascist parties. The ideas of racial Social-Darwinism influenced British fascism in a number of ways. To begin with, hereditarian ideas and biological determinist models contributed to the emergence of racial theories of anti-semitism. The anti-semitism of the Imperial Fascist League was of a very different order from that of the British fascism. Moreover, to Britain's fascists, artistic modernism, with its creative use of distortion, disintegrative images and general disdain for the traditional discipline of the art form, made a virtue of deformity. The search to uncover the anti-liberal and anti-capitalist pre-fascist lineage would become a highly subjective exercise in invention and take the fascists on an imaginative journey deep into the British past.
This chapter describes a number of points that are in need of clarification. Firstly, there is no necessary or natural correlation between fascism and anti-semitism. Secondly, the analyst and student of fascist anti-semitism needs to be alive to the fact that there are numerous strains of the antisemitic virus, ranging from the common-or-garden anti-Semitism to the more virulent racial-biological kind with its potentially genocidal implications. Thirdly, a tradition of anti-semitism existed in Britain long before the advent of domestic fascism, much of it potent and highly articulate, as Colin Holmes's admirable Anti-Semitism in British Society, from 1876 to 1939 demonstrated. The anti-semitism of the Imperial Fascist League was of a very different order from that of the BF. The IFL advocated a doctrine of racial anti-semitism and Nordic supremacy that would set it apart from the great majority of its contemporaries on the interwar fascist fringe.
Like the majority of the interwar fascist parties, both in Britain and on the continent, the British Union of Fascists came to prominence on the back of a domestic internal crisis. The BUF was very much the child of the economic crisis from 1929 to 1931, while its subsequent political life unfolded against the backdrop of the trade depression that came after it. The BUF sought to apply corporate principles to virtually all the key sectors of industrial life. When contemplating the reasons for the BUF's ultimate political failure during the 1930s, Benewick Benewick suggested that it was due to its alienation from the British political culture. The BUF's attempts to refute philosophical Marxism also bore the mark of Nietzsche's insights on the 'will-to-power' and the 'superman'.
In the fascist mind Bloomsbury 'intellectualism', together with changing trends in leisure and sexual behavior were decadent phenomena which heralded the dissolution of culture. However, in the view of many of Britain's fascists between the wars, the supreme paradigm of decadence and the ultimate symbol of the destruction of culture in the modern age was the city. Consistent with its fascist ideology, however, its views on the countryside were of an even more extreme kind. In fascist ideology, particularly that of the 'mature' Mosleyite variety, 'true' culture was indelibly bound up with the countryside and the soil. Apprehension about the machine and the machine age was prevalent in British fascist discourse. Fascist unease about the machine, industrialisation and mass production was not only shaped by perceptions of the Industrial Revolution, Fordist industrial capitalism and Bolshevik productivism.
Culture was at the centre of the fascist political project in interwar Britain. British fascism was a cultural phenomenon as much as it was a movement for political or economic change. With regard to the former, British fascist culture developed within the broad European-wide cultural critique of liberal rationalism and positivism that originated in the 1890s, and was thus an organic element of it. Culture was imagined in a number of ways by British fascists. Indeed, like fascism and its ideology, it did not project a single uniform identity. True culture, for the fascists was meant to convey a sense of the eternal and enduring. Fascist culture was meant to convey and reinforce the idea of a harmoniously integrated society, united in its pursuit of prescribed political goals.
The origins of British fascism can be traced to a range of intellectual currents and developments that germinated in the period prior to 1914. Domestic fascism also grew out of the traumatic experience of the Great War. The early postwar years, however, would prove to be just as crucial for the emergence of a native fascism. In broad outline it is possible to detect traces of an incipient fascism of the type of genus that characterised the fully matured variety of the later 1920s. This chapter addresses the question of the relative importance of the early postwar organisational and publicistic forms to the emergence of 1920s fascism. Although it is vital not to underestimate the significance of the pre-fascist groups for the fascist parties that came after them, therefore, we should not forget that each, in the main, belonged to a different organisational and ideological realm.