The British Extreme Right and Northern Ireland

Abstract

In the late 1960s, the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland began. Most of the British extreme right had just come together to form the National Front (NF) and the new organization's opposition to Irish Republicanism and defence of the retention of Northern Ireland within the Union quickly became entangled with support for loyalist paramilitary organizations. This article concentrates on the period from 1969 to the beginning of the 1990s, when the NF, having split into rival factions, ceased to be the dominant group for Britain's ‘racial nationalists’. Towards the end of the article, we turn our attention to the NF's most important splinter, the British National Party, from its emergence in the early 1980s until after its entry into the European Parliament in the early twenty-first century. British extreme rightists have not taken the same stance on Northern Ireland, and the article will contrast their frequent support for Ulster's retention within the Union with the attraction of one faction of the NF for Ulster independence and, most unexpectedly, the support of some British extreme rightists for a United Ireland.