The National Front and environmental politics, 1967–90

Abstract

Abstract The green entanglements of the inter-war British far right are well-documented. Martin Pugh has drawn attention to the predominantly rural, agricultural support base of the British Union of Fascists. We know that the aspiration to go ‘back to the land’ was deeply enmeshed with a politics of racial hygiene, which equated the urban with miscegenation and the rural with purity. However, in the post-war world, British far-right ecologism has typically been interpreted as a curious anomaly driven by cynical realpolitik. This article contends environmental themes as an intellectual staple of British fascism—running from the interwar far right, through the NF, and into the latter’s largest successor organization, the Flag Group. The Front’s preoccupation with the environment, and its racism, were mutually reinforcing, central pillars of its politics. Its environmentalism was alternately revolutionary and conservative, nostalgic and future oriented.