What Actually Happened: Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1918–51

Abstract

Even before there were organised fascists in Britain, there were individuals who articulated ideas which were close to the ideas of fascism. The extreme wing of the Conservative Party, the so-called Radical Right, was anti-socialist and ultra-imperialist. Any number of respectable thinkers flirted with anti-Semitism or demagogic National Socialism. A list of such precursor-fascists would include Hilaire Belloc, Lord Milner, G. K. Chesterton, Joseph Chamberlain and Edward Carson.1 Most of these, however, looked to the traditional elites and to the Conservative Party as the means to protect the property of the rich. If they organised outside the Conservative Party they did so as individuals, around newspapers such as The Patriot and The Morning Post, or in pressure groups including the Parliamentary Alien Immigration Committee, the Tariff Reform League, the Anti-Socialist Union, the National League for Clean Government and the British Empire Union (BEU).2 At times these pressure groups did act as proto-fascist parties, such as during the organised campaign against Jewish immigration between 1901 and 1906. Even then, however, these were campaigns and not parties. The leaders of the groups came from within the establishment, they were usually rich and often Conservative MPs. The British Brothers’ League, for example, was founded by Tories, including William Stanley Shaw, Howard Vincent and Major William Evans- Gordon MP.3 There was not yet any fascist radicalism or anti-capitalism, not even at the level of rhetoric. So far these right-wing individuals were radical Tories, not fascists.