British Fascism Research Articles

‘Wake Up—John’

Abstract This article examines the published literatures of the British proto-fascist group the British Fascists (BF). It argues that, while failing to develop a ‘fully-fledged’ fascist ideology, the organisation’s materials fostered an emotionology, or instructions on how to think and feel, that contained some fascist qualities, especially profound anxieties over the nation facing an existential threat. It draws on conceptual framings from the history of emotions to assess how the BF promoted a variegated range of views, united by deep worry and fear over Communism and profound concern over its potential to influence the future of Britain and its empire, as well as corrupting a future generation through influencing the minds of children. While the BF’s solutions often lacked the fully palingenetic vision typical of fascists, the BF helped to foster a fascist-style emotional refuge and developed this through ideological instruction as well as providing social opportunities and in principle empowerment. Finally, it concludes that the study of such emotionologies allows for deeper consideration of the overlapping political spaces of the right and processes of fascistisation.

The National Front and environmental politics, 1967–90

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.

Tudor Ghosts in Black Shirts: The British Union of Fascists, Nazi Germany and the Quest for Musical Greatness in Britain

Abstract The United Kingdom has for centuries suffered the reputation of an ‘unmusical nation’ that could not produce a great composer or compete with the rich musical cultures of Germany, Italy or Russia. In the 1930s, members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) who worked in the musical professions began to challenge and reject this long-standing stereotype. These self-described Blackshirts hoped to achieve a ‘rebirth’ of British classical music under the leadership of Oswald Mosley and expel racially impure ‘alien’ performers from Britain’s houses of culture. As British fascists conceived and debated these plans, the example of Nazi Germany loomed large in their imaginations. BUF Blackshirts professed admiration for Joseph Goebbels’s campaigns against ‘degenerate’ music and imitated the Nazi Party’s völkisch criticisms of jazz, modern art and consumerism. Especially intriguing to Mosley’s followers was the Nazi cult of Richard Wagner, which offered a compelling illustration of how a hypothetical fascist Britain might revere a historical composer as an emblem of racial nationalism. The Third Reich’s glorification of Wagner prompted debate within the BUF about which figure, or figures, could fulfil such a role in Britain, with two schools of thought predominating: either the late Victorian generation of composers or the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tudor masters. If Nazi cultural policy was a source of inspiration for British fascists, it was equally one of intimidation and self-doubt, reviving insecurities that the British people were a ‘musically inferior race’ unable to produce a composer rivalling Wagner’s genius.

Radio Caledonia: Scottish Nationalism and Nazi Radio Propaganda, 1940–1942

In June 1940, from somewhere in Scotland, a radio station named Radio Caledonia began to broadcast Scottish nationalist, anti-government and anti-war propaganda to Britain, on behalf of an organisation called the Scottish Peace Front. Its objective was to bring about Scotland's exit from the war, an end to the capitalist system, and the creation of an independent, socialist Scotland. The speaker and scriptwriter behind Radio Caledonia was Donald Grant, a Scot, since dubbed Scotland's Lord Haw-Haw. But Radio Caledonia was only superficially a Scottish nationalist station. In reality, the Scottish Peace Front was an entirely fictitious group, and Radio Caledonia's programmes were made in and broadcast from Berlin under the direction of Joseph Goebbels, as one element of his propaganda campaign against Britain. Radio Caledonia, like other similar ‘secret stations’ commissioned by Goebbels, was conceived of by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, and its broadcasts written and produced by British renegades. This paper looks at Grant's background and political beliefs, the Nazi propaganda organisation within which he worked in Berlin, and the broadcast output of Radio Caledonia. It concludes that far from being an authentically nationalist or socialist enterprise, Radio Caledonia was devised by German Nazis and British fascists as a tool to achieve their shared aim of bringing about an end to Britain's involvement in the war.

British Society in the reflection of the press: fascist sentiments among the World War I veterans in the 1930s

Importance. The topic of the threat of fascist ideas and movements at the present stage is increasingly being brought up in the framework of public and scientific discussions. The coverage of this problem of the history of Great Britain in the 1930s is connected with the need to study the development of the features of fascism in society and in the society of veterans of the World War I. The novelty of the work is to consider the strengthening of the right-wing sentiments of part of the community of British war veterans in the 1930s, while fascism in Great Britain has been studied most widely by historical science in relation to political organizations and parties. Revealing the connection of veterans with the fascist movement will reveal the essence of the state ideology and the contradiction in public sentiment.Materials and Methods. Within the framework of a historical and systematic approach, the Fascist movement in Great Britain was considered as one of the features of the development of public sentiment. The problem of fascization of British society was the duality of political attitudes. On the one hand, representatives of British fascism were marginals, and on the other, prominent figures of the largest veterans’ organization, the British Legion, were the exponents of the ideas of fascism. Using the prosopographic method, the social and political activities of the World War I veterans were investigated.Results and Discussion. Based on the analysis of the development of Great Britain in the 1930s, the specifics of public sentiment are described. The veteran movement in the country adhered to various ideologies. By the mid-1930s, opinions arose among veteran leaders about the possibility of uniting with the fascists. During this period, the veterans of the World War I themselves, with the assistance of politicians and the aristocracy, as well as the support of capitalist circles, created right-wing radical organizations that openly adopted nationalist, anti-Semitic, and racist positions. The possibility of veterans coming under the influence of fascist organizations actually existed, given the numerous contacts and joint activities both within the UK itself and with foreign organizations and politicians (in particular, with the leaders of the Third Reich and Italy).Conclusion. Prominent figures of the veteran movement (in particular, the British Legion) are responsible for the development of fascism in the UK and have contributed to the policy of appeasing the aggressor. Their activities in the process of unleashing the World War II were derived from the prevailing socio-economic system. In the 1930s, veterans and their leaders became instruments and sometimes representatives of the interests of competing groups of the economically dominant class in Great Britain. Dissatisfaction with the policies of the British governments and the rise of fascist sentiment was reflected in social protest and criticism in the press.

‘We are not the Last of Yesterday but the First of Tomorrow’: Futural Nostalgia and the Emotionology of Postwar British Fascists

Drawing on both the history of emotions and study of radicalised temporalities in fascist cultures, this article defines and explores variants of ‘futural nostalgia’ in British fascist discourses from the 1940s to the present day. It defines ‘futural nostalgia’ as a specific type of nostalgia that is both backward looking and forward focused: it looks to the past to evoke a sense of rooted identity, community and ontological security that underpins myriad critiques of the present day as in crisis; it looks forwards in time to provide a vision of an alternate future based on its idealizations of the past. After conceptualizing this term, it explores forms of postwar British fascism that evoke this trope. Starting with Oswald Mosley and the Union Movement, the article examines variants of futural nostalgia in the emotionology of postwar British fascism, including in the National Front, Blood & Honour, the British Movement, the British National Party and National Action. It concludes by suggesting futural nostalgia is an extreme variant of far-right nostalgia, and further exploration of the phenomenon could help establish family relationships between the fascist and populist far right.

“Peace for our Time”: a Uchronian Approach to British Fascism in Jo Walton’s "Farthing"

This paper draws on a uchronian framework to analyse Jo Walton’s Farthing (2006) as a suitable example of a counterfactual Britain in the aftermath of an effective peace agreement with Nazi Germany. The following pages will attempt to intertwine the purely historical comment on the intricacies that underlay the rise of fascism in the country with the allohistorical turns that ignite the plot of the novel and its point of divergence, which brings about the appointment of a fascist militant as Prime Minister and the outburst of a violent antisemitic wave. The study of this novel will be informed by a wide array of critics and historians like Amy Ramson, Karen Hellekson, Richard Thurlow or Nigel Copsey, among others, whose work contributes to tracing significant parallelisms between the historical outcome and the uchronian alternatives Walton explores in her work

‘Breeders for race and nation’: gender, sexuality and fecundity in post-war British fascist discourse

ABSTRACT Burnett and Richardson’s paper has two related aims. First, it develops a model of how gender is articulated within fascist and other far-right discourses based on a review of the relevant scholarship. This model is presented in the first section. Researchers have in the past suggested a gap, or even a wilful ignorance, of gender in studies of the far right, and claimed that the topic is ‘neglected’ and ‘under-researched’. This gap is to some extent held open by disciplinary, historical and definitional boundaries that work fractally to split inquiry. Burnett and Richardson have thus read the literature in a kaleidoscopic fashion, including analysis across different historical periods and country contexts, to examine how gender surfaces in various ‘fascist’ discourses. This approach covered psychoanalytical, discourse analytical, historical, art historical, literary, political and anthropological approaches to gender and fascism. The second aim of the paper is to show how the model proposed is brought into relief in a particular country context: that of the United Kingdom since the Second World War. Gender in post-war British fascism has been the subject of several important studies, though none of them have specifically traced the textual journey of key ideas and themes related to gender in mediatized far-right discourse. Building on a discourse-historical analytic approach to the development of fascist politics of this period, Burnett and Richardson argue that paying attention to gender in fascist discourse is a useful lens through which to analyse the local and historical contingencies that make one fascist discursive formation differ from another.

Turn Again, Fascist Studies: New Perspectives on British Fascism.

Turn Again, Fascist Studies: New Perspectives on British Fascism.

Ryan Shaffer, Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism; Basingstoke

Ryan Shaffer, <i>Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism; Basingstoke</i>

Global Fascism?

Abstract In the early 1980s, British fascism was reeling from the failure of the National Front (NF) to build on the brief swells of support it attracted in the 1970s through its crude ethnic populism. Enter a group of young radicals who, via a series of splits, gained control of the party and pushed it in a startlingly new direction. As the decade wore on these radicals embraced ideas that would have confused or even horrified their (essentially neo-Nazi) predecessors, promoting a global “Third Way” vision that borrowed heavily first from esoteric continental influences and then, increasingly, from radical Islamic ideologues like Louis Farrakhan and Muammar Qathafi. This article explains how this unusual variant of neofascism emerged in the political context of the 1980s and interrogates its transnational credentials in order to understand the extent and sincerity of this reinvention, so as to find the Third Way NF an appropriate place in the history of contemporary fascism(s).

Thinking Imperially: The British Fascisti and the Politics of Empire, 1923-35.

This article sets out to examine what fascism actually meant to its earliest British adherents focusing on Britain's first self-proclaimed fascist group, the British Fascisti (BF). Drawing on material from the BF's newspapers, the popular press, and archival sources, it argues that its members conceived of British fascism as an imperial solution to a crisis imagined in imperial terms. They envisioned British fascism in practice as the metropolitan extension of repressive imperial violence-that is, the ability to take whatever steps deemed necessary to safeguard the law, order, and the status quo, whether on the streets of Britain or those of the Punjab. In this sense, the article maintains, the BF formed part of a broader British political tradition, one that saw the 'ethos' of Empire as a means of averting Britain's decline. It begins by introducing the BF and their ideology, moving to a discussion of how the Jewish-Bolshevik plot against the British Empire imagined by BF members reflected the colonial experiences of their leading personnel. It then interrogates the BF's proposed antidote to this anti-imperial conspiracy. By emulating the qualities and behaviour of Britain's imperial heroes and living an 'imperial' way of life, they hoped to restore Britain to greatness. It concludes with a call for further research into the overlapping histories of British fascism and the British Empire.

Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism

Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism

Ryan Shaffer. Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 351. $109.00 (cloth).

Ryan Shaffer. Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 351. $109.00 (cloth). - Volume 59 Issue 1

Ryan Shaffer, Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism

Ryan Shaffer, <i>Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism</i>

Foreign friends and British fascism: understanding the American Friends of the British National Party

ABSTRACTThis article explores the first British National Party effort to establish a branch in a foreign country with the purpose of furthering political objectives in Great Britain. Specifically, it examines the American Friends of the British National Party by exploring its origins and activities as well as assessing its impact on contemporary British fascism. Using author interviews, United States government documents, tax returns and access to scarce publications, it finds the American Friends was instrumental in establishing social links across the Atlantic and raising key individuals’ profiles even though its financial contributions and actual membership were marginal.

British fascism, fascist culture, British culture

ABSTRACTIn reading British fascism as a cultural phenomenon, historians have started to chart the cultural products and visions of British fascists during the interwar and post-war periods. Such analysis has tended to focus on fascists’ discourse on culture (particularly the ways that they position liberalism and modernism as degenerate), or on the cultural texts of fascists/fascism in the form of, inter alia, literature, music, dress and art. George Mosse goes as far as to argue that it is only through a cultural interpretation of fascism that we can come to understand the movement ‘from the inside out’. However, the notion of fascist culture is contentious, and not simply because the meanings of both ‘fascism’ and ‘culture’ are highly contested. Eschewing Mosse’s invitation to interpret fascism as culture, Richardson nevertheless argues that ‘the cultural’ can be understood as one approach to fascism. In this article, Richardson discusses six ways into a critical cultural analysis of the continuing presence of fascist political projects, focusing in particular on the British variant.

Music, Youth and International Links in Post‐War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism. By Ryan Shaffer. Palgrave Macmillan. 2017. x + 351pp. £56.99.

Music, Youth and International Links in Post‐War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism. By Ryan Shaffer. Palgrave Macmillan. 2017. x + 351pp. £56.99.

Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism by Ryan Shaffer

Reviewed by: Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism by Ryan Shaffer Roland Clark Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism. By Ryan Shaffer. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. x + 354 pp. Cloth $119.99, e-book $89. Fascism is not what it used to be. Ryan Shaffer’s study of the history of the National Front (NF) and the British National Party (BNP) tells the story of how extremist right-wing parties in Britain evolved beyond their association with Oswald Mosley and Adolf Hitler, embraced skinhead music and culture, and then sought “respectability” and seats in the European Parliament. Shaffer is not the first historian to examine these movements. His basic narrative will be familiar to readers of historians of the NF, such as Stan Taylor and Nigel Fielding, and the BNP, like Nigel Copsey, Alan Sykes, Matthew J. Goodwin, and Nick Lowles. What is new in Shaffer’s book is his emphasis on how music and youth culture shaped both movements. Shaffer argues that skinhead music rejuvenated a flagging British extremism in the late 1970s, influencing and connecting with right-wing movements throughout the world. He shows how movement leaders were consistently wary of the reputations young people were gaining for them and that they worked hard to distance themselves from the skinhead label while simultaneously cultivating the international connections music and youth culture had facilitated. The chapter on NF youth and music lies at the heart of the book and is where Shaffer carries out his most original analysis. Shaffer argues that NF youth adopted the strategies and sounds of anti-fascist groups such as the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, which used punk rock to mobilize people against right-wing extremism. Eddy Morrison and other extremists in Leeds began Rock Against Communism in 1978, out of which emerged a number of fanzines and resulted in the radicalization of internationally successful Oi! bands such as Skrewdriver. Given the centrality of music to the book, Shaffer pays remarkably little attention to the music or lyrics of these bands, focusing [End Page 317] instead on how NF and BNP leaders instrumentalized the music for political purposes. Skinhead music brought the NF international attention, and in turn NF leaders began collaborating with extremists in Italy during the 1980s as well as the Nation of Islam and Muammar Gaddafi. More “traditional” British voters were not comfortable with this shift toward internationalism, which Shaffer argues eventually destroyed the NF. Disillusioned by factionalism within the NF, many leading activists followed John Tyndall into the BNP during the 1980s, where they continued hooliganism and youth activism through related groups such as Blood & Honour and Combat 18. Both Tyndall and his successor, Nick Griffin, nonetheless tried to minimize youth influence on the movement because they felt that it limited the BNP’s ability to contest elections. One strength of Shaffer’s book is the extensive interviews he carried out with NF and BNP leaders, including Phil Andrews, Richard Edmonds, Nick Griffin, Martin Webster, and others. Shaffer also draws heavily on rare sources—illegal magazines, albums, and videos that activists have shared with him, allowing him to document factionalism and nuanced changes in policy with detailed footnotes. Throughout the book, Shaffer gives considerable space to the opinions and strategies of NF and BNP leaders without seeking to explain their oscillating popularity with British voters. He tells us why the leaders thought that their movements were winning or losing, not why he thinks it happened. The result is a study of movements and their strategic choices rather than an explanation for the success or failure of the extreme right in Britain, which would have involved discussing mainstream politics and would have required quite a different research agenda. Despite describing their spread into youth culture and internationally, Shaffer is careful not to give the impression that the NF and the BNP were large-scale or influential movements. On the contrary, he highlights the amateurism and posturing that have characterized their leadership and policies over the past fifty years. He presents the BNP’s brief period of popularity between 2005 and 2009 as...

Pan-European thought in British fascism: the International Third Position and the Alliance for Peace and Freedom

ABSTRACTShaffer’s article explores pan-Europeanism in post-war British fascism by examining the International Third Position (ITP) and the Alliance for Peace and Freedom (APF). More marginal than the National Front and the British National Party, these groups never sought electoral influence or attracted a noteworthy membership. However, the ITP and the APF served as an important expression of extremist thought after the National Front and British National Party suffered from declining support. Both notably involved Nick Griffin and Roberto Fiore—who played significant roles in post-war fascism—although their involvement has not been explored in detail. By examining their activities, Shaffer argues that the pan-Europeanism of the ITP and the APF represented an evolution of British fascism that focused on foreign audiences and non-electoral goals. Despite containing elements of pan-Europeanist thought that existed in the NF and the BNP, they sought a purer and more exclusive objective with a strictly international focus.