Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985

by Richard C. Thurlow

Tracing its origins from shortly after the World War I, this book presents a portrait of fascism in the 1930s. It reassesses Mosley's career, describes the reasons for internment in 1940 and the effect it had on leading fascists, exposes the famous Britons who subscribed to fascism, reveals the ominous re-emergence of the tradition after 1945, and explains its remarkable persistence into the l980s.

Genres: History, Politics

334 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1987

Reviews

[John Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Contents:

Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations – mega useful (egs BF = British Fascisti/British Fascists; NL = Nordic League; WUNS = World Union of National Socialists...many more, some more obvious than others)
Introduction
1. The Origins of British Fascism 1890-1918
2. The British Fascists and the ‘Jew Wise’ 1918-1939
3. The BUF and British Society 1932-1939
4. The Boys in Black 1932-1939
5. The Mutiny against Destiny
6. The Hitler Fan Club
7. Internment, 1939-1945
8. New Wine for Old Bottles 1945-1960
9. National Socialists and Racial Populists, 1960-1967
10. The Grand Synthesis, 1967-1985
11. Terminal Decline?
Conclusion: The Sawdust Caesars
Bibliographical Note
Index

3.5*

My copy is the revised one of 1998 and it needs updating.

This is an interesting, informative read, fairly objective and balanced (in my opinion). I was especially interested in the inter-war (WW2) period and then 1939-45. Mosley is clearly the stand out character and I was very interested to read about him and will read more later. I had not realised that he had served in government (Labour) 1929-30, his admiration for Lloyd George, and Mosley’s commitment to reducing unemployment, also his distinguished service in WW1. Consigned to the political wilderness after resigning from the Labour Party and outside the political mainstream he would ultimately find himself ‘beyond the pale’. This seems a waste of obvious talent. Plenty of mistakes were made in the political wilderness and his judgement of people was faulty on more than one occasion. He was surrounded by a very motley crew, some more motley than others. Interesting the range of social backgrounds within British Fascism. This was particularly interesting when it came to internment; the higher the social ranking the less likely to be interned (there’s a surprise!) or for long periods.

The internment of many appears unjustified and it is pertinent that of the surviving files a great number have still to be released. There is a suggestion at least that internment hardened attitudes and beliefs and honed extreme views.

The squabbling amongst the nationalist factions – National Front, BNP, BM et al post 1945 and the way that the British Public had been conditioned to perceive the atrocities committed by the losing side in WW2, ensured that any electoral success in local and national elections was kept to a minimum.

I’ve docked half a star as I found my attention wandering at times...

[Harry McDonald · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is... bizarrely sympathetic to the plight of the fascists. Which I was not expecting. I also wish Thurlow had spent more time on the 1980s, even as he dismissed it as a non-event.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as an e-book, through the service “ebrary,” which affected the way in which I processed and experienced it. Because it had footnotes, rather than endnotes, I was not hampered by the difficulty of checking other pages while reading an e-book, at least. The book is a revised edition of an important 1985 book, updated to account for developments at the end of the twentieth century, which seems to hold up well 13 years later. It is an extremely useful overview of an authoritarian political minority in a liberal democratic society, which supplements (and often confirms) the conclusions in Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale: Memoirs of Sir Oswald Mosley and Family/2 Volumes in 1. It goes beyond Oswald Mosley, however, to explore the full spectrum of groups and individuals who have identified as fascists, or at least flirted with that identification.

Fascism in Britain is undeniably a marginal movement, which Thurlow makes clear from the outset. Election results for fascist or fascist-sympathetic candidates in Britain are generally well below 3%, and even in the few local elections in which better results have been gained, fascist parties have been unable to mobilize consistent support. Thurlow argues, however, that British fascism remains interesting to the researcher, in part because it “produced the most coherent and developed programme of any fascist movement” in its adversity during the 1930s and 40s. He links this with Roger Griffin’s concept of generic fascism as an ideological expression, which, if applicable, surely argues for the examination of coherently articulated fascism. Thurlow also finds the inherent contradictions of Mosley, the BUF, and British Fascism to be instructive – a man whose own impatience for getting things done made him ineffective, a militant movement which claimed to be anti-war, a patriotic movement inspired from abroad, a modern fascism which denies its fascist origins. These tensions provide the questions Thurlow examines.

Perhaps the most interesting contradictions involve the extra-legal detention of fascists during the Second World War by the British Government. Not only did this cause the government to attack freedom in the name of defending it, but it put the fascists in the position of objecting to the infringement of the rights of citizens for security purposes, when this is what they themselves had advocated with regard to Communists and Jews. The internment was a genuinely traumatic experience for most of them, and it did color the attitudes and concerns of postwar fascism, but Thurlow finds it hard to see it as a terrible human tragedy in light of the horrors of the war in general.

The book is generally excellent, but not without a few problems. One problem with this book was a somewhat cavalier handling of citations. I noted six instances in which the lack of a citation weakened his argument. These include, for example, a suggestion that the Labour Party put pressure on the Government to intern Fascists as a condition for participation in the governing coalition, in connection with “[t]he influence of communists in the labour force” after 1940. This seems to ignore the collapse of the Popular Front, with a concomitent reduction in communist influence, after the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and the shift in Comintern policy towards avoiding confrontation with fascism after this time. It is possible that the CPGB ignored the party line, or that the situation was different in Britain than in other countries, but this needed some kind of documentary support.

In connection with this, another area I was sometimes disappointed in was Thurlow’s lack of follow-up about related extremist movements, especially in the United States. For example, his coverage of George Lincoln Rockwell’s leadership of the World Union of National Socialists contains a tantalizing suggestion. He claims that when John Tyndall defected from WUNS in 1964, he maintained contact with an anti-Rockwell American group called “White Power,” and the National States Rights Party. To a student of American fascism, this is fascinating, because it is generally understood that Rockwell himself invented the phrase “White Power” in his most successful political period, during the protests over integrated housing in Chicago in 1966. If there was another American group, possibly composed of defectors from the American Nazi Party, using this name at an earlier time, it would have been interesting to know more about it, but the only source is an “open letter” held in “Searchlight Files.” Searchlight is an anti-fascist newsletter, but it is unclear from Thurlow’s bibliography what this reference points to.

These are relatively minor quibbles, however, about a book which gives a masterful narrative on a fascinating subject. Thurlow’s work is overall both enjoyable and informative, and stands as one of the great studies on the subject of fascism in the world today.

[Madeleine Herkes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Informative but dry. Partly because Britain's active fascists have been surprisingly few over the period covered, usually numbering fewer than 10,000. The Second World War, the internment of leading fascists and the revelation that they had been funded through the 1930s by Mussolini increased the British public's distaste for such politics causing fascism's proponents to decline to the low numbers from which it has not yet recovered (and hopefully never will).

[Jimmy]

Thurlow and me are on the same page when it comes to BUF anti-Semitism. He does miss stuff out, but I guess he couldn't go too mad in a general book on the far right in Britain.