Pride in prejudice: Understanding Britain's extreme right 9781526156730

Table of contents :
Front matter
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction
Roots
Reinventions
Modernisations
Leadership
Supporters
Gendered activism
Online activists
Violence
State and society responses
Conclusions
People
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Pride in prejudice

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Pride in prejudice

Understanding Britain’s extreme right Paul Jackson

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Paul Jackson 2022

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The right of Paul Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 5672 3 paperback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Introduction 1 Roots 2 Reinventions 3 Modernisations 4 Leadership 5 Supporters 6 Gendered activism 7 Online activists 8 Violence 9 State and society responses Conclusions

1 13 32 54 78 97 114 131 149 171 193

People Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

200 207 213 228 237

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Introduction

In the first months of the coronavirus crisis, extreme right groups and figures in Britain were quick to seize on the emerging sense of panic to make a case for their confrontational brand of politics. Some called for the rekindling of the ‘Best of British’, in characteristically divisive ways. In March 2020, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon uploaded a video of himself remonstrating with a group of young men of colour, whom he alleged had coughed at a white couple. He explained that the incident showed that the country’s youth had lost its way and needed to rediscover British spirit during the crisis.1 Others emphasised restoring a sense of community. Britain First uploaded videos of its activists feeding the homeless during lockdown,2 while the British National Party provided a support helpline for its dwindling band of followers,3 and Patriotic Alternative developed an alternate online curriculum for home schooling.4 Conspiracy theories also quickly grew around the implications of the virus and the vaccine, rekindling antisemitic tropes for a new context. Others attacked lockdowns. Nick Griffin’s Twitter account, with over 35,000 followers, argued the restrictions were more damaging than the virus, that people should resist limitations on their freedom, and emergency controls were a power grab by political elites and 1

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Introduction

large corporations.5 Others emphasised the need for new attitudes to public health, though in typically provocative ways. The British Movement’s Telegram page, for example, included a meme depicting the Nazi salute as the most hygienic form of greeting. While much of this racist extreme right culture has remained on the margins of British society, as is the way with the extreme right’s discourses, some of its messages also blur and blend into more prevalent criticisms of politics and society found in mainstream debate and discussion. Moreover, such episodes underscore clearly the ways the extreme right sees opportunities in a human catastrophe and can quickly adapt to make itself appear relevant to changing situations. Focusing attention on the extreme right raises some basic questions. What exactly is the ‘extreme right’? Where has it come from and what drives it? Is it growing? Is it a danger? Why are people drawn to such divisive, racist groups? And are violent attacks carried out by someone influenced by extreme right ideas a form of terrorism? To address such questions, and to understand the extreme right today, it is important to recognise that its current form is rooted in a longstanding culture of political extremism. Awareness of this history is vital for dissecting the contemporary situation. Appreciation of this history also helps reveal how the extreme right is far from a singular entity. What can also often be called the far right or fascism is actually a highly variegated politicised counterculture, one generated by multiple groups and individuals that collectively contribute to an ever-​changing, and highly diverse, culture. Moreover, what this book will generalise as Britain’s extreme right movement is usually marginalised and is not, in itself, primarily a danger to liberal democracy. However, its influence is significant. It does pose an ongoing threat to those it targets, most typically people of colour and women, as well as the vulnerable people it draws into its orbit. As this movement 2

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threatens people, and at times even poses a risk to life, it needs to be taken seriously by politicians, the police and the wider public. Taking it ‘seriously’ does not mean arguing that its leading activists, from Oswald Mosley to ‘Tommy Robinson’, have persuasive arguments, nor does it mean turning a blind eye to racism. Rather, this means recognising the extreme right is something that needs to be comprehended in order to stymie its impact, though in all probability it can never be eliminated without destroying democracy itself. Politicians and society more widely should not dismiss the extreme right as a silly irrelevance, in other words, even if much of what it espouses is racist, offensive and deeply contradictory. Getting to know its leaders and followers is crucial to grasping its appeal, while robustly challenging its positions is a core part of developing a mature, multicultural liberal democracy. The alternatives of ignoring it or even accepting parts of its discourse (both tendencies found all too often in political responses to the extreme right) would mean failing to protect sections of society from cultures that take pride in their prejudices, and on occasion enact violence. Making the case for taking the British extreme right seriously can be difficult. It is certainly commonplace to find those who dismiss it out of hand, considering it as something not worthy of serious concern. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, politicians, academics and a wide range of commentators have regularly made the rather comforting argument that fascism and the extreme right is alien to a British culture, which apparently is by definition moderate, and so the minority drawn to it are mere eccentrics and cranks, best ignored. While it is true to say that the extreme right in Britain has largely been a fringe concern, as is the case in many countries, it has been a movement that has a real impact and regularly expresses a highly radicalised senses of Britishness and white identity. It sees these as facing an 3

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existential threat from various quarters, including Jewish people, from people of colour, and often women as well, and steeps a call for the defence of race and nation in a highly emotive language.

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What is the extreme right? There is no easy answer to what the extreme right is, and it can take many forms. To help explain the phenomenon, it is helpful to locate where the extreme right sits within the wider political landscape. The extreme right is part of a broader phenomenon often called the ‘far right’, which sits in contrast to the moderate right. In general terms, what makes politics right wing, as opposed to left wing, can be summarised as acceptance that societies are unequal. While leftwing politics tries to overcome inequalities, rightwing politics accepts degrees of inequality as inevitable. The extreme right can borrow elements from the left, but as it relates these to exclusionary and racist agendas they cannot be seen as straightforwardly left wing. The ‘far right’ then, is a catch-all term that spans all forms of, ‘far’, or non-​mainstream, right wing activity that sees society as inevitably hierarchical, from those with some illiberal views but who engage with democratic processes, to those who see violence as the answer and carry out acts of terrorism. Using a framework set out by Cas Mudde, it is helpful to see the far right as comprised of two phenomena: the ‘radical right’, or those whose politics remain within the bounds of legal activity and seek radical modifications to the existing political system; and the ‘extreme right’, who ultimately do not want to retain the existing political system, and who often are willing to step over legal boundaries in one way or another to achieve their aims.6 In reality, this is not a neat distinction, and some groups can sit across this dividing line. Moreover, some forms of the extreme right call for a 4

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political and social revolution. This type of revolutionary extreme right politics, one calling for a new era for race and nation, is what academics such as Roger Griffin identify as fascist.7 Not all forms of the extreme right are fascist, but all fascists are part of the extreme right. As such, fascism can be used in an analytical manner, rather than simply being a pejorative. This book focuses on the extreme right, including fascists, because while there has been much discussion on the impact of the larger radical right in Britain, especially United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) under Nigel Farage, there has been less analysis of the extreme right and British fascism. Often what has been developed tends to either focus on the past, or on the present day, and so fails to consider how the contemporary situation has been informed by earlier activism, how it has come from somewhere, and so has not clearly mapped how the fascist past resonates in groups active today. In terms of the differences between radical and extreme right, the distinction between Farage’s UKIP and the British National Party under Nick Griffin helps to clarify the disparities between the radical and extreme right. In the 2000s and especially the 2010s, UKIP developed into an impactful radical right party, styling itself as an alternative form of patriotic politics that contrasted with the traditional right’s Conservative Party, which it argued was weak on Europe and issues of immigration. UKIP could attract socially conservative Labour voters as well. Continuity with the economics of Thatcherism, criticism of immigration policies and calling for the renewal of Britain by leaving the European Union were its signature ideas. UKIP was a radical right party as it sought change through electioneering, and by courting the mainstream media, but did not idealise a move away from democracy. The BNP, on the other hand, was founded by John Tyndall, an unashamed neo-​Nazi in the 1960s and a man who espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories 5

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while leader of the National Front in the 1970s, and the BNP from the 1980s. By 1999 the party had a new leader, Nick Griffin, a man convicted the previous year of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred.8 Griffin’s internal messaging while leader from 1999 until 2014 explained the party needed to gain power to initiate a far-​reaching constitutional revolution. While both UKIP and the BNP were nationalistic, the BNP was clear it was an ethno-​nationalist party, a party for white people only. BNP activists in the 2000s also engaged in criminal acts, such as Terrance Gavan, who in 2010 was convicted of 22 offences related to possession of firearms and collating information useful for terrorism. While the ‘radical right’ UKIP sought to play within the rules of the democratic system, the ‘extreme right’ BNP wanted to change the rules, and worryingly its members regularly engaged in criminality. Nigel Copsey and Matthew Goodwin are two leading academics who also rightly categorised the BNP as fascist.9 The extreme right is important to focus on, even though it has limited political impact in comparison to the radical right. Electorally speaking, the BNP has been far and away the most significant extreme right political group in Britain, by 2010 achieving 57 elected local councillors and two MEPs. While this was impressive for Britain’s extreme right movement, these results demonstrate it was hardly on the cusp of political power, and it soon dwindled to a shadow of its former self. More often, as in the case of the Batley and Spen by-​election of July 2021, its candidates receive fewer votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party. Despite being of limited electoral significance, extreme right activists, past and present, have been more successful in terms of creating a diverse counterculture, one fostered by a bewildering array of groups that draw followers from a range of age groups and classes. These generate a wide range of aggressive material, in the physical 6

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world and now often online as well, which can cause offence and injury to those they target. Its internet presence can have a powerful effect on the thinking of a younger generation looking for political agendas that shock and radically alternate senses of identity to give their lives meaning, and lead to issues of racism and extremism in schools and other educational settings. Organisations that make up the extreme right engage in a wide range of direct-​action activities, which require significant resources to police and manage, sometimes costing hundreds of thousands of pounds per demonstration, and lead to a wide number of hate crimes. These divisive events can also have a damaging impact on local communities and businesses. And a few drawn to it decide to act violently, and even kill. Such extreme right activism has not emerged from thin air, nor is it likely to go away any time soon. Specific groups often draw influence from earlier times. For example, the neo-​Nazi group National Action, proscribed in 2016 under terrorism legislation, idealised Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists and revelled in the memory of American neo-​Nazis such as George Lincoln Rockwell, who was active in the 1960s. They even based their logo on the Nazi’s mass paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung or SA. The fascist past echoes into the present day in such affective, extremist material. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty first, many such extreme right groups have come and gone. Most have been short-​lived, of little individual consequence, while a few became something larger. The many small groups that seem to have little public impact, or wider relevance, nevertheless play a crucial role in developing this variegated culture of activism. There is also a wide range of types of organisational styles that comprise the extreme right. Some have wanted to become mass parties. The British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, the National Front 7

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from the 1960s and the British National Party from the 1980s are all good examples here. However, others have developed as street protest groups, such as the English Defence League; while others have cultivated a role as publishing houses, like the Britons Publishing Society and more recently Arktos; others conceive of themselves as think tanks, such as the London Forum and the Traditional Britain Group. Some have emerged as cultural networks, such as the Blood & Honour music scene. Some have wanted to be openly violent organisations, such as Combat 18. And some have promoted terrorism, such as National Action. While mass parties aim for large-​ scale membership, often extreme right activists know their organisations will hold limited appeal, and so create small, targeted groups (or groupuscules, a term that will be discussed later in the book) that attract specific audiences. With these limited ambitions, they are more successful at achieving their own immediate goals. While this shows acknowledgement of their limited appeal, activists within the movement often understand this can become a strength as well. Those who feel drawn to the extreme right find a multifaceted movement with a wide range of styles of activism to choose from, ranging from groups focused on philosophical speculation to those who offer street protests, from youth groups to those aimed at older activists, and from primarily working-​class groups to those aimed at more affluent sectors of society. And if one group falls into decline, there are always others to migrate to. Approach and structure This book has been set out to offer an introduction to the extreme right in Britain, past and present. It is based on over ten years’ personal experience researching, teaching and advising in this area, 8

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and tries to reflect in an accessible way the wide range of academic research that helps us understand the extreme right. References have been kept to a minimum, but the endnotes and bibliography at the end of the book highlight a wide range of work by many leading academics, as well as useful news reports. There is a lot more that has also influenced the writing of this book. Not all who are cited here agree with each other either, and academic reviews of each other’s work, as well as Twitter conversations, show this is a lively and heated area of debate among specialists who often differ on how to interpret and understand the extreme right. This is not a book written by an activist, but rather has been written as a primer to the academic analysis on the extreme right for those who want to know more. Like any academic text, it is not fully ‘objective’ and does have a politics. This is necessary to help inform suggestions for responding to the extreme right, and these are essentially based on promoting multicultural liberal democratic values. It has also not been written to demonise the extreme right or sensationalise its activism. The reality is that, like everyone else, extreme right activists are complex, multifaceted people. Acknowledging this does not mean analysis will shy away from drawing attention to the explicit and more coded forms of racism that underpin this milieu, and while it tries to understand political extremism it does not seek to justify it. To explore the diversity of the extreme right, the book is divided into two sections, history and current dynamics. Both are crucial to understanding the extreme right milieu today. The first part has three chapters, which survey the extreme right’s past. Chapter 1 examines the origins of activism and shows how modern extreme right politics emerged in early twentieth-​century Britain, assessing groups from the British Brothers’ League to the British Union of Fascists. It shows there was a diverse, yet largely marginalised, 9

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culture of extreme right activism in the country by the 1920s and that more developed in the 1930s. These attracted interest from men and women of different classes, who were able to pioneer a specifically British extreme right counterculture. The second chapter then looks at how British fascists, and more ambiguously extreme right activists, reconfigured themselves after 1945. Some groups were overtly neo-​Nazi, that is they took inspiration specifically from Hitler and National Socialism, such as Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement; others rejected accusations of fascism, such as Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement. Many created new links with equally marginalised activists internationally. This chapter also covers the rise of the National Front, a mixture of extreme right neo-​Nazi and radical right activists, as well as the British National Party up to 1999, when it decided to modernise its public image under Nick Griffin. The chapter unpacks the idea of ‘groupuscularity’, the notion that the extreme right is made up of many tiny groups and organisations that collectively generate an extreme culture. The final chapter of this section looks at the development of the extreme right in the twenty-​first century, and introduces the many recently and currently active organisations, large and small, discussed in later thematic chapters, from the English Defence League, to Sonnenkrieg Division, to Patriotic Alternative. The second part of the book, explores in more detail the nature of the people and organisations found within the extreme right, making links between the past and the present. Chapter 4 looks at leadership, and the ways mostly, but not always, it has been men who have headed extreme right groups, attracting around them wider communities of activists who share a sense of mission. A few of these have been ‘charismatic’ leaders of sorts, such as Oswald Mosley and more recently Stephen Yaxley-​Lennon whose activist persona, ‘Tommy Robinson’, is drawn from football hooligan 10

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culture and is a minor household name. Others remain mysterious, enigmatic figures who exert an influence over a select few, such as David Myatt. Chapter 5 gives consideration to the range of supporters of the extreme right, focusing on some of the ethnographic studies of groups that have included activists who have wanted to be interviewed by academics. It assesses how the extreme right has an eclectic appeal amongst those searching for an alternate sense of meaning and purpose, and can also offer them an emotional sense of home. Chapter 6 reflects on the gendered dynamics of the extreme right. From hypermasculine ideals that attract disaffected young men, to female leadership, to examples of LGBTQ forms of extreme right activism, this chapter examines the many gendered dynamics found across the extreme right spectrum. Chapter 7 examines how extreme right activism has found a new home in online spaces. The extreme right was an early adopter of the power of digital communication and has been finding ways to maximise its impact using online tools ever since. This trend has continued into the social media era, where memes offer a novel language for the extreme right, and online platforms have allowed new, decentralised communities to emerge. Chapter 8 explores the extent to which this culture has developed in violent ways. It highlights cases of extreme right aggression, past and present, but also reflects on how such groups often manifest internal brakes on violence as well. Most organisations are far less likely to carry out violence than their aggressive rhetoric may first suggest, yet fringe activists can feel the need to take things further and decide to act alone or develop splinter groups. The final chapter focuses on how Government policies have been developed to respond to the risks posed by the extreme right and considers both ways they have legitimised many of their positions. It also explains how state

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structures as well as antifascist and antiracist groups can be part of the solution here, while the wider public should also be involved in conversations on how to counter the extreme right. The book concludes by returning to the central point that the extreme right needs to be taken seriously. While being mindful of not giving small groups that actively seek attention undue notice, challenging their racism is essential to the dynamics of a mature and multicultural liberal democracy.

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Roots

On 15 January 1902, The Times reported on an energetic meeting of 4,000 supporters of the British Brothers’ League, held on the Mile End Road in London’s East End. The gathering approved the motion that ‘the continued influx of destitute aliens tends to lower the standard of life desirable for English citizens’, and the event epitomised several years of campaigning by the British Brothers’ League.1 As noted by Panikos Panayi in his An Immigration History of Britain, this provocative, anti-​ immigration group claimed a membership of 45,000, though this is likely an exaggeration. In the first years of the twentieth century it opposed Jewish immigration, arguing migrants’ claims to be fleeing persecution abroad were disingenuous as really they had come to make money.2 The league was supported by people such as Major Sir William Eden Evans-​Gordon, a Conservative MP who in 1902 chaired the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration, and later campaigned under the slogan ‘England for the English, Major Gordon for Stepney’. Another figure at the heart of the league was journalist, writer and failed politician Arnold White, who from the 1880s onwards had written books decrying Jewish migration and developed political groups to campaign around this agenda. 13

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The British Brothers’ League’s activities waned after the passing of the Aliens Act of 1905, itself a milestone in legislation to limit primarily Jewish migration to Britain, while its presence marked a new turn in British politics. Edwardian contexts and World War The British Brothers’ League’s blend of patriotism, profound hostility towards migrants and conspiratorial racism epitomised a wider nationalistic, aggressive far right culture that was developing in Britain ahead of the First World War. There was a range of factors influencing this emergent trend that revolved around perceptions of the nation in crisis and a search for radical alternatives to overcome such fears, an anxiety that seems common among some throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. As Alan Sykes notes, at this time such concerns were powerfully expressed through the rhetoric of traditionalist ‘die hard’ Tories opposed to progressive reforms such as political suffrage for women; and were also epitomised by jingoistic enmity towards Germany that became the focus of a naval arms race, reflected too in public fears of German spies operating in Britain.3 The country had been affected by the Boer War, helping provoke an anxious debate over the empire, in particular fears over the seemingly declining quality of the men in Britain. The population was seen by some to be degenerate, and unable to meet the grandiose ideals of masculinity required for the continuation of the empire. In turn, the ideas of eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Carl Pearson were discussed as a solution, both in terms of ‘positive’ forms, which would promote the ‘healthy’ to breed and thrive, as well as ‘negative’ forms, which would limit reproduction of sectors of a supposedly decadent society. 14

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Dan Stone has written about the current of Edwardian-​era radicalism that echoed the embryonic forms of fascism found on the continent in his book Breeding Superman.4 He coined the term ‘extremes of Englishness’ for the types of thinking emanating from a wide variety of British cultural figures (of the left as well as the right) who articulated ideas that were quite similar to those also found in continental interwar fascisms. Science and pseudo-​ ­science blurred and blended in radical literatures at the fringes of British intellectual debate. Stone has also explored how Nazism was widely debated in 1930s Britain, seen both critically and more positively by many British figures who were well informed on its nature.5 This is also echoed in Martin Pugh’s provocative book Hurrah for the Blackshirts! which sought to debunk the shibboleth that fascism and political extremism from the right were not compatible with British political thought in the interwar years. As Pugh showed, a wide range of British figures came to support fascism, even Nazism, in the 1920s and 1930s, and often saw nothing particularly un-​British about engaging with this new ideology.6 Remembering these points helps correct the rather comforting, yet unhelpful, mythology that the British people are somehow automatically immune from engaging in political extremism because British culture is essentially moderate. As Paul Ward’s work has also highlighted, ‘Britishness’ can mean many things to different people.7 In Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, by the first decade of the twentieth century new political ideologies including socialism and feminism were calling for quite radical change. The First World War was a further crucial watershed, and offered renewed challenges to older sensibilities, helping to creating new, more nationalistic sentiments. While fascist and wider extreme right ideals were embryonic before the war, they were crystallised by its impact. 15

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Hindsight allows us to see the war as a major calamity, though many in 1914 greeted its outbreak with great relief. Young men in particular welcomed the conflict across the continent, as did many writers and intellectuals.8 War fever offered a chance to escape from conformity, and the opportunity to engage in a moment of heroism. People could now ‘turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping’, as Rupert Brooke put it in his highly popular sonnet ‘Peace’, ‘Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary’. Such a turn to something alternate and exciting helped attract people to fascism after the war, but these feelings were common before 1914 as well. Then, as the total war economies developed across the belligerent countries after 1914, they demonstrated how modern states could work differently, if all parts of society gravitated around a single common cause. These were also lessons learned by many who became fascists in interwar Europe. In Britain as elsewhere, new radical nationalist movements engaged with the changing political space for patriotism, and the potential for elemental change. For example, in 1916, the British Workers’ National League was formed. This left-​leaning organisation was one that only admitted British workers and called for a new type of nationalistic socialist politics. Another new party of the war period was the National Party, much more clearly right wing in its economic agenda, and also both antisemitic and anti-​ immigrant.9 Marxist-​influenced revolutionary intellectuals such as the Guild Socialists also entertained the idea the war was creating the chance for a new political order to emerge, and some of their number veered into fascism in the interwar period.10 Finally, there was the emotive weight found in the war dead themselves to consider –​which included people like the young Brooke who died in 1915. A vast sacrifice to the nation, an emotional scar, H. G. Wells likened the mood immediately after the war in Europe to a patient 16

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recovering from major surgery, and it was unclear if it would even survive. The conflict, in other words, helped to create new mythologies and national martyrs, leaving Britain and Europe dramatically changed. The 1920s and the rise of fascism In the wake of such uncertainties also came fears over the rise of Communism, emanating from the civil war in Russia that broke out in 1918 and ended in the early 1920s with the formation of the Soviet Union. In response, a novel type of mass politics, fascism, took off first in Italy and soon grew in other parts of Europe as well. For his part, Benito Mussolini typified a wider trend rooted initially in the experiences of total war. After other European countries went to war in August 1914, Mussolini helped lead a movement focused on restoring Italy to greatness by also entering the war, a campaign that for a time was even funded by Britain. After Italy joined the conflict, he was among those who celebrated the masculine ideals of warfare, and by 1917 had coined the term ‘Trenchocracy’ to describe a new type of politics he felt the war was generating.11 He came to power in 1922 as he was seen by Italy’s King as the only solution to the country’s political problems. In Britain in 1922, black shirted men reflected this development when they saluted the Cenotaph, the tomb of the unknown soldier, and laid a wreath. The first fascist group in Britain to openly identify as such was formed a year later. As it grew, fascism confounded expectations and offered initially confusing juxtapositions. The experiences of the creator of the British Fascisti, rebranded the British Fascists in 1924 to avoid confusion over pronunciation, points to formative effects of the war, and the significant role of women within the history of British 17

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fascism from its outset. It was founded by Rotha Lintorn-​Orman, and attracted other female, as well as male, members. The granddaughter of Sir John Lintorn, a field marshal, and the daughter of Major Charles Orman, before the war Lintorn-​Orman had not joined the suffrage movement but rather had proudly been a leader of Girl Guides troops in Bournemouth. During the war she drove ambulances, went to Serbia where she received the Croix de Charité, and also joined the Red Cross. Single and clearly attracted to roles that involved uniforms, as Founder of the British Fascists Lintorn-​ Orman was often dismissed as a ‘mannish woman’. The organisation itself was led by the men who served as its President, such as former British Army Officer R. B. D. Blakeney, rather than by its female Founder.12 The group has often been explicitly or implicitly mocked in a misogynistic manner, seeing Lintorn-​Orman as a curiosity rather than a serious figure, including by fellow British fascists, by its critics and even by historians. Newer studies of the organisation, such as by Paul Stocker, have offered a more critically nuanced depiction of the group, highlighting its role in fostering a revolutionary, extreme right and ‘fascistised’ culture in later interwar Britain.13 The British Fascists saw their role as a paramilitary defence organisation and a bulwark against the new threat from Communism and was broken down into a clear hierarchical structure. It was divided into men’s units and women’s units and so, should a moment of crisis where Communists tried to seize power occur, the former would become active while the latter would support them in an auxiliary capacity. It was also structured through regional and local divisions, ultimately made up of ‘Units’ of seven men or women. There was also a Cadet Unit for those under 16. Enrolment forms are often curious documents to explore with fascist and extreme right groups. The BF asked people joining to agree they would 18

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‘render every service in my power to the British Fascists in their effort to destroy all treacherous and revolutionary movements that may endanger the Throne and the Empire; and their effort for the betterment of all Classes of the Community’, adding the need to ‘submit to discipline’ required to sustain the mental and physical fitness of ‘my Brother and Sister Fascists’. As well as promoting a cross class rather than classless approach, the ideal British Fascist community was a deeply Christian one as well. It often directed activity towards children’s clubs, designed to warn against the evils of Communism and promote faith in God, the King and the Empire. Echoing earlier groups like the British Brothers’ League, its policy documents highlighted a need to restrict immigration. One explained the movement sought a ‘Gradual purification of the British Race, by drastic restriction of future alien immigration into Great Britain and the Dominions’. The organisation’s moment of crisis and opportunity came in 1926, with the General Strike. British Fascists wanted its members to join the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, which essentially coordinated volunteers to keep the economy functioning during the strike, and wanted them to do so openly, as fascists. While the Government was happy for individuals from the British Fascists to volunteer, it would not accept the group using the strike as a vehicle to advertise its wider politics. Some, such as Blakeney, volunteered in an individual capacity, while the British Fascists also developed its own volunteers that were not supported by the Government. However, the issue divided the organisation. After this point, the British Fascists declined in relevance, the strike itself having not produced the Communist threat fascists warned of, while the blow created by debate over how to engage with the strike led to division and splits. The group’s impact was lasting as a number of figures who became active in later, more overtly ideologically 19

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fascist groups, such as Arnold Leese and William Joyce, developed their first taste of such politics in the British Fascists.

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Diversity of positions As well as the British Fascists, the 1920s period saw other developments in the politics of fascism in Britain. Nick Toczek’s Haters, Baiters and Would-​Be Dictators offers some of the most detailed analysis of The Britons, founded in 1918 by Henry Hamilton Beamish.14 Its politics again focused on immigration, including a call for immigrants and those descended from them to be unable to gain elected office. It also fed into related organisations, such as the Britons Publishing Society that disseminated antisemitic conspiracy theory material, such as English-​language copies of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This document, widely recognised as a forgery yet central to many antisemitic conspiracy theories, typified the phenomenon in proposing an all-​encompassing narrative explaining how Jewish people posed a hidden, existential threat to the nation. Lacking any factual detail, such outrageous propositions can only be held on the level of totalising faith, which helps explain the fanaticism often found in many who believe in them. There was a closeness between Beamish’s own belief in a Jewish ‘hidden hand’, and the emergent Nazi movement in Germany; in 1923 Beamish spoke alongside Hitler at an early Nazi rally, and later claimed to have helped educate the future Führer. Others promoting antisemitic conspiracism in this period included Nesta Webster, who wrote for a newspaper published by the Duke of Northumberland called The Patriot. Webster’s books included World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization, published in 1921, which argued the Russian Revolution was a Jewish plot. 20

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She was later linked to the British Fascists as well as the British Union of Fascists. Inspired by the more aggressive antisemitic agendas found in the Britons, and increasingly frustrated with the lack of radicalism in the British Fascists, several figures in the 1920s sought a more extreme version of British fascism. The most notable here was Arnold Leese, a man who came to fascism later in life. Before the First World War Leese had worked in India where he became an expert on camels, and in 1927 even wrote a standard work on the one-​humped camel. A professional socialised in Edwardian contexts of empire, after the war, aged 40, Leese became a vet in Stamford, and developed a passionate interest in antisemitic conspiracy theory-​driven politics that would define the rest of his life. In 1923 he wrote a pamphlet praising Mussolini, and then joined the British Fascists. He was elected a councillor for Stamford Town Council, and so became a rare thing in Britain: a fascist to win office. However, he found the British Fascists ultimately too tame for his tastes, ‘Conservativism with knobs on’ was his memorable, pithy dismissal. Joining a more radical but ultimately short-​lived breakaway National Fascisti in 1925, by 1928 he stepped down as a councillor, moved to Guilford and in retirement aged 50 founded the Imperial Fascist League.15 While important, Leese’s Imperial Fascist League was never a contender with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in terms of size and impact. Yet it remains a crucial foundational organisation in the history of British fascism. Leese’s group was small, and sought, along with related organisations such as the Britons Publishing Society, to foster what it called a ‘Jew wise’ in Britain, an ideological elite who understood the (supposedly) true nature of Jewish influence on British society. Others within this small network included the antisemitic economist Arthur Kitson, who had 21

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helped introduce Leese to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The Imperial Fascist League argued for an economic transformation of Britain by establishing a corporate state to replace democracy, and the group saw this as a modernised version of guilds of the pre-​modern era. Such idealisation of the past to project a vision of renewal is a common feature of fascist politics, which typically propose an alternate, non-​democratic model for a modern society. While the IFL did not aspire to become a political party, it did develop a fascist style. It was a uniformed group, and so in public its small band of largely middle-​class members could be found wearing black shirts, boots and berets, with khaki breeches and an armband with a swastika superimposed onto a Union Jack background. Leese focused an incredible amount of energy on his political venture, which included publishing the monthly newspaper The Fascist. This increasingly became modelled on Julius Streicher’s Nazi antisemitic propaganda sheet Der Stürmer, and the IFL published a wide range of other propaganda materials steeped in a language evoking fears around the supposed existential threat that Jewish people posed to Britain. Not many subscribed to The Fascist, perhaps 2,000–​3,000, though one regular reader was the poet and later propagandist for Mussolini, Ezra Pound. Evocative of its extreme positions, at one meeting the IFL’s vice-​president argued Jewish people should be sterilised, segregated or exterminated, a view Leese also expressed. Over time the organisation tracked closely to Nazi-​style pseudo-​scientific biological racism, identifying Jewishness in terms of blood not culture. Largely a political irrelevance, the Imperial Fascist League was able to attract some public attention. For example, Leese was convicted in 1936 of creating a public mischief after two articles in The Fascist, that were also reproduced as a pamphlet, claimed Jewish people engaged in ritual murder of children. Upon his release Leese 22

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then published an even more strident text, My Irrelevant Defence, but was not prosecuted, underscoring a degree of toleration of antisemitism from British authorities in the 1930s. Leese’s importance lies in his later influence, as he rather than Mosley inspired a new generation of neo-​Nazi activists from the end of the 1940s onwards, and his embrace of Hitler’s variant of fascism can be followed through to contemporary British neo-​Nazis such as National Action. He has also been celebrated by American neo-​Nazi cultures, who find a relevance in English language material expressing extreme National Socialist positions. Leese was also a member of the short-​lived Centre International D’Études sur la Fascisme, led by another British fascist, Major James Strachey-​Barnes. The centre itself was based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and was supported by Mussolini, with whom Barnes was on friendly terms. Barnes wrote several books on fascism, including The Universal Aspect of Fascism, which was reviewed conscientiously in The Times, and promoted the idea of Italian Fascism leading a fascist revival, and later his ideas argued German Nazism was a different but related movement. Claudia Baldoli has written extensively about the influence of Italian fascists on interwar British cultures, and has explored Barnes’s activities in Italy during the Second World War as well.16 The Centre International D’Études sur la Fascisme was one of many efforts by European fascists to develop transnational organisations to encourage uptake of the ideology among national groups, but these often ended in failure. By the end of the 1930s fascist internationalism was dominated by the interests of the Nazi regime. Other figures central to interwar fascism in Britain include Archibald Maule Ramsey, a Conservative Party member who in 1931 became MP for Peebles and Southern Midlothian. In 1935, he helped establish the Nordic League, a group that like Leese 23

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espoused antisemitic conspiracism that was supposedly targeting Britain. Ramsey was not seen as material for high office by the Conservative Party, though he became a central voice in parliament advocating for antisemitic ideas. By 1938, he campaigned to have the Jewish MP Leslie Hore-​Belisha removed from the post of Secretary of State for War, and developed an Aliens Restriction (Blasphemy) Bill, a Private Members Bill that sought to prevent people who were not British from ‘propagating blasphemous or atheistic doctrines or in other activities calculated to interfere with the established religious institutions of Great Britain’. In 1939 he set up the Right Club as a group to unify the many extreme right groups in the country. Ramsey’s profile underscores again how ideas found in British fascism permeated far more widely than the openly fascist groups themselves. The British Union of Fascist (and National Socialists) The most impactful of the fascist organisations in Britain was undoubtedly the British Union of Fascists, founded in 1932.17 Led by Oswald Mosley, it was the only such organisation in interwar Britain to be headed by a truly charismatic leader figure, albeit on a very limited scale and degree of impact when compared to continental fascism of this era. His journey to fascism before 1932 was marked by a set of staging posts in the development of a self-​ regarding, self-​styled iconoclast. With an aristocratic background and a Winchester College education, Mosley was another who came of age during the First World War. He epitomised a generation that were offered heroic, and horrific, experiences at this time and searched for a new politics after 1918. His war record included joining the Royal Flying Corps, though a crash left him injured. He also fought in the trenches but actually spent much fighting 24

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away from the front line. After the war he married Lady Cynthia Curzon, the daughter of the Foreign Secretary, and became the youngest member of the House of Commons as the Conservative MP for Harrow. A confident speaker, he left the Conservative Party over their policy of using violence in Ireland, and in 1924 joined the Labour Party, styling himself as a left-​wing radical. He read publications such as The New Age, which featured radically alternate political perspectives. By 1929, he was hoping to gain a significant position with a new Labour government but felt slighted when he was not included in Ramsey MacDonald’s cabinet. His response was the radical Mosley Memorandum, which proposed a Keynesian-​style use of public works, as well as tariffs and nationalisation of industry. Lacking support for his rejection of international free trade and increased public spending, Mosley set up his own party, modelled in part on the rise of fascist groups abroad and featuring his version of a political militia, the ‘Biff Boys’. The New Party was quickly defeated, failing to register much support in the October 1931 General Election.18 So Mosley sought an even more radical alternative, and looked closely at continental fascism. Mussolini’s Italy was a clear example of a new type of politics that seemed to fit the needs of the twentieth century, and Mosley decided to develop a fascist party for Britain. In October 1932, the British Union of Fascists was founded.19 Presented as a revolutionary alternative to the National Government of the period, it drew together activists from existing fascist groups. However, Mosley was opposed by, among others, Leese, who derided the new party as the ‘British Jewnion of Fascists’ and claimed it was not strong enough in condemning the hidden Jewish hand. Others such as Lintorn-​Orman also remained outside the BUF. It is often assumed that the BUF was not innately antisemitic in the same way as people like Beamish and Leese were, but recent 25

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historians such as Daniel Tilles have contented this narrative and examined the complexities of fascist antisemitic politics. Tilles’s book British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses details the ways the BUF developed a series of messages around anti-​Jewish themes, and how the Jewish community in Britain was careful to develop a range of responses, some measured others understandably less so.20 This is in contrast to older, more sympathetic assessments of Mosley, such as that found in Robert Skidelsky’s biography, Oswald Mosley, from 1975. This described Mosley’s antisemitism as ‘intellectual and moral carelessness’, a position that Skidelsky has moved away from yet typifies an unnecessarily apologetic approach to Mosley’s racist politics. The BUF’s antisemitism certainly reconfigured itself over time and related itself to various issues, but this was always an important part of its fascist politics steeped in the mythology of Jewish finance as a threat to Britain’s national economic interests. Notably, the BUF changed its name in the mid 1930s to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists, as it came closer to Nazi Germany, and then rebranded itself again to the more neutral-​sounding British Union when it wanted to appear as part of a broader peace movement within the later 1930s appeasement culture. Launched with great fanfare in 1932, the centrepiece articulation of Mosley’s new endeavour was The Greater Britain. This book took a step further in proposing a new political and economic system for Britain. Upon gaining power, Mosley explained the BUF would put a Bill to parliament allowing it to rule by decree. The country would be led by Mosley as Prime Minster, along with four others. The House of Lords would become a ‘corporate chamber’ to represent business interests (these would be divided into 25 sectors), while the House of Commons would become a parliament for fascists endorsing the will of the executive. New politicians would 26

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need to be fascists, and multi-​party democracy would come to an end. The monarchy would remain but could only replace fascist politicians with other fascists. The BUF’s version of the corporate state was also based on an alternate economic system modelled in part on Mussolini’s Italy, but also clearly drawing on earlier British radical discourses, such as those of the Guild Socialists. The supposed national unity of the Elizabethan era would be rekindled and combined with a novel type of modern state to create a fundamentally new type of society. This was a marked departure from what came before with Mosley’s politics. He repeatedly evoked a fascist mythology of national rebirth through an ultra-​nationalist revolution in this and other publication titles, such as Tomorrow We Live. The culture of empire was also celebrated by the BUF and figures such as Rudyard Kipling and Baden Powell were seen as role models for the BUF. The empire context was also important in detecting the BUF’s deeply racist outlook, a reflection of the wider accepted cultures of racism that empire was founded upon, as has been discussed by Paul Stocker.21 Mosley made clear in Tomorrow We Live that he believed that Africa needed Britain’s rule, and that black people were not capable of governing themselves. In this, his racism was not out of step with wider British establishment views. The BUF also looked to the Tudor period as a time before contemporary capitalism had led to the degeneration of the nation, and saw this as a great era of British cultural and political flourishing, just as Mussolini harked back to Rome or Hitler to the Teutonic middle ages. British fascists were influenced in the types of national narratives found in continental forms of fascism, but as with every extreme nationalism pummelled its own national history for cultural resources to create a clear and distinct form of the ideology. Mosley even wrote of how British fascism combined the traditions of Anglicanism with the notion of a new man found in Nietzsche’s 27

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philosophy to evoke the idea of his British fascists as a new aristocracy for a new age. The BUF found support from newspapers such as the Daily Mail and also the Daily Mirror. The former’s interest in the BUF is well established, but the latter also engaged with the movement, for example publishing an article by Harold Harmsworth, better known as Lord Rothermere, in January 1934. He encouraged people to join the movement, adding that demonisation of fascists abroad was nonsense. Early press support highlights once more how leading British figures beyond the narrow sphere of the extreme right itself could be supportive of fascism before the Second World War. This largely changed following a rally in July 1934 at Olympia, when antifascists tried to disrupt Mosley as he engaged in his theatrical politics. Violently expelled by BUF bodyguards, this watershed moment was set within a range of other antifascist activism of the period. It also coincided with the Night of the Long Knives in Nazi Germany, where Hitler’s fascist regime executed at least 85 potential opponents, and arrested many more, in a violent purge to secure Hitler’s domination. British press articles could no longer credibly say fascism was not violent, as events at home and abroad demonstrated. The BUF’s membership dwindled from a high point of probably around 50,000 to between 5,000–​20,000 for the rest of the period to the outbreak of the Second World War, nevertheless making it one of the most popular extreme right organisations in British history. Echoing earlier groups such as the British Brothers League, the BUF increasingly developed its antisemitic agenda in the East End of London. This led to the next notable engagement with antifascist opponents, the Battle of Cable Street of October 1936. The BUF’s marches themselves became increasingly violent, as militant antifascists sought to aggressively challenge the organisation’s own 28

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violent politics. These street battles came to a head with a march that saw as many as 100,000 antifascists try to stop a few thousand BUF members led by Mosley. Antifascists at Cable Street came from Jewish, Communist and liberal backgrounds, united by their sense of danger from the fascists. Not all agreed with these tactics; the advocacy group the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which represented Jewish interests, urged greater moderation in responding to political antisemitism and distanced itself from antifascist violence. Cable Street also led to the Public Order Act of 1936, and increased state concern over fascism in Britain. By the later 1930s, the BUF campaigned for peace with Germany, an issue that helped swell its ranks once more, but it was still unable to get members elected. A political failure despite being able to develop a sustained fascist counterculture in 1930s Britain, the BUF also produced its share of political characters. These included A. K. Chesterton and William Joyce. The former was a journalist who worked in Britain and South Africa before joining the BUF, and became a propagandist for the party serving a variety of roles, eventually becoming editor of the BUF paper The Blackshirt. He was also a known drunk, and vocal supporter of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Despite penning a hagiographic book, Oswald Mosley: Portrait of a Leader, Chesterton became disillusioned with the movement and resigned in 1938. William Joyce, meanwhile, left in 1937, following a restructuring of the organisation as funds from continental fascist organisations dried up. Like Leese, Joyce was a firm believer in the Nazi form of fascism. Joyce founded his own tiny group, the National Socialist League, and put out a Nazi-​style newspaper, The Helmsman, but made no headway. He set out his vision of a fascist revolution in pamphlets, and later wrote a book lamenting what he saw as the decline of his country due to Jewish influence, Twilight Over England. As the war broke 29

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out, Joyce moved to Germany, and more by accident than design found himself broadcasting as an English language propagandist, the press in Britain dubbing him Lord Haw Haw. His final few months evoked both comedy and tragedy in his story. After the war was over Joyce was discovered in Germany, shot in the backside while being arrested, and then convicted and executed on charges of treason. His trial became a focal point for a new wave of British fascism after the war had ended.22 As for figures such as Mosley and Leese, they spent most of the war interned under Defence Regulation 18B, along with about 1,500 other British fascists. Maule Ramsey was the only MP to be imprisoned in this way. A few escaped such detention, including Chesterton. Fascism in Britain was largely crushed during the Second World War, but a new generation came together with older figures and rekindled the movement after 1945. From the beginning of the twentieth century extreme right, and often fascist, cultures developed in various ways in Britain. Typically, antisemitism was at the heart of this politics, but this prejudice came in a variety of forms, from the anti-​immigration protests of the British Brothers’ League to the Nazi-​inspired conspiracist outlook of the Imperial Fascist League. This milieu was much more complex than just Mosley’s more well-​known British Union of Fascists, in other words. While these British fascist cultures were inspired and in part modelled on European counterparts, they were also rooted in radicalised senses of British identity. These groups were a product of their era, and marked by it as well. The legacy of the First World War helped create political cultures reimagining what the modern state and society could become, if governed by a central animating ideal of national renewal. For fascists, these fantasies of an alternate modern society became an appealing alternative vision to the seeming decline found in liberal 30

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democracy. Britain’s political and social order was not ‘tested’ in the same ways as was found elsewhere in Europe and this helps explain why such fascist and extreme right politics was unable to become a mainstream solution to an elemental crisis, as was the case in Germany by 1933. Yet despite their political failure, they left a legacy of ideas and activism that have helped inspire new generations in the postwar era.

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In 1987, Ciarán Ó Maoláin published The Radical Right: A World Dictionary. With the help of the antifascist magazine Searchlight, for Britain alone he identified over 50 active groups that he considered ‘radical right’, most of which can be described using the language of this book as ‘extreme right’ and often ‘fascist’ as they called for a political revolution. Alongside a number of self-​promoting individuals such as David Irving, the dictionary noted well over one hundred further such organizations that had become defunct by that point. Groups given entries included the more well-​known, such as the National Front, as well as the fleeting, such as the Anti-​ P*** League, a name used by several racist gangs, including one based in Harlow that in 1984 was broken up by the police following a series of violent attacks on Asian families. Ó Maoláin’s dictionary also included the more cerebral end of the extreme right spectrum, citing publishers of extremist material like Imperium Press and the Historical Review Press; publications such as the racist and eugenicist magazine Mankind Quarterly; cultural societies, such as Iona (which stands for Islands of the North Atlantic); overtly neo-​Nazi groups such as the National Action Party and the British Movement; and even shops linked to this broad movement in the 32

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1980s, such as Rucksack ‘n’ Rifle, an outfit based in Wrexham that was set up by former British Movement leader Michael McLaughlin to target the survivalist movement. Several splinter groups from the National Front had emerged by this time, including the National Front Support Group, Our Nation and the British National Party. Some organisations the dictionary identified were close to the Conservative Party, such as the Monday Club. Ó Maoláin’s dictionary also included entities for phenomena such as Lady Jane Birdwood’s broadsheet Choice, a publication that carried the telling strapline ‘Racialism is Patriotism’.1 In sum, this snapshot demonstrated the many and varied types of activism generated by wide-​ranging groups, networks and ideological entrepreneurs. Anyone who was drawn to the extreme right had a range of options in terms of style and nature of activism. What are extreme right ‘groupuscules’? Academics who work on the extreme right often call this organisational style, one defined by variety of activism set across a wide range of small groups, networks and individuals, the groupuscular dynamics of the extreme right. The term derives from the French word groupuscule, meaning small political group. Roger Griffin helped to shape this terminology, and he drew on the post-​ ­structuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who distinguished between what they saw on the one hand as ‘arboreal’, or tree-​like organisational structures, and on the other ‘rhizomic’, or akin to grass roots, systems. The former are large, clearly structured phenomena, and so more established political parties conform to this style, typically with features such as a central office and a series of affiliated regional and local branches, all legitimised through well-​established rules and practices. However, for Griffin 33

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after the Second World War most of the extreme right has operated in the messier rhizomic, or groupuscular, organisation style –​ a product of its marginalisation. Those drawn to the extreme right generate a looser movement by spawning an ever-​changing community of small groups (groupuscules) each individually lacking critical mass to become larger and more impactful, but collectively able to generate a culture of extremist activism of significance. If just one groupuscule is assessed individually then, of course, it seems of little to no consequence. However, the reality is that each groupuscule that makes up the extreme right does not exist individually, as one organisation is always set within a wider context of other, similar ones, which sometimes furiously compete with each other, yet at other times can act collegially and in unison.2 As Jeffrey Bale observes here, taking account of the groupuscular nature of the extreme right means it is crucial to think of the ever-​ changing culture generated by these many and varied groups, and not to focus on a specific organisation.3 Others have also conceptualised the groupuscular nature of the extreme right, and have added some future clarity on why this dynamic seems to be instinctively developed by the movement. Bonnie Burstow explains that limiting ambitions in terms of the size of individual groups allows them to foster changeable and adaptable identities, and so small groups have an ability to shift in new directions to attract new supporters and continue activism, a nimbleness lacking in larger organisations.4 Fabian Virchow stressed the appeal of small groupuscules networked with each other not only allows each group to appeal to a wide variety of audiences, but also makes the extreme right overall very difficult to ban.5 Not all British groups of the postwar era fit this groupuscular model. The National Front in the 1970s and the British National Party in the 2000s were both larger and became more established. However, in 34

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their present-​day incarnations both the NF and the BNP are tiny, and so have returned to being part of the contemporary groupuscular milieu examined in the next chapter. What follows in this chapter will survey some of the main developments in the growth of this groupuscular extreme right culture through the post-​1945 period to the 1990s, but readers should be aware that this will necessarily be an abridged exploration, and bear in mind the many unmentioned groups that also existed in this period, which were often fleeting and local in nature. This includes many other groups akin to the offensively titled Anti-​P*** League noted by Ó Maoláin. The ‘unbroken thread’ The Second World War was a watershed for extreme right politics across Europe. Overcoming the revelations of the Holocaust was often an insurmountable task for small groups linked in any way with fascism and Nazism. Yet despite this what came after 1945 in terms of extreme right politics built on what came before. In the British case, the postwar extreme right has achieved greater political success than its interwar variants. While much of the movement was broken up by the effects of Defence Regulation 18B, not all antisemitic groups were curtailed. The British People’s Party was one among a number of groups linked to the British extreme right that was not shut down during the Second World War. Founded in 1939 by Lord Tavistock, who became the Duke of Bedford in 1940, and John Beckett, formerly of the British Union of Fascists and the National Socialist League, it formed one example of fascist activism in Britain continuing despite the war, a phenomenon examined by Richard Griffith’s in his recent book What Did You Do During the War?6 A. K. Chesterton was another who was able to escape 35

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internment during the war period and was central to promoting renewed activism after 1945. After a period in the British Army, Chesterton developed a short-​lived organisation called National Front After Victory, to try and bring together various groups at the war’s end, and he then developed links with the British People’s Party. From 1945, a rekindled British People’s Party was also able to attract new figures, including a younger generation of men like Colin Jordan, who had been in the Army during the war and over the course of the conflict had, paradoxically, developed an interest in fascist politics. In the later 1940s, while at Cambridge University, Jordan started writing for the British People’s Party publication The People’s Post, drawing him to others within the movement. The British People’s Party itself ended abruptly, following the death of the Duke in 1953 due to a self-​inflicted gunshot on his estate. As the British People’s Party helped to rekindle the movement after 1945, Arnold Leese also resumed his activism. Released in 1944, by 1945 Leese had published a new book, The Jewish War of Survival. This deeply antisemitic analysis of the Second World War, incredibly, argued that the war had been fought in Jewish interests, which he added had emerged strengthened by 1945, while Britain was a loser as it had descended to a second-​class power. This early analysis on the Second World War is still widely available on extreme right websites. Indeed, as news of Nazi genocide developed, Leese went on to engage in the growth of Holocaust denial, an issue examined by Joe Mulhall’s excellent book British Fascism After the Holocaust.7 Here, Mullhall identifies what he carefully describes as an ‘unbroken thread’ of activism linking interwar and postwar British fascists. In the decade after the war, Leese published a new magazine, Gothic Ripples, until his death in 1956. This ‘unbroken thread’ was adept at innovating its message to changing circumstances, and among other recurrent themes, Gothic 36

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Ripples developed a new style of deeply racist commentary focused on new black migrant populations, especially in a column titled N***** Notes. Leese used this publication to help rekindle a circle of figures to continue his ‘Jew wise’ coterie. He also attracted a new generation, including Colin Jordan, who after leaving Cambridge University first developed a nationalist club in Birmingham, and by the 1950s helped to write and edit Free Britain, an antisemitic newsletter expressing views similar to Leese’s and linked to his postwar network of antisemites. At the same time, Chesterton was developing yet another new form of activism. He launched a new publication in 1953, Candour that promoted his antisemitic outlook. This became the magazine of the League of Empire Loyalists, a group he launched a year later. Chesterton’s analysis of Jewish influence was elaborated further in his 1965 book The New Unhappy Lords. The League of Empire Loyalists itself campaigned against the breakup of the British Empire, and focused also on criticising new issues, such as the migration to Britain that had started to occur following the British Nationality Act of 1948. The league attracted some Conservatives opposed to the moderate One Nation model of Conservatism found in prominent party figures such as Rab Butler, as well as activists previously associated with interwar British fascism. It also drew into its orbit younger activists, including Jordan, as well as John Tyndall, Martin Webster and John Bean. It became known for a range of stunts, such as delivering a giant spoon to 10 Downing Street. In 1961, one of its members threw sheep offal at Jomo Kenyatta, the President of Kenya. While the league hoped to influence Conservative Party policy, increasingly such acts saw any credibility it had dwindle away. As well as Leese and Chesterton, Mosley was another who returned to active politics after the Second World War. This 37

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comeback was facilitated by Jeffrey Hamm, a former BUF member who by the end of the Second World War had taken control of the campaigning group the League of British Ex-​Servicemen and Women. Under Hamm, it promoted staunch patriotic themes, and developed antisemitic politics as well. Hamm became a regular in the east end of London. His group came into conflict with antifascists of the period, especially the 43 Group, and these fascists and antifascists clashed at places like Ridley Road, which had a large Jewish population and was renowned as a place where extreme right groups provocatively campaigned. Clearly rooted in earlier British fascism, it was via this organisation that Mosley himself announced his return to politics. This came at a meeting organised by the league on 15 November 1947 where a new organisation, the Union Movement, was announced. This would bring together Hamm’s League of British Ex-​Servicemen and Women, as well as several other groups, such as the Imperial Defence League and the Union of British Freedom, and would promote Mosley’s new ideas. Mosley’s post-​1945 politics were marked by their focus on Europe and the wider world, a theme explored by Graham Macklin’s Very Deeply Dyed in the Black.8 Mosley developed two key new ideas, Europe-​A-​Nation and Europe-​Africa. He had set out a new vision for post-​1945 internationalism within fascist groups in his 1947 book The Alternative, forming the basis for Union Movement ideals. The vision for the future set out the need to create a politically fully unified Europe, centred on the Germanic race, which included the British and Scandinavians. Jewish people were supposed to be moved to Palestine, so there was a clear fascist vision of racial, as well as political, reordering of swathes of European territory in Mosley’s grand vision for postwar European fascism. The need to unify Europe into a single nation was driven by the 38

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emergent Cold War context, as for Mosely Europe needed to act as one, and become a third force against the USSR and America, bastions of vulgar Communism and equally vulgar capitalism respectively. He called for a new type of European socialism that he idealised as something higher, in other words a politics blurring left and right-​wing ideals as is often the case with fascist fantasies of an alternate modern state. Central to the economics of this vision was a new relationship with Africa, which was to be ruthlessly exploited, even more so than it had been to date. As Mosley explained, Africa was crucial as it could produce all food and raw materials needed, and was under-​developed economically, allowing it to be easily dominated by Europeans. His language was clearly racist, in a manner typical of British colonialism. For example, here he is describing why it was not appealing to allow independence for African nations, in a typically dismissive tenor: ‘Is it an alluring prospect to devote a lifetime of energy … to the development of Africa, in order at the end to be placed under the Government of Ju-​Ju men?’ The vision for a united Europe was developed in more depth in his 1958 book Europe: Faith and Plan, as well as in publications such as The European. It also saw Mosley trying to develop a National Party of Europe, linking together the Union Movement with European parties such as the Italian Social Movement and the German Empire Party, an idea explored at the Conference of Venice in 1962 though one that eventually came to nothing. In 1975, Mosley even spoke out in favour of remaining in the European Economic Community when most extreme right groups decried Europe’s influence on Britain during the referendum of that year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this pro-​European politics was of very limited appeal to the wider British public, especially sectors that might be sympathetic to the extreme right. 39

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The new politics of race in Britain Mosley’s postwar agenda combined his antisemitism of the pre-​war period with a new focus on criticising immigration to Britain, a concern found in earlier groups but became increasingly salient as an issue. In the 1950s though, the Union Movement achieved no discernible political success, and even Mosely showed limited commitment. In 1951 he moved to Ireland, but later tried to make a political comeback in the 1959 General Election, standing in the Kensington North seat where he developed a campaign steeped in opposition to the growth of black migration to the Notting Hill area over the course of the 1950s. His election materials, which notably included the line ‘Remember the ballot is secret’, argued that black people needed to be repatriated, otherwise in ten years there would be five times as many black people as in 1959. Such an evocation of the idea of white people becoming a minority has become a standard trope of extreme right literature across Europe and America after 1945. While gaining just over 2,000 votes, this was yet another electoral failure for a British fascist. Nevertheless, Mosley had helped to set out a new agenda for anti-​immigrant campaigning distinct from that of interwar fascism. New migrant communities offered a visible and evocative target for racist arguments claiming British society was not only being threatened, but that the foundations of its culture were being eroded. Where Mosley pioneered, and failed, a new generation found greater success. Oswald also tried to interest his son Max in this political activism, who worked with the Union Movement for a period in the early 1960s, before developing a career as a barrister and finally a leading role in Formula One motor racing. The latter roles often lead people to forget his fulsome support for his father’s politics, which in 1961 included publishing a leaflet arguing that black migrants were a threat to children’s health. 40

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The Notting Hill region of London, popular for new migrant communities, had experienced tensions before Mosley’s election campaign. In August and September of 1958 these tensions had come to a head as young white ‘Teddy Boys’ clashed with new black communities, often stemming from the former attacking the property of the latter. In May 1959, following earlier attacks on black people, an Antiguan law student, Kelso Cochrane, was murdered in a crime that remains unsolved. At the time, police argued the motive was robbery, and was not racial in nature, though clearly Union Movement activists were heightening tensions in the area. A new racist group, the White Defence League founded by Colin Jordan, was also active in Notting Hill. While Cochrane’s murder itself remains unsolved, the ability of these two groups to exploit tragedy for political gain was all too apparent. Mosley held a meeting on the spot where Cochrane was killed, while Jordan used the fallout of the event to steep his fledgling movement in a sense of victimhood, and he defended white opposition to black communities as justified. The White Defence League was short-​lived, but produced a telling piece of propaganda, one edition of a newspaper called Black and White News, a screed of negativity towards people of colour, with article after article making extreme claims linking black people to disease, debauchery and crime. Jordan also had the backing of Arnold Leese’s widow, who let Jordan use Leese’s property in Princedale Road, Notting Hill. This became an important centre for a series of groups linked to Jordan, and it operated as both a headquarters and as a bookshop selling materials linked to racist campaigning in the late 1950s and through most of the 1960s. As Jordan was developing his provocative White Defence League, another breakaway from the League of Empire Loyalists emerged. John Bean and John Tyndall developed a new racist political party, the National Labour Party. The pitch for this party was 41

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to move away from the stunts developed by Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists, and instead like Mosley they tried to gain electoral credibility around an anti-​immigration agenda. They targeted voters who were attracted to the Labour party but who also took a strong, critical line on immigration. They put up a single candidate in the 1959 General Election, the former Boxer Bill Webster standing in St Pancras North, who lost his deposit. The White Defence League and the National Labour Party combined in 1960 to form the British National Party (an earlier party using the same name as the more recent British National Party founded in 1982). This party promoted extreme solutions to a changing Britain, including repatriation of migrants and even deporting all Jewish people. Jordan and Tyndall’s sympathies for Nazi ideology also became more apparent, and the pair developed a Nazi-​style uniformed paramilitary group, Spearhead. In 1962, the group split again over divisions on how overtly National Socialist the party could become. John Bean sought to use the BNP’s publication Combat, and its wider activism, to present a provocative agenda that had at least some hope of gaining electoral credibility. Meanwhile, Tyndall and Jordan decided to break away and create an outwardly neo-​Nazi group by launching the National Socialist Movement, on 20 April 1962, Hitler’s birthday. For several years after this split, Bean’s BNP campaigned on the slogan ‘Stop Immigration Now’ and called for mass repatriation. His small party gained some relatively encouraging election returns, but ultimately was always a marginal political concern. The National Socialist Movement became, briefly, a curiosity for the tabloid press, especially when it was linked with a trip to Britain by the leader of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, in August 1962. Rockwell had been banned from entering the country, yet found a way to come to Britain anyway, and 42

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attended an international neo-​Nazi camp run by Jordan and his circle, held in the Cotswolds. Here, Jordan and Rockwell founded the World Union of National Socialists, a neo-​Nazi network that continued to be active throughout the 1960s and 1970s before declining in relevance. It helped to connect British activists with others in America, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. Later that year, Jordan and Tyndall were in prison, convicted on charges related to developing their paramilitary group, Spearhead. Jordan also hit the headlines in 1963 when he marred François Dior, niece of Christian and Catherine Dior and well-​known antisemite. Tyndall broke away from Jordan, in part a division fuelled by their shared desires for Dior, and founded yet another new group, the Greater Britain Movement, which was also neo-​Nazi in ideology but with a greater focus on a sense of Britishness. Tyndall launched a new magazine for the extreme right too, Spearhead, echoing the name of the previous paramilitary group, which he published until his death in 2005. Jordan’s National Socialist Movement, meanwhile, declined in scale and mainly featured in news reporting of several arson attacks on synagogues carried out by young men with links to the group in the mid-​1960s. Jordan was eventually imprisoned again in 1967, after his pamphlet The Coloured Invasion was found to be in breach of the 1965 Race Relations Act. As well as seeing a rise in such provocative organisations, other groups of the 1960s sought greater credibility yet campaigned on broadly similar issues. For example, on the fringes of the Conservative Party, more extreme positions were forming. Critiquing the view that decolonisation was an inevitability, a mainstream Conservative position epitomised by Harold Macmillan’s Wind of Change speech of 1960, in 1961 the Monday Club was formed by Conservatives critical of Britain’s changing place in the world. Its members, which included MPs and party 43

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activists, also openly opposed non-​white immigration to Britain and called for voluntary repatriation. The Monday Club developed a long-​lasting interface between more mainstream yet hard right positions, and the extreme right itself. Its agenda was endorsed by many in the Conservative Party, thereby provided legitimacy for more extreme positions on race and immigration found within the extreme right itself. As well as this development, over the decade many local grassroots groups opposing immigration were founded, such as the Birmingham Immigration Control Association and the Southall Residents’ Association. Like the Monday Club, these were not necessarily extreme right in nature, but also helped develop a new politics of race that saw the nation under attack and in need of staunch defence. Conservative politicians, especially Peter Griffiths, helped to draw attention to the electoral potential of vocally opposing immigration, especially at the 1964 General Election, where he stood for the Smethwick constituency. This was an important event in the development of anti-​immigration politics and saw an unexpected victory for a mainstream yet outsider politician opposing immigration. Moreover, the racist slogan ‘if you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour’ was tacitly endorsed by Griffiths’ campaign. Deeply offensive, it is also worth recalling that the Labour Party in the area operated a colour bar at this time, and the left was certainly not immune from seeing migrant communities in a negative and threatening light either. By the mid 1960s, capturing these sentiments, another group, the Racial Preservation Society, had starting to draw together local opposition to immigration. Acting as a pressure group supporting other organisations, it produced a range of publications such as Midland News and Sussex News, and also networked with more overtly politicised figures such as Tyndall and Bean.9 44

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The National Front The year 1967 saw another effort to unite elements of the right into a new and more powerful organisation. Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists and Bean’s British National Party agreed to become the National Front, and would be joined by the Racial Preservation Society, though the latter also continued as a separate entity. They were clear that overt neo-​Nazism was to be avoided if they were to achieve electoral success, so shunned Colin Jordan, who reformed his own group into the British Movement from 1968. Curiously, Jordan also tried to shake off his reputation for overt neo-​Nazism at this time, to gain some degree of electoral credibility. His British Movement operated as a smaller competitor group to the National Front throughout the 1970s, but gained no political breakthroughs. It eventually descended into an overtly neo-​Nazi street group, under the leadership of Michael Mclaughlin, in the later 1970s and into the early 1980s, and has been redeveloped more recently by Steve Frost. From the outset, the National Front expressed deep concern with the politics of decolonisation and the changing demographics of postwar Britain. Its agenda included support for the white minority governments in South Africa and Rhodesia, and lamenting the loss of empire. It engaged with the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and was both emotively critical of Republicanism and terrorism in its publications, and supportive of loyalist ­paramilitaries.10 It also opposed Britain’s new relationship with the European Economic Community in the 1970s. The party also campaigned for the deportation of all non-​white migrants, a stronger position than that of the Monday Club. The heightened politics of race developing by the end of the decade was central to its outlook, and soon after its formation this agenda was given further mainstream legitimacy when Enoch Powell gave his famous Rivers of 45

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Blood speech, on 20 April 1968, which co-​incidentally was also Hitler’s birthday. Delivery of such a provocative speech by a figure like Powell helped to bring greater credibility to overtly racist anti-​ immigration campaigners and activists, and so acted as a powerful fillip to the fledgling National Front. Roger Eatwell has explained that the analysis of the extreme right can be understood by examining the ‘demand’ for its politics as well as the quality of its ‘supply’.11 Into the 1970s, there was clearly a growing ‘demand’ for anti-​ ­immigration political agendas, a tendency that had grown from the 1950s onwards. The question was how well this could be ‘supplied’ by the National Front, which over the decade certainly became the most impactful political party of the extreme right since the British Union of Fascists, though this was not saying that much given the BUF was a complete electoral failure. The National Front certainly transcended the groupuscular extreme right milieu that preceded it, and by the end of the 1970s had developed into something much more well-​known, including among those beyond racist political groupuscules. A strength of the National Front was its ability to draw together a range of groups and interests, however over time tensions between differing perspectives also led to a series of splits developing within the party. A turn to more overt extremism came when John Tyndall’s Greater Britain Movement was absorbed; the GMB was dissolved, and its 138 members encouraged to join the National Front. Tyndall’s sympathy for neo-​Nazi ideals certainly became a strong component of the NF’s identity into the 1970s, though often this was highlighted by antifascists as the only component within the National Front. By the end of the 1970s Tyndall had become the party’s most established leader, but it had others too that had tried to take it in different directions. Its first leader was Chesterton himself, who hoped to develop a more respectable profile for the 46

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party, though activists soon started to engage in aggressive direct action. Chesterton resigned in 1969, while in South Africa, and was in a weak position to become a frontline leader. Following this, John O’Brien led the party. A former Conservative Party member who had supported Powell and who even joined Jordan’s British Movement, O’Brien was critical of Tyndall’s close association with overt neo-​Nazism. However, Tyndall was able to oust O’Brien by July 1972, who then broke away and took a section of National Front members to develop the National Independence Party, which offered a similar agenda to the National Front. Tyndall’s leadership was challenged though, and he was replaced in 1974 by another former member of the Conservative Party, John Kingsley Read, who again tried to distance the National Front from its neo-​Nazi associations, and for two years was in conflict with Tyndall who he tried to expel from the party in 1976. Tyndall took the matter to the High Court, and had his expulsion overturned. Reed formed a breakaway National Party that gained two seats on Blackburn Council in 1976, though this party declined thereafter. Tyndall led the National Front for the rest of the decade, and claims that the party was therefore led by a Nazi sympathiser from antifascists of the era were valid, given his previous activism. However, though National Socialism remained relevant to Tyndall there was a strong and extreme patriotic vision that focused inwardly and was less overtly neo-​Nazi compared to figures like Jordan. Michael Billig argues that the National Front had an esoteric ideology for its inner core, as well as an exoteric one to attract people to it.12 The former was based around conspiratorial antisemitism, and was central to figures such as Tyndall, Martin Webster and others at the heart of the organisation. Its exoteric ideology was more ambiguous and tried to appeal to broader racist sentiments in Britain in the 1970s. The party’s overt racism for wider public 47

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consumption was often present in its public facing materials, and at key flashpoint moments of tension. These included in 1972, when it protested against Edward Heath’s Conservative Government and its decision to allow Asians expelled by Idi Amin from Uganda to enter Britain. The party regularly took its racist motifs to the streets, and Tyndall’s strategy of ‘march and grow’ sought to draw attention to the movement though provocative, sometimes violent, marches, allowing it to develop a media profile and recruit new members. On 13 August 1977, a particularly notable demonstration by the National Front took place in Lewisham. Demonstrating under the slogan ‘Clear the Muggers off the Streets’, characteristically linking crime with immigration, the Lewisham demonstration ended in street fighting and over 200 arrests. More generally the language and practice of violence was endemic within grassroots National Front activism, a feature that Tyndall at least was happy to ignore as he felt it evoked the party’s strong stance against people of colour. The appeal on one level was to young working class men looking for a cause, yet issues such as campaigning against Ugandan Asians also helped to attract middle class supporters such as Monday Club members. The National Front hoped to make a major breakthrough in the 1979 General Election, a time when leadership of the Conservative Party had passed to Margaret Thatcher. The year before her l­ andslide, she had notoriously tried to recapture the anti-​immigration political agenda when she told World in Action that people in Britain were rightfully fearful of being ‘swamped’ by immigrants from the wider Commonwealth. Such overt endorsement of white anxieties towards people of colour helped to re-​establish the Conservatives as a party that was forcefully opposed to immigration, and took away the political space from the National Front. Meanwhile, organised antifascism had developed in the mid to later 1970s, 48

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including the investigative magazine Searchlight, the mass opposition group the Anti-​Nazi League, and the related Rock Against Racism movement. Which of these factors, Thatcher’s mainstreaming of the anti-​immigration agenda to disarm the National Front or demonstrations against the National Front by the antifascist left, had the greatest impact is debatable, and both had an influence on the National Front’s failure to win any seats in 1979. At this election, it put up 303 candidates and hyped-​up expectations of a political breakthrough, yet lost every deposit. Setbacks and successes After this major failure, the National Front then collapsed into infighting and factions. At the top of the party, Tyndall fell out with Martin Webster. He made a series of homophobic comments about Webster before resigning in 1980, founding the New National Front. In 1982, Tyndall then launched the British National Party. Meanwhile, the National Front continued, but in weakened form. Its youth wing, the Young National Front, developed a new newspaper, Bulldog, which promoted the white power music scene and youth activism. Edited by Joe Pearce, it was sold on the football terraces, and even outside schools. Pearce was jailed in 1982 for publishing material likely to promote racial hatred, and again in 1985 for conspiring to incite racial hatred. The year 1987 saw another crucial development when the founder of the white power band Skrewdriver, Ian Stuart Donaldson and his long-​time friend Nicky Crane, founded Blood & Honour. The name was clearly neo-​Nazi, taken from the Hitler Youth motto Blut und Ehre, and the underlying idea was to create a network for activists engaged with various groups to come together around a shared passion for extremist music. The groupuscular Blood & Honour network has grown 49

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exponentially in the years that followed and has been used by two competing groups in America, while others using the name can be found across Europe as well. Donaldson himself died in a car crash 1993, and conspiracy theorists within the white power music scene have viewed his death as a state-​ordered assassination, and the movement has elevated Donaldson himself to a martyr figure.13 Since this time, such music cultures have developed into new genres, from neo-​folk to martial industrial. Meanwhile by the mid-​ 1980s, a new generation, including Cambridge graduate Nick Griffin, Patrick Harrington and Derek Holland, sought to reinvent the National Front, and took charge of the dwindling organisation. An important theorist of fascism, George Mosse, once coined the term ‘scavenger ideology’ for the way this type of political extremism can synthesise a wide range of positions into its outlook, and this term seems well suited for thinking about the National Front milieu at this time.14 They developed a radical new stance, idealising the Nation of Islam and Marcus Garvey as part of a turn to Third Positionism, a type of radical fascism promoted by other European activists of the period, such as the Italian Roberto Fiore who came to Britain to avoid prosecution and mentored Griffin. This new approach praised leaders demonised by the west, such as Muammar Gaddafi. In 1988, Griffin, Harington and Holland travelled to Libya to seek funding, though returned with nothing more than copies of Ghaddafi’s Green Book to sell. For many in the National Front, praise for African political leaders was too much, and so a more traditionalist breakaway National Front formed, led by among others Andrew Brons. Its newspaper was called The Flag, and the group was often known as the Flag Group. It resumed using the National Front name after Griffin, Harrington and Holland’s branch of the National Front rebranded themselves International Third Position at the end of 50

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the decade. Over the 1990s, it dwindled in importance, and found itself part of the wider milieu, made up of a range of smaller groups and figures. These included Colin Jordan, who by this time had retired from leadership roles, but rekindled Arnold Leese’s magazine Gothic Ripples and later wrote two novellas, Merrie England 2000 and The Uprising. Meanwhile, other publications offered more intellectual perspectives, such as Michael Walker’s journal, Scorpion, which promoted aspects of the European Nouvelle Droite culture. Another variation of intellectualised prejudice was the racist Mankind Quarterly; launched in 1960 and still in print this is a quasi-​academic publication for sharing eugenicist and other pseudo-​scientific ideals. As the National Front and related groups fell into decline over the 1980s, the British National Party steadily took its place, though for its first 10 years it remained an electorally unsuccessful organisation. It fielded candidates sporadically during the 1980s, and did not contest the 1987 General Election at all. Its years under John Tyndall began by recreating much of the style of the National Front in the 1970s. Tyndall organised provocative marches to attract wider attention, and he saw publicity gained as a way to grow the party. In the public imagination it was seen as another group closely associated with street violence, limiting its appeal. Tyndall himself served four months of a year-​long prison sentence in 1986 for inciting racial hatred. Unlike the National Front, Tyndall ensured the Chairman of the BNP retained full power over the organisation, which he ran from his home in Hove. The party retained Tyndall’s focus on antisemitic conspiracism, and a strong sense of patriotism. This was no longer overtly neo-​Nazi in tenor, though it was still deeply fascist. His 1988 book The Eleventh Hour described how British society was near a point of complete destruction, and that only revolutionary approach to politics would resolve this decay. 51

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The BNP stood between supporting violence and cultivating voters. Regarding the former, it spawned an internal security group in 1992, Combat 18. The numbers 1 and 8 stood for the letters A and H, highlighting ongoing cultures of neo-​Nazism within the party, and Combat 18’s overt aggressiveness accentuated further the party’s reputation for political violence. Then, in 1993, the party gained an elected local councillor, a major breakthrough for the extreme right. Derek Beackon, campaigning on an old National Front slogan, ‘Rights for Whites’, became an elected representative for the Millwall ward of Tower Hamlets borough council and held this post for 8 months. The BNP found itself at a turning point, and decided to move away from violence, and proscribed Combat 18. Instead, it put more effort into elections and political campaigning. While no more BNP councillors were voted in until the 2000s, the electorate seemed to be ever more interested. In the 1992 General Election it gained just 7,631 votes, yet in 1997 won 35,832. In 1999, it achieved 102,647 votes in the European Elections of that year. The fortunes for British fascism seemed to be changing. In 1999, Nick Griffin challenged Tyndall as leader of the BNP, and won. With this latest shift, a somewhat modernised BNP would emerge in the 2000s as a new model for British extreme right politics. In the second half of the twentieth century, the extreme right space in Britain reflected developments found in many democratic countries. It fostered a range of small groups, groupuscules that sometimes came together and sometimes broke apart. The movement was able to generate a few larger organisations as well, notably the National Front and the British National Party. Its politics reflected a wide range of issues, from the breakup of empire to the growth of the European Economic Community and later the European Union, and often militated against the changing demographics of Britain. This messy, complex dynamic fostered new 52

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types of extreme right cultural expression, such as white power music, created new ideological variants of fascism, such as neo-​ Nazism that sought to recalibrate National Socialist ideals for a new era, and attracted a diverse range of followers. It remained a political failure, yet continued an ‘unbroken thread’ of activism connected to the years before the Second World War.

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Modernisations

When the journalist Reni Eddo-​Lodge interviewed Nick Griffin for her 2017 book Why I am no Longer Talking to White People About Race, the former BNP leader concluded their discussion by advising Eddo-​Lodge to leave Britain as the country was ‘utterly fucked’.1 Steeped in a sense that time had, almost, run out for white people, the interview pithily summarises an extreme right mindset. His reasoning relied on a conspiratorial worldview, seeing mass immigration to Britain as the product of a longstanding Europeanist plot, the Coudenhove-​Kalergi conspiracy, aided by the duplicitous mass media and serving the interests of out of touch elites. People like himself were the real victims and were in fact being ethnically cleansed by hidden forces that had decided to inflict race mixing on the masses. His hyperbolic narrative set divisive binaries against each other: the (imagined) national community versus a nefarious international order; the honest everyday people versus the corrupt elites; white people versus those of colour. His argument reverted to extremes when alleging white British people were victims of the worse crime imaginable, a hidden genocide that people of colour were both wittingly and unwittingly inflicting by breeding with each other in parts of the world where they did not belong, such 54

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as Britain, and by interbreeding with white people. Eddo-​Lodge’s reasoned efforts to challenge Griffin regarding this paranoid worldview, such as pointing out that white people remain objectively structurally advantaged in contemporary Britain in a variety of ways, were of no consequence. Such dismissal of facts in favour of stories presenting white people as victims and facing an existential threat is not surprising. The extreme right worldview hinges on the emotions evoked by narratives of white victimhood extended to such extremes. Its politics is not about establishing truths, but about the power found in telling stories, and promoting a mythology that revolves around a sense of extreme decline to draw out powerful negative and antagonistic emotional repsonses. In the 2000s such stories have found a range of new spaces and contexts for gaining traction. Liberal racism and the growth of political legitimacy Nick Griffin and other extreme right ideologues have been able to connect with new audiences in twenty-​first century Britain, in part because of the changing politics of race. While the overt racism that grew during the 1950s to the 1980s has become far less acceptable, a sense of complacency that underlying prejudices have been eradicated has set in. Although the period from the 1990s onwards can rightly be heralded as one of growing social liberalism, Aaron Winter and Aurelian Mondon set out in Reactionary Democracy how modern societies are still characterised by what they diagnose as liberal racism.2 Winter and Mondon map how a language of upholding democracy and promoting liberalism can be used to deny that racism continues to exist in less overt and easy to identify manifestations, allowing racist themes to be articulated in more ambiguous ways. This is both a problem in itself and 55

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can also be exploited by both the radical and the extreme right. Becoming adept at avoiding overt forms of illiberal racism, such as the rhetoric of the National Front in the 1970s, yet becoming more fluent in the language of liberal racism, has offered new opportunities to the extreme right. The 2000s generated a slippery yet deeply prejudicial range of views spanning the political mainstream, the radical right and the extreme right. The combination of a language of liberal tolerance and liberal racism can be seen, for example, in Labour politicians of the 2000s who were prominent when the BNP was growing. While Tony Blair certainly welcomed immigration and heralded this as a progressive shift from his predecessor, soon figures like David Blunkett learned to talk tough about ‘bogus’ asylum seekers to please right-​wing media outlets, thereby legitimising and reinforcing rather than challenging prejudices towards such powerless people. A free press is undoubtedly a cornerstone of liberal societies, yet in the 2000s expressions of liberal racism can be found widely in areas such as mass media legitimisation of anti-​ Muslim discourses. Often Muslim communities were critiqued on liberal grounds, such as a focus on conservative attitudes towards women, and so criticising Islam for regressive attitudes became a way that racist agendas towards people of colour were legitimised. Griffin’s rise to national prominence in the 2000s was clearly developed through exploiting such anxieties over Muslim communities. The terrorist attacks on 9/​11 in America, and later 7/​7 in Britain, helped to breed a climate where Muslim communities were more noticed in mainstream debates, and Islam was discussed in fearful and securitised terms. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq placed ‘British’ society in conflict with ‘Muslim’ countries. Older targets of the extreme right, such as Jewish and black communities, became less central to the recruiting discourses of the BNP, though racism towards these communities remained central to its inner ideology. 56

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In 2005, Griffin explained as follows why exploiting widely held prejudices was central to the party’s strategy as ‘With millions of our people desperately and very reasonably worried by the spread of Islam and its adherents, and with the mass media … playing “Islamophobic” messages like a scratched CD, the proper choice of enemy needn’t be left to rocket scientists’.3 He added in this article to party members that the real goal behind the scenes remained challenging a hidden Jewish conspiracy, and that the BNP still sought a political and demographic revolution should it come to power. The British National Party was able to become a more established presence for nearly a decade as from 1999. Under Griffin’s leadership, it changed its image with enough success and campaigned in local areas with enough energy to attract new voters who had become disillusioned with mainstream parties. It developed this seemingly new type of politics by reformulating itself publicly as a populist radical right party, while remaining an extreme right party rooted in neo-​Nazism privately. Across Europe, the radical right has become more successful since the 2000s, and like others in Europe Griffin drew on the model of Jean Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France. This had successfully created what Jens Rydgren calls a new ‘master frame’ for the far right in the 1980s and 1990s.4 Griffin understood this and was aware that political lines were becoming defined less by traditional notions of left and right, and some voters were seeing new divisions such as that between ideas of tradition and nationalism set against an embrace of an international, cosmopolitan modernity. As Griffin’s BNP publicly distanced itself from Tyndall’s more overt racist framing, it was governed by four key terms that defined its modernisation strategy: Freedom, Democracy, Security and Identity, the last in many ways being the most important. By talking about defending British identity from attack, Griffin reasoned, a discourse around white 57

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supremacy could be masked from the public. The party would let its rank and file know what it was about, while through new family-​ focused events like an annual Red, White and Blue festival, an idea borrowed from Le Pen, it would project outwardly a politics akin to the populist radical right. It would push at the limits of acceptable discourse publicly, but try not to overstep the mark. It also shifted away from the street-​based party of Tyndall linked to public order offences, and focused on local politics and family friendly images in the hope the party would become a respected presence in British politics. Alongside this, the shift to focusing on Muslim communities started before 9/​11, and this watershed event only served to amplify the new direction. As Nigel Copsey’s book Contemporary British Fascism explains this new politics was developed in northern mill towns at the turn of the millennium.5 One such place was Oldham. In January 2001, the Oldham Chronicle reported on the issue of Asian communities targeting white people for attacks, as police statistics had suggested that 60 per cent of racial attacks were of this nature. Many attacks by white people on Asians went unreported it should be noted. Both the BNP and the remnants of the National Front become active in Oldham in the spring of 2001, as community tensions rose. In part, these issues were heightened through divisive local press stories and unhelpful police messaging. Things came to a head on 26 May, when extreme right activists including those linked to the BNP and Combat 18 gathered in Oldham in the hope of setting off violence. Attacks from Asian youths ensued, and in the days that followed the Oldham Chronicle’s offices were firebombed. As Copsey highlights, the BNP targeted places like Oldham, and also Burnley, areas that had a significant minority population, were in economic decline, and had substantial issues of depravation and high crime rates. In the June 2001 General 58

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Election, Griffin stood in Oldham West and Royton and won 16.4 per cent of the vote, while Steve Smith stood in Burnley and won 11.3 per cent. Both were standout results in comparison with previous elections and were taken as a sign that the party was finding a new way of developing its politics, focused on local activism and changing the party’s image. Media coverage soon grew around the BNP’s curious new level of interest, with Griffin appearing on Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman, and Radio 4 with Rod Liddle, among other outlets, while conflict between Asian and white communities developed in other northern towns. A highly critical episode of Panorama from 2001 exposed much of the repositioning of the BNP as disingenuous, but this exposure of underlying extremism had a limited impact. Griffin’s presence was being normalised by the media and his party was increasing its electoral support, often taking votes from disaffected Labour voters. A young activist, Paul Golding, edited a new magazine, Identity, a typically Griffin-​era BNP publication. Golding sometimes discussed race in biological terms, but more commonly developed a discourse around a Christian Britain defending itself against invasion, and especially threatening were Muslims. In the local elections of 2002, the BNP gained four councillors, including three in Burnley. By 2003 it had 13. In the European elections of 2004, the party did not gain any MEPs, but it won over 800,000 votes. Clearly it was finding a new level of demand for its politics. Mike Wait’s recent book On Burnley Road explores the rise of the BNP from a first-​hand perspective, as he witnessed their political breakthroughs. His analysis frames the issues that were emerging in Burnley at this time as reflective of wider shifts that have become more prevalent in the years since and were reflective of a local level disillusionment with national politics, including from the Labour Party.6 59

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By 2006 the BNP had gained 44 councillors, an unprecedented level of political success. In 2008, Richard Barnbrook was elected to the London Assembly, the year that saw mainstream politics rocked by the expenses scandal where MPs were seen as abusing a system for their own personal benefit, and the fallout from the financial crisis start to take effect. By 2009, the BNP representation had increased to over 50 local councillors, appealing to disaffected voters, often in areas just beyond racially mixed regions of towns, as the only solution to a broken political system. This extreme right mainstreaming was in part achieved by its activists but was also driven by a wider embrace of such agendas. Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin have analysed the electoral successes of the far right in the twenty-​first century, and highlight a new demand for what they define as ‘national populism’.7 They argue nationalistic anti-​establishment parties have grown in recent times due to four factors found among voters in Britain and elsewhere. The first is growing distrust in the existing political elites, and here the BNP benefitted from working class disillusionment with the New Labour project. The second is a dealignment with traditional voting patterns, as voters become increasingly happy to experiment with alternative parties, especially in second order elections like European elections, an area of particular success for the BNP. The third is a sense of the economic system not being aligned to their own interests, so fuelling interest in parties that offer radical alternatives, such as calling for withdrawal from the EU. Finally, they stress that voters of the far right are motivated by overcoming a sense of the breakup of older ways of life, such as responding to immigration, and see their identity as under attack. The emergence of these factors certainly helps explain the BNP’s limited growth, but they also explain the rise of a much more successful radical right politics in the form of UKIP under Nigel Farage. By the 2010s, 60

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this party overtook the BNP as the far right alternative credible enough within the mainstream to appear legitimate, the radical right dominating over the extreme right. The BNP’s biggest triumph electorally was gaining two MEPs in 2009, Griffin himself and Andrew Brons, both stalwarts of the British extreme right, posed as democrats and entered the European Parliament to network with likeminded others, especially from France, Italy and Hungary. This was exceptional by British extreme right standards, but ultimately their ‘breakthrough’ was also very limited in terms of political impact, and the party was not able to capitalise further on its growth. The extreme right’s influence on the political mainstream into the 2010s was notable though. Paul Stocker’s book English Uprising has examined how many ideas from the extreme right’s past found their way into mainstream debates around Brexit by the mid 2010s. The BNP’s election commitments of the 2000s regarding withdrawing from the European Union, for example, now seem commonplace.8 The EDL and the ‘counter-​Jihad’ extreme right As the BNP reached its height, another type of activism returned: mass street demonstrations. There had been limited forms of street protest in the 2000s, as Griffin wanted to disassociate his party with such protests and promote his family friendly image instead. Smaller groups, such as March for England, had developed street-​level protests that focused on themes framing Muslims as terrorist threats alongside patriotic events such as St George’s Day celebrations. However, these events tended to be small and attracted limited media coverage. Such protests were some of the first examples of what analysts such as Alexander Meleagrou-​Hitchens have referred to as the ‘counter-​Jihad’ movement in Britain.9 This type 61

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of extreme right activism grew from specific grievances towards Islam, and unlike Griffin’s BNP were not primarily motivated by antisemitism and neo-​Nazism. Sometimes those linked to this ‘counter-​Jihad’ extreme right milieu have even promoted Israeli interests to demonise a Muslim politics, a type of positioning that organisations such as the BNP simply could not adopt. While small-​scale for most of the 2000s, on 10 March 2009, at a homecoming parade in Luton for the Royal Anglian Regiment, an Islamist protest accused the soldiers of being ‘butchers’. They in turn were attacked by local patriots outraged by this provocative stunt, including Kevin Carroll, a co-​founder of what grew from this flashpoint moment into the English Defence League. Luton typified the types of location where the far right could find fertile territory by the 2000s. Its industrial heyday was dealt a blow when the Vauxhall car factory was closed in 2002, a facility that had attracted significant migration to the town in the postwar years. Some in white communities felt they stood in isolation to the newer, migrant communities, became resentful and by this point believed Muslim communities were prioritised for municipal investment over white areas. On the back of the conflict in March, over the spring and summer of 2009, Carroll and a masked leader figure who called himself ‘Tommy Robinson’ developed a grassroots protest network into the English Defence League. Others linked to the group, such as the early prominent Sikh activist Guramit Singh, looked very different to those in previous extreme right groups. The emergent EDL argued it had nothing to do with the extreme right, yet like many others adopted the language of liberalism for racist ends. It even claimed to be a human rights organisation. It boasted of Jewish, LGBT and Women’s divisions, to highlight its embrace of diversity, which it contrasted with a caricatured depiction of Islam as intolerant. The EDL exploited 62

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the emergent social media tools, especially Facebook, to help keep their network connected, and to help it grow. As it expanded, the EDL used a range of other online tools to develop its profile. On eBay it sold hoodies, polo shirts, England flags and other paraphernalia, while activists developed their own blog sites. The EDL drew on football hooligan culture to help expand, and existing networks such as Casuals United and March for England were also important for the initial development of the network. This relationship between football hooliganism and activism was epitomised by its masked leader, ‘Tommy Robinson’, who used the name of a well-​ known, violent football hooligan from Luton Town’s Men-​In-​Gear ‘firm’ to help appeal to this audience. Its ambiguities helped it drew media attention, for example an ­episode of Newsnight from October 2009 featured an interview with its masked leader, ‘Tommy Robinson’, who burned a Nazi flag to, albeit threateningly, symbolise the movement’s rejection of fascist racism. Yet this messaging was dealt a blow in July 2010 when the antifascist magazine Searchlight revealed ‘Tommy Robinson’ as Stephen Yaxley-​Lennon, a former BNP member who also had a conviction for violent assault. In the following months, the EDL tried to develop a more coherent organisational dynamic. Some activists linked to the social movement, which lacked a clear membership structure, by this point found themselves in court, and increasingly the EDL became associated with criminality targeting Muslim communities. One example typifies how the group helped legitimise localised, spontaneous Islamophobic criminality. In 2011, four men were convicted in Nottingham of several offences related to putting a pig’s head atop a pole at a site where a mosque was being constructed. ‘No Mosque Here EDL Notts’ was spray-​painted on the pavement nearby.10 At a local level there was much undirected EDL-​related activity, such as local flash protests. Yaxley-​Lennon and his organisation 63

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may not have directed such localised initiatives, but his rhetoric clearly gave licence to hate and often criminality. One notable speech at a static protest in London, recorded for dissemination on social media, saw him tell ‘every single Muslim watching this video on YouTube’ that on 7/​7 they ‘got away’ with ‘killing and maiming British citizens’ and that the EDL had ‘built a network’ across the country in response. He then added, the ‘Islamic community will feel the full force of the English Defence League if we see any of our citizens killed, maimed or hurt on British soil’.11 The binary division here between British and Muslim is clear, and for Lennon people could not be both. The public conceit from the leadership that the EDL was only concerned with Islamist terrorism, a position also genuinely held by some activists, fell away in such moments. By 2011, the EDL boasted over 130 regional divisions on its Facebook pages, and according to data analysis by Mark Littler and Jamie Bartlett at Demos it was likely to have gained over 25,000 online supporters at its height,12 though this is distinct from paying members of the type attracted to the BNP. Its main protests were often themed, and they invariably focused on Muslim communities in localities. One large protest in Dudley in April 2010 was attended by around 2,000 supporters, and specifically sought to oppose the building of a new mosque in the town. This ended in brawling as EDL protestors clashed with police and even their own stewards, leading to 12 arrests. Policing for this one event alone was estimated at around £150,000. A month earlier a similar protest in Bolton saw the EDL clash directly with antifascists, and here there were more arrests, and disruption was felt throughout the town centre. Policing for this demonstration was estimated at over £300,000. By 2011, interest was declining, but EDL found new ways to develop its message. In May 2011, for example, it mounted a high-​profile demonstration in Blackpool, highlighting the case of Charlene 64

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Downs to focus on allegations that Muslim men were grooming white girls and young women while local authorities were fearful to investigate.13 Outrage focused on ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ became a fertile concern for the organisation for the next few years, not least as there was a degree of truth to allegations of failings by local authorities. Notably, the EDL was silent on cases of white gangs engaging in similar criminality, and the criminality of many of its activists. Breakups and reconfigurations The EDL was in clear decline by 2012, and Lennon himself left in 2013 claiming that the movement was beset by racists, so he and Carroll would step down. He also announced he would work with the counter-​extremism thinktank Quilliam to promote tolerance, though this was not a long-​lasting relationship. By 2022 while some drawn to the EDL at its height are just about still active online, it is unable to mount demonstrations and is certainly not at the forefront of current extreme right activism. The splinter groups that developed, such as the North East Infidels and the North West Infidels, tended to take a more overtly neo-​Nazi inflection. Other ‘Infidel’ groups also broke away, often localised and short-​lived. The BNP ’s collapse in the 2010s was also as dramatic as its growth, though it helped spawn more significant newer groups. The turn against the party came in 2010. Following his rise to MEP, Griffin was riding the peak of mainstream interest in his politics, and was famously invited onto Question Time in October 2009. This event, watched by 8 million people, is often remembered for Griffin’s failure to convince a highly hostile audience, and the episode has often been pointed to as the BNP’s undoing. This is problematic, and such media exposure if anything benefitted the 65

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BNP rather than hindered it. Griffin was again drawing on Le Pen’s strategies, as in 1984 the leader of the French Front National had appeared on mainstream media after an election breakthrough and was able to significantly increase his party’s appeal. Playing the role of outsider and appearing as the victim to the mainstream elite’s ire was part of Griffin’s media strategy as well, and notably the party picked up members after this appearance. Griffin hoped to become an outspoken regular on the show, a position later developed masterfully by Nigel Farage for the radical right not the extreme right. Question Time was not a victory for Griffin, but nor did such exposure destroy the party. The party dug its own grave. In the 2010 General Election the BNP won a surprising 563,743 votes, far more than the 192,746 of the 2005 election. Such a result perhaps showed potential for further growth, if it was up to professionalising further. However, this level of support came despite a campaign that revealed an already fundamentally broken organisation. On the eve of the election, a leading campaign organiser Bob Bailey was filmed violently attacking teenagers, helping to dissuade some voters. Yet before this final episode, other controversies had included: leading activist Mark Collett being arrested on suspicion of plotting to kill Nick Griffin; a former senior figure, Alby Walker, stating the Holocaust denial culture of the BNP meant he had decided to stand as an independent; and the party’s website being shut down days before election day, replaced by a message from its manager, Simon Bennett, stating both Griffin and the party’s fundraiser Jim Dowson were ‘pathetic, desperate and incompetent’. Unforced errors also included an election broadcast featuring the logo for Marmite, to highlight people either loved or hated the BNP. As a consequence, the party was taken to court by Unilever for copyright infringements, leading to substantial costs. Grassroots campaigning was also crucial in certain areas. The BNP 66

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was targeting several areas to gain an MP, and this included Griffin challenging Labour MP Margaret Hodge in the seat of Barking, an area where the party had already had significant successes in gaining local councillors. A fervent door-​to-​door campaign by antifascists and opposition party activists helped to defeat the BNP. Failure to build on the momentum of 2009 was followed by clear decline over the next four years. Griffin became more detached as he sought to build European links. Finally, in September 2014 he was expelled from the party, having already that year failed to regain his MEP seat, been replaced as party leader and been declared bankrupt. Subsequently led by Adam Walker, a man lacking the media presence of Griffin, in the 2015 General Election the party’s vote fell by 97 per cent. In the 2019 General Election, it won just 510 votes, and while still active it is little more than a website, that itself is a shadow of its earlier version. As the extreme right space in Britain has reconfigured in the wake of the breakup of these two larger more impactful groups, over the course of the 2010s it has returned to its more normal state of being groupuscular, a loose movement set across a wide range of small, marginalised groups, creating complex a culture of activism. The BNP’s legacy The failures of the BNP in the 2010s led to a number of insignificant splinter groups, including Andrew Brons’s British Democratic Party, founded in 2013. Led for a short time by a British fascist MEP, it still stands for local elections, picking up a handful of votes. The magazine Heritage and Destiny is another legacy of the BNP. Founded by Mark Cotterill, who in 1998 established the American friends of the British National Party as a BNP fundraising outfit, it reports widely on the extreme right scene. A bi-​monthly magazine, Heritage and Destiny, has achieved over 100 editions and offers 67

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wide ranging commentary on issues such as election performances, essays and book reviews related to the movement, and obituaries. A more significant breakaway is Paul Golding’s Britain First, co-​founded with Jim Dowson in 2011, though Dowson later left in 2014 because he felt the group became too aggressive. A former BNP councillor, Golding used Britain First to develop his theme of defending an idealised Christian Britain from threats from a supposedly invading Islam. This included Golding and others in Britain First uniforms entering mosques, and filming their invasions before putting the footage on their social media pages.14 Golding was issued with a court order to stop this activity, and went to jail in December 2016 for breaking this order, the first of several sentences.15 It has also developed paramilitary ‘Christian patrols’. Like the EDL, Britain First raised the issue of Muslim men grooming white women as a central, emotive part of its narrative opposing Islamic culture in Britain. As with the BNP, Britain First has also focused on elections, including the 2014 European Elections and in the 2016 London Mayoral election, though these were more clearly efforts to garner publicity than realistic campaigns for office. In 2019, it was fined by the Electoral Commission for various offences, such as undeclared party donations.16 Its deputy leader until 2019 was Jadya Franzen, who had been active in the EDL before joining Golding’s party, and she also helped develop its public messages in provocative ways before departing in the wake of revelations of abuse she faced from Golding.17 A marginally more successful political party in terms of electoral impact is For Britain, which again has emerged in part from the remnants of the BNP. Led by former UKIP leadership hopeful Anne Marie Waters, For Britain has received celebrity endorsement from the singer Morrissey, and like others in the modern extreme

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right space has clear focus on attacking Muslims and Islam. Using a language of liberalism to promote intolerance of Islam, Waters claims that Islam itself is incompatible with western notions of freedom, and its presence in Britain therefore needs to be curtailed. Her party’s literature has also argued that white British people will be a minority in the country within the lifetime of those living now. For Britain has been able to elect two local councillors in 2019, including former BNP member Julien Leppert for Epping Forrest District Council, a man who once while with the BNP targeted Jewish areas with Islamophobic material depicting Muslim men holding signs saying ‘God Bless Hitler’. In 2021 local elections its candidates included former BNP councillors, such as Graham Partner and Lawrence Rustem. Its website also boasts several parish councillors.18 Another more recent group to emerge from the wake of the BNP is Mark Collett’s Patriotic Alternative, which was founded in 2019. So far, Collett’s group has focused on developing a cultural impact rather than seeking success at the ballot box. During COVID-​19 lockdowns, which has defined its limited period of activism, it put out a range of leaflets alleging the virus is a state conspiracy, and has gone as far as to develop alternate educational resources for use in home-​schooling.19 It has not been able to distance itself from the more overt racism of the BNP, as Collett’s interest in Nazi ideas are well documented, including his praise for Hitler in the 2002 Channel 4 documentary Young, Nazi and Proud. The group has attracted interest from activists also linked to a range of other groups, including the remnants of the British National Party, the Scottish Defence League and Blood & Honour. Its positions include strongly critiquing immigration, and material claiming white people will become a minority in Britain by around 2060.

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Publishers and cultural networks The extreme right space has developed a fertile range of alternate publishing. Longstanding magazines of the extreme right include Candour, Britain’s longest lasting extreme right publication, now published by the A. K. Chesterton Trust. The website for the trust sells a range of materials to help keep the memory of Chesterton’s activism alive. The extreme right also has a range of specialist book publishers. These include Steven Books, linked to the League of St George, which sells a wide range of books and pamphlets spanning texts related to the history of the Third Reich, to books about fascism movements and their leaders, to tracts on race theory, to reprints of magazines by British fascist groups like the Imperial Fascist League. Another outlet is Castle Hill Publishers, an outlet that promotes Holocaust denial material. Its website offers ebooks and audiobooks, some free, including texts such as Arthur Butz’s ‘classic’ of the genre, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Most of these publishers are fairly old fashioned in tone, but not all. Among the most dynamic is Arktos Media, a publisher registered in Britain that disseminates a wide range of books and other material in English and other languages too. It has a much more sophisticated website that includes its online Arktos Journal, a podcast series called Interregnum, audiobooks and music, as well as a wide range of books. These are also diverse, including those that influenced the Nazis themselves, like Arthur Van Den Bruek’s Germany’s Third Empire, texts by fascist thinkers like Julius Evola, who was widely read especially by Italian terrorists in the 1970s, and key works by Nouvelle Droite thinkers like Alain de Benoist. It also publishes works by people such as Markus Willinger, whose book Generation Identity has helped give shape to the Identitarian movement in Europe. 70

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Arktos UK’s head is Gregory Lauder-​Frost, who is also Vice President of the Traditional Britain Group, which was founded in 2001. The Traditional Britain Group has endorsed assisted repatriation, and targeted black public figures such as Doreen Lawrence, who it argues should not be a peer due to the 1701 Act of Settlement.20 It claims it offers nothing more than a traditional Toryism that is no longer found in the modern Conservative Party, and echoes the sentiments of figures such as Enoch Powell. It plays another important function in the extreme right space, hosting intellectualised talks, dinners and conferences bringing together a wide range of figures. People who have addressed the group’s events include American white supremacist Richard Spencer, Austrian leader of the Generation Identity movement Martin Sellner, right-​wing philosopher Roger Scruton, high-​ profile controversialist Katie Hopkins, For Britain leader Anne Marie Waters, Maerton Gyöngyösi from Hungary’s far right party Jobbik, and many more. Numerous recordings of these talks remain available on YouTube. Another group offering talks and online content, the London Forum, was active in the 2010s, though in May 2018 its leader, Jeremy Bedford-​Turner, was jailed following a speech where he called for Britain to be ‘freed form Jewish control’.21 While Arktos, the Traditional Britain Group and some speakers at the London Forum have promoted aspects of the Identitarian ideology found more strongly in continental Europe, discrete groups have tried to develop this brand of extreme right activism in the UK as well. For example, in 2017, a Generation Identity UK group was established, officially launched when a banner with the slogan ‘Defend London, Stop Islamisation’ was unfurled in Westminster Bridge, London. The movement drew on European counterparts that had developed in France, Germany, Austria and elsewhere from the 2000s. They created a new type of youth-​orientated fascism that combined the intellectualised racism of figures like Alain 71

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de Benoist with direct action stunts. Benoist was the founder of the French Nouvelle Droite in 1968, an extreme right response to the new left of the 1960s explored by leading academics such as Tamir Bar-​On.22 Benoist’s ideas have included differential or cultural racism, which ostensibly promotes respect for otherness and difference. However, while arguing against globalisation and calling for all cultural identities to be respected, his philosophy claims that preserving white racial and cultural ‘purity’ is necessary and that those who promote multiculturalism are racist as they seek to destroy all races and different cultures. Steeped in such intellectualised, coded racism, Generation Identity UK was active until 2019, when it renamed itself the Identitarian Movement. This was a bid to distance itself from the wider European movement which felt their British colleagues had become too close to older racist activism. In January 2020, the group was then dissolved, though more recently newer groups again drawing on the more intellectualised Identitarian outlook have emerged. These include Local Matters and Identity England. So far, the efforts to develop this more intellectual, youth-­orientated ­variant of extreme right activism in the UK has been a failure, though those drawn to it have been present in larger street demonstrations developed by other groups. New movements impacting on the streets and online The almost complete breakdown of the English Defence League has led to new vehicles for broadly similar anti-​Muslim activism linked to football firm networks. The group most akin to the EDL is the Democratic Football Lads Alliance, a network that emerged from the short-​lived Football Lads Alliance, which itself grew in response to the Islamist terror attacks of 2017. Democratic Football 72

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Lads Alliance rallies included one in London in October 2017 that attracted over 30,000 people, a number far higher than was ever achieved by the EDL. The breakaway DFLA has used the slogan ‘Against All Extremism’. However, the far right and ‘counter-​Jihad’ qualities of the movement are also clear, as its public messaging focused on presenting Muslims as a security threat, combined with a strong patriotic narrative, in ways that attracted groups from across the far right spectrum to its rallies.23 In 2020 its network found a new cause of defending statues against Black Lives Matter protests. The network is fragmented, like the EDL before it, but its spontaneous growth shows that large street protests remain possible, and new issues can provoke a quick mobilisation even if organisations like the DFLA itself fall by the wayside. The DFLA has also repeatedly supported Stephen Yaxley-​ Lennon’s activism as he has continued to develop his ‘Tommy Robinson’ persona, steeped in similar messages to his time with the EDL. After moving away from the orbit of Quilliam, in 2016 he tried to develop a British version of the counter-​Jihad street movement Pegida that had found significant support in Germany in the wake of the panic over migration to Europe that grew in the mid 2010s. While Pegida UK was a failure, Yaxley-​Lennon’s Tommy Robinson persona grew in stature again when he became a reporter for the Canadian media outlet Rebel Media. He started to report on terror attacks in 2017 and in May also broadcast a report outside Canterbury Crown Court, where he was arrested for being in contempt of court. The case related to an alleged rape, and his actions threatened a successful prosecution. He claimed he was being silenced. He repeated this action in May 2018, and broadcast a report over Facebook as a jury considered its verdict. Yaxley-​Lennon was jailed immediately for 13 months for breaking reporting restrictions and putting a trial at risk, but was freed 73

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on appeal after two months. He was then put on trial at the Old Bailey, and finally sentenced to nine months in July 2019,24 though was released after 9 weeks. The publicity he gained through these endeavours helped raise his profile, and while framing himself as a free speech martyr he received support from UKIP’s then leader, Gerrard Batten, as well as significant international funding to help build his ‘brand’. Batten’s support suggests that UKIP’s own trajectory has veered towards the extreme right after the departure of Farage. For his part, Yaxley-​Lennon has used this exposure to help attract attention to his alternate news website Tommy Robinson News. Though this is now a declining rather than thriving online presence, and in March 2021 he filed for bankrupcy, his profile in Britain and America remains significant. Robinson is the most well-​known among a much wider range of influencers using streamed video and other online content to communicate that also includes Colin Roberson, Morgoth’s Review, Paul Watson, and Carl Benjamin, explored in more depth in later chapters. The neo-​Nazi fringe Openly neo-​Nazi groups are also still active. These include older organisations such as the National Front, which has declined dramatically since its heyday and in the 2000s has tried to style itself as a more hard-​line variant of the British National Party by promoting overly white supremacist ideals such as David Lane’s 14 Words slogan. In 2020, two key stalwarts of the extreme right, who in their final years were linked to the National Front, Richard Edmonds and Eddie Morrison, both died. The organisation looks largely defunct, as it has done for several years, though as is often the case with these groups this has not led to its total demise either, and its brand name can carry an appeal for some. 74

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Another pro-​Nazi group originally founded in the 1960s, the British Movement, is also marginal but has become more active in pockets across the country, including in London and the Midlands. Led by Steve Frost, it has an online presence, such as its Sunwheel blog and a Telegram page, while its main campaigning activities are limited to putting up offensive stickers. It also often runs an annual Sunwheel festival and has links to the Blood & Honour music network. This too is a group which retains its online presence, though has been largely inactive in Britain despite the ongoing dynamism of Blood & Honour activism internationally. Some activists have engaged with ideas of creating entirely separate white enclaves, for example, in the 2010s, a few have discussed developing British variants of the Pioneer Little Europe idea of self-​supporting whiteonly communities. The white power music scene has certainly declined in scale in the 2010s, and it is less profitable now sales of CDs have been replaced by online streaming. Even in recent times some events have been considerable. In 2016, a two-​day festival in Haddenam, Cambridgeshire, saw around 350 people attend, the majority from abroad, to mark the death of the network’s founder, Ian Stuart Donaldson. A final aspect of the British extreme right that has developed in the 2010s is a new wave of neo-​Nazi youth cultures, related but distinct from older forms of neo-​Nazism. The first group in this vein, often also dubbed ‘accelerationists’ as their ideals seek to speed up the collapse of liberal democracy and capitalism to usher in a new era of white supremacy, was National Action. It was created in 2013, in part from the remnants of the Young BNP. Its founders Benjamin Raymond and Alex Davies were university students seeking to reinvent overtly Nazi agendas in a way that exploited the internet and echoed Nazi youth movements in Europe. They rejected the middle-​aged profile of the BNP, and also the heavy drinking 75

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laddism of the EDL, and sought something strikingly different. Its early ideological materials included a booklet called Action, which called for political revolution, and even idealised Leninism as a revolutionary model to copy. It argued that if a small band of dedicated believers were able to take over Russia in a time of extreme crisis, the same thing could happen for National Action, if Britain should even experience a similar catastrophe. It established links with likeminded American activists who developed similar groups such as Atomwaffen Division and later The Base. It developed a range of racist stunts, striking social media content and training camps for its young activists. National Action was proscribed in 2016, following its idealisation of terrorism. Despite prosecutions for many of its key activists including Raymond himself in November 2021, the neo-​Nazi accelerationist youth culture was reconfigured in new organisations, including Scottish Dawn, System Resistance Network and Sonnenkreig Division, all of which have also been proscribed. Related to this milieu is a neo-​Nazi satanic organisation called Order of the Nine Angles, whose leading figures include David Myatt, an older figure whose activism started in the 1970s. This cultic movement has also had influence on accelerationists elsewhere, including in America. Such esoteric themes can confer a sense of deeper meaning that appeal to some drawn to extreme right spaces, helping some within this culture consider their activism as part of a wider cosmic order and an alternative type of faith. This whirlwind tour through many of the most recent extreme right groupuscules, networks and figures, concludes the ‘History’ section of the book. It has shown the diversity of activism, past and present, from the extreme right. Despise such variety, there are a number of common themes, such as racism, opposition to demographic change and conspiratorial outlooks that are found across 76

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this movement, past and present. Today, its diversity continues, and it is important to recognise the ongoing groupuscular nature of the extreme right. The chapter started with Nick Griffin, and notably he too has a new venture. He is editor of Britannia, the magazine of Jayda Franzen’s British Freedom Party. Their coming together epitomises the ever-​shifting allegiances, relationships and groupings found within the extreme right space. There is not one single organisation that dominates. Rather, there is a wide range of options to engage different activists. The cultic nature of the Order of the Nine Angles is a world away from, say, Yaxley-​Lennon’s much more accessible presentation of himself as a free speech martyr, which itself is highly distinct from the quasi-​Tory intellectualism of the Traditional Britain Group, which is different from the more party-​political focused groups such as For Britain. Like Dr Who’s Tardis, from the outside the extreme right space looks like a small world, but once inside it is also a highly complex one, and comprehensively mapping the shifts and changes of its activism would be a labyrinthine task.

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According to Oswald Mosley, in a recorded speech from 1938, his fascists ‘have lit a flame that the ages shall not extinguish’, adding with a quiver of emotion, ‘Guard that sacred flame, my brother Blackshirts, until it illuminates Britain and lights again the paths of mankind’. The Comrades in Struggle speech these quotes are taken from is regularly recycled, and notably it presents fascist ideals as a mission for followers to share in, one of fundamental renewal set against an old way of thinking. Should it be victorious, Britain would be reborn. The speech was not just relevant to interwar fascists, and has been repeated by many since, including online spaces today. One recent comment to a YouTube video featuring the speech set to music reflected the emotional power of Mosley, exclaiming ‘This gives me goosebumps’.1 Leadership in the extreme right takes many forms. One of the traditional notions of leadership in the extreme right is that epitomised by Mosley, the charismatic leader, someone able to inspire a large crowd through the use of powerful rhetoric. Yet in many ways a figure like Colin Jordan was also an archetypal British fascist leader. Hardly charismatic in the same way, he was a founder of, and activist in, numerous fascist groups from the 1940s to the 1970s, while also cultivating various 78

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international networks to bring together disparate activists. In later life he published a magazine, Gothic Ripples, to try and influence others. He also engaged in stunts, wrote articles, made headlines, and went to prison in the name of a cause to which he dedicated his entire life. Yet he has also been all but forgotten, apart from among a few academic specialists and sections of the white nationalist movement. Leadership is a complex phenomenon and needs careful conceptualisation. To lead means to exert influence on others. Within the variegated, groupuscular dynamics of the extreme right ‘leadership’ happens in many different ways and is certainly more diverse than just the guidance offered by those at the head of organisations, like Mosley, Jordan or Nick Griffin. Leadership is developed by those at other levels of organised groups and networks, and influence can also be achieved through expressing powerful ideas as well as ongoing organisation and instigating action. Thinking about leadership styles and approaches in its many forms is crucial to understand how this milieu interacts, and develops new modes of activism. Charismatic leadership One of the standard terms for assessing leadership within the far right is ‘charisma’. But what is charisma? How can any leader really be described as ‘charismatic’? The sociologist Max Weber helped shape this way of discussing political leaders. In works such as his major lecture from 1918, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, Weber explained that, as societies modernised, politics became defined by a mixture of two types of legitimacy: legal-​bureaucratic and charismatic, which superseded a traditional type of leadership justified through tradition, such as monarchies. Legal-​bureaucratic was a new type 79

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of rational leadership, given parameters through the rules and structures of modern liberal democratic states, and their political bureaucracies. Charismatic leadership had always been present, but Weber argued this was taking on new forms in the early twentieth century as people with extraordinary personal characteristics appealed to the masses on the level of emotion.2 Charismatic leaders were exemplary figures, who embodied a mission shared by their followers, and whose lives personified this cause. The idea of the charismatic leader has been much debated ever since and has been applied to figures as diverse as Mussolini, Hitler and Trump. Importantly, Ann Ruth Willner argues in her classic analysis The Spellbinders that leaders themselves do not really have charisma, but rather this is something conferred upon them by their followers.3 Many of Britain’s extreme right leaders have entertained some hope of being similarly charismatic, by getting others to ‘believe’ in their ideas and by creating a theatrical politics to draw out the emotions of followers. Graham Macklin has written an extraordinarily detailed book, Failed Fuehrers, that demonstrates the many ways in which British fascist leaders, from Arnold Leese and Oswald Mosley to John Tyndall and Nick Griffin, were historically diverse, yet were all restricted by common inability to rise above marginal levels of appeal.4 Indeed, the only leader to successfully develop anything approaching a significant charismatic community of followers was Oswald Mosley, whose rallies and appearances were styled to attract the masses in a similar way to continental fascisms of the period. However, whereas Mussolini and Hitler led states, at his height Mosley was able to command more limited mass audiences in buildings like Olympia in London. He developed a following in the tens of thousands at best, hardly on the same scale in other words. Nevertheless, Mosley drew out an impressively high degree of personal dedication from some who remained believers 80

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throughout their lives, well after the BUF had failed, such as Jeffrey Hamm. Direct comparison with the exceptional cases of Italy and Germany is also unfair, as interwar Britain lacked the social context of widespread crisis found elsewhere that led to very large numbers of people turning to an alternate politics offering national revolutionary solutions. Moreover, there was limited uptake of Hitler’s cult in reality, and many in interwar Germany did not worship him like a god either. Other British leaders in later generations have certainly tried following the traditional interwar fascist model of the charismatic leader drawing around himself a mass party. Perhaps most notably here was John Tyndall. In his public performances, he too clearly wanted to embody the emotive, masculine leader whose life personified his dedication to the cause, and aimed to give speeches that entertained the converted as they built to a crescendo. However, Tyndall was simply not electrifying in the same way as even Mosley could be, and his charismatic powers were highly limited at best. One useful term for describing the types of limited charisma found especially within the British extreme right is ‘coterie charisma’, a distinction for assessing charisma proposed by Roger Eatwell. Whereas the more successful charismatic leaders, like Hitler, were able to appeal well beyond their own organisations and develop a widespread appeal, a charismatic community, the phenomenon of coterie charismatic leader is more relevant for discussing the British extreme right. These leaders embody the sense of mission for the faithful, and project a sense of going above and beyond the average person for the cause, but their charismatic bonds only really extend to those in their immediate circle, to their coterie of fellow activists.5 To draw out the distinction, it is possible to make a good case for seeing the radical right politician Nigel Farage as a type of 81

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charismatic leader in Britain in the 2010s. He was able to generate a wider charismatic community of support, evoked a sense of ‘mission’ to restore a sense of power to Britain through a major project, Brexit, and could connect emotively with sectors of the public to appeal well beyond the UKIP faithful through his personal embodiment of the Brexit cause. Regularly pictured with pints, tweed jackets and an ever-​present blokeyness, he performed the charismatic role in powerful ways. However, it is not possible to make the case that his extreme right contemporary, Nick Griffin, was rarely seen as a living embodiment of a wider cause among the wider public in a way that made them sympathise with it, though a few did and so some within the BNP in the 2000s saw him in this way. It would also make sense to discuss Stephen Yaxley-​Lennon’s political persona, ‘Tommy Robinson’, as a charismatic embodiment of a cause. However, while more powerful than Griffin’s profile, in terms of its significant but limited level of appeal he too is better seen as a type of coterie charismatic leader, rather than suggesting his appeal has extended much further than this. Such coterie charisma can on occasion draw out thousands, even tens of thousands, of people onto the streets, as seen during Lennon’s leadership of the EDL, and more recently through the support he received from formally independent networks, such as DFLA. However, while well known through ongoing media reports of his interactions with the law, he has failed to penetrate more deeply into the social consciousness. The Griffin and Lennon cases help reveal some further issues with reliance on the charismatic leader phenomenon. Maintaining a sense of energy around the ‘Tommy Robinson’ character’s leadership of the EDL, at Lennon’s own admission was hard work to maintain. Continuing on an ongoing basis to embody his organisation’s mission placed huge strains on him. The ability to evoke an affective dimension from a wider band of followers needs constant 82

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refreshing, and will go stale over time if this is not achieved. Charisma, therefore, is not a static phenomenon found within the leader himself or herself, but rather something that can both grow and decline, especially if not worked on. Also, for any organisation based on a charismatic leadership, even at the more limited level of internal coterie charisma, the departure of a central figure can quickly lead to collapse. The English Defence League was not able to find a new leader after Lennon and Carroll’s departure in 2013, and the BNP was unable to recalibrate following Griffin’s departure. Depending on a charismatic leader can reap rewards for political organisations, but it can also prove very high risk. Stalwart leaders and female leadership Sometimes, coterie charismatic figures operate within movements, rather than leading them, inspiring their fellow activists. This could be said about William Joyce, a well-​known BUF public speaker in the 1930s who could command an audience, and who in the hands of the British press became Lord Haw Haw during the Second World War when he tried to influence British public opinion from Germany. Whether this was in any way ‘charismatic’, or simply meant he had a high profile as he was widely mocked in the British press, is debatable, but in the 1930s he was a potent and able public speaker, and was used as such by the BUF commanding respect from others. Joyce was a man who, like others, devoted most of his adult life to his political cause, and this quality alone can be inspiring, a living embodiment of the mission. With this in mind, an often-​forgotten category of leadership is what we might call the stalwart leaders, the longstanding figures in the movement who have a wider profile but cannot really be seen as charismatics. 83

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These stalwart leaders often dedicate their lives to furthering the extreme right cause. A. K. Chesterton is another example of someone who was not a particularly charismatic leader but clearly was a man who devoted his life to the extreme right in ways that were highly influential. His ‘career’ spanned time as a BUF activist and leading propagandist, organiser of British fascism when it was suppressed during the Second World War, founder of the League of Empire Loyalists, and later originator of the National Front. Biographers such as Luke LeCras highlight that his many contributions to the movement over decades certainly helped to sustain and recreate a bigoted extreme right milieu.6 Chesterton was a figure who many respected within the movement, and he also helped to cultivate younger activists such as Tyndall and Jordan. There are many others whose collective energies are crucial to understanding the extreme right. Such figures often operate on the borderline between external visibility and internal direction, and are central to extreme right organisations, often becoming active in several groups over a lifetime. Martin Webster is a good example here. He was a key figure in Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement in the 1960s, before joining John Tyndall’s Greater British Movement. Webster became fundamental to the National Front in his role as Activities Organiser from 1969. During the height of the National Front, he was crucial in shaping its internal direction and was a public face for the party. One high profile moment from 1977, for example, saw him march alone through Hyde after a march through the town centre was banned. As he marched alone this was not restricted by the 1936 Public Order Act. The stunt attracted much media attention and inspired other activists. In later life, after he was expelled from the National Front, he tried to develop his own organisation, Our Nation, and more recently has written for extreme right publications. Richard 84

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Edmonds is another archetypal stalwart leader. A maths teacher for a London comprehensive school, Edmonds’s political career started when he joined the National Front in 1972. By October 1974, he stood for the party in the Lewisham, Deptford seat, polling just under 5 per cent. He followed Tyndall into the BNP in the 1980s and stood in 1983 and 1992 elections. He was a Holocaust denier in the 1980s too, and published Holocaust News. He spoke up for the BNP in the media, for example, when it was featured on a Panorama documentary in 1991, he openly declared himself a racist, and defended Tyndall’s antisemitic conspiracism. In the 2000s he wrote for Tyndall’s magazine Spearhead, and by 2008 had become part of the BNPs Advisory Council under Griffin’s leadership. He stood against Griffin in a leadership contest in 2011, as the party was collapsing, and later that year re-​joined the National Front. In 2016, he provocatively and distastefully stood in the high-​ profile Batley and Spen by-​election as the National Front candidate, following the murder of Jo Cox by a neo-​Nazi inspired lone actor terrorist, and remained active in the National Front until his death in December 2020. A month before he died, Edmonds represented the NF alone at the party’s annual event at the Cenotaph. There is a long list of stalwart figures such as Webster and Edmonds whose endeavours have sustained the milieu across generations. The leadership discussed so far has been by men. The extreme right is often misogynistic, and hardly an environment critical of patriarchal structures. Yet from the 1920s onwards, women have also been a core part of fascist cultures and many acted as stalwarts. This was epitomised by the high-​profile Rotha Lintorn-​Ormann, who engaged with this milieu throughout her life in the 1920s and 1930s, until her death. Women took on prominent roles in the BUF too, and in 1934 Mary Richardson became the Chief Organiser for the Women’s Section, having previously been a suffragette 85

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who famously damaged Velázques’s Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery in 1914. In the 1960s generation, women such as François Dior and Savitri Devi, were active on an ongoing manner, providing funds, access to wider networks and, in Devi’s case, also adding a rich and complex layer of mythological intellectualism blurring Hinduism and Nazi racial thinking. Devi was interested in Nazi ideals before this period, and has had a lasting influence on the fringe, cultic dimension of the extreme right as well. By the 1970s, female leaders also included the prominent moral campaigner and often unguarded racist, Lady Jane Birdwood, who wrote for the National Front’s publications, and even stood for the BNP in the early 1990s. In the 2010s, a newer generation of female leaders have included Britain First’s Jadya Franzen and For Britain’s Anne Marie Waters, both women who demonstrate that tenacious, fulsome leadership of extreme right groups can be provided as effectively by women as it can be by men. As with almost all of their male counterparts, such female leaders have also lacked a clear charismatic dimension, but have been longstanding and committed figures, providing an example for others to follow. Youth leadership While the stalwart types exemplify the longstanding, older profile found among many extreme right leadership figures, youth leadership has also always been an important means for the movement to connect with new audiences. People cannot stay youthful, but often they start out as such. In previous generations, youth leaders included people like Tyndall and Colin Jordan, who in the 1950s and 1960s were young, uniformed men who used their overt neo-​ Nazism as a pose to capture media attention, just as youth neo-​Nazi groups such as National Action have done in more recent times. 86

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They came of age during the Second World War, and their recalibrations of Nazism offered a radical taboo-​breaking alternative attractive to small bands of likeminded youths. The youth dimension of extreme right counterculture became more overtly directed to a new style of youth activism from the end of the 1970s, as the white power music scene developed. This was an alien culture to those of Tyndall and Jordan’s generation, who felt that new phenomena such as Rock Against Communism while ideologically clearly aligned to their politics also contained elements of black culture that true white nationalists should decry, no matter how racist the lyrics were. Tyndall preferred Wagner, while Jordan thought that rock music actually hypnotised and dulled the brain through African-​derived rhythms. Despite such reservations among the then older guard, the new generation of young activists drawn to the National Front included Joe Pearce, a dynamic figure who edited the National Front’s youth newspaper Bulldog from 1977. Targeting music venues, football terraces and school gates, Pearce’s sensationalist youth publications led to two successful prosecutions under the Race Relations Act, one in 1981 and again in 1985, and he worked closely with other younger leader figures of the party in the 1980s, such as Griffin. The 1980s saw other youthful leaders emerge, including Ian Stuart Donaldson who was again central to the white power music scene through his band Skrewdriver and who founded Blood & Honour in 1987. Nicky Crane was another of this generation who offered such youth leadership in ways that connected emotionally with others. Not known as a conversationalist, he was a man who epitomised a violent and masculine ideal, and according to Pearce exerted genuine charisma over those he encountered through his comportment. The white power music scene continues to be active, though by the 2020s it has become increasingly problematic to call this only a 87

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‘youth’ movement anymore, given the now aged profiles of some of those who were first attracted to it in the 1980s. While many from this generation have now also faded, millennials are now also part of the shifting youth leadership dynamics. One example here is Mark Collett, born in 1980 he was a chairman of the Young BNP in the 2000s, and now is leader of Patriotic Alternative. He is joined by Laura Towler, its deputy leader, who according to Hope not Hate has married Sam Melia, a former National Action activist who leads the anonymous extreme right network Hundred Handers.7 (Such details help reveal the small communities of activism found in the groupuscular milieu.) The most overtly youth focused group of recent times has been National Action and its follow-​on groups. Founded by Benjamin Raymond and Alex Davies, these leaders are a generation younger again than Collett. Other leading figures in National Action included Jack Renshaw, again a prominent, high-​profile figure in the BNP Youth before joining this group, discussed further in Chapter 8. National Action offered a strong sense of leadership for the tiny number attracted to the extreme right space, and has also been influential in this milieu internationally. While it attracted relatively few, the level of dedication it inspired was often high, and many of its followers found they were engaging in criminal activity by the mid 2010s. A number linked to it have faced prosecution for their ongoing involvement with the group after it was proscribed, as well as related criminality before and after its proscription. The group was typical in looking to the past for inspiration, and idealised both Hitler and even Oswald Mosley. This interest in the fascist past demonstrated how a tradition of extremism has accumulated over generations. This accumulative extremism is not going to go away and will inspire future generations as well. National Action explored this in publications such as Attack, a key 88

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ideological text that looked backwards to think about its revolutionary ideals, and presented Mosley as a forgotten leader whose neglect epitomised the wrong path Britain had taken across the twentieth century. Mosley’s memory also evoked for the group a sense of struggle, and a quest for a better, higher society that fascism could create. National Action’s stated purpose, through its leadership, was to reconfigure extreme right activism in ways to make it appeal to a new generation, in other words to make it stylish. Since the group’s proscription until his recent conviction, Raymond continued to develop a role promoting extreme right inspired graphic design,8 and this too can be seen as a type of leadership, broadly conceived, trying to reshape the feel of the movement to draw in new activists. Ideological leadership Forms of cultural influence are important to consider as a type of leadership practice. A wide range of ideologues act as leaders in such ways, as they provide a sense of direction to the extreme right. Some are well known outside the milieu, such as David Irving, whose prior, and to a lesser extent ongoing role, as a leading figure of the British Holocaust denial movement needs little introduction. Indeed, his public profile has become such that wider debates around responsible and irresponsible free speech tend to reference Irving as an example of what most want to avoid giving him and ongoing, and free, notoriety. Other ideologues are less high-​profile but are more well-​known among a select few within the extreme right, and also provide powerful ideological influence. A good, perhaps counterintuitive example here is Jonathan Bowden. A notable public speaker known within but not really beyond the movement, Bowden joined the BNP in the 2000s and even became its Cultural 89

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Officer for a short time. A number of his speeches continue to circulate on YouTube and other sites. He was able to draw together the intellectual aspects of extreme right cultures, through extensive references to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the Italian Fascist supporting poet Ezra Pound, the German writer Ernst Jünger, and the racist philosopher Julius Evola, among others. Bowden left the BNP in 2010, but continued to be active, speaking at events and networking with other such intellectuals, including Troy Southgate, up to his death in 2012 aged 49. Such ideologues, putting together radical oppositional and counter cultural perspectives, can have a powerful impact on those looking for an alternate sense of meaning, people of course who the extreme right always tries to attract. Figures drawn to National Action found his videos informative, for example. At the more respectable end of the spectrum of such intellectual leadership is the late philosopher Roger Scruton, who before his death addressed the Traditional Britain Group. Many within the extreme right have found common ground with his traditionalist conservative worldview. Other intellectual leaders are far more esoteric, yet can also be quite prolific. Mentioned above, Troy Southgate is also worth highlighting as an exemplar of such an intellectual extreme right leader. He first joined the National Front in 1984, then in the 1990s launched the English Nationalist Movement and later the National Revolutionary Faction as radical efforts to rethink ideology. This led him to promote by the 2000s ‘national-​ anarchism’, combining aspects of anarchism with aspects of fascist thought. He has also promoted his ideas through Black Front Press, which he founded, and which continues to publish his books.9 Books by Southgate such as Tradition and Revolution advocate forms of entryism, or the strategy of joining other political organisations and influencing their political direction. The influence of 90

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clandestine figures such as David Myatt are important to note. He is someone who has explored a wide range of ideological p ­ ositions,10 and according to Hope Not Hate now animates the Order of the Nine Angles mythology.11 He has also been an adherent to Islam and influencer of people such as David Copeland. These types of leader present variants of what Colin Campbell identified as the ‘cultic milieu’, an ambiguous, heterogenous countercultural space offering a wide range of alternate explanations and that offers its adherents deeper, existential answers as well.12 In terms of ideological leadership, influences have not been limited to British figures either. There are some obvious examples of the British extreme right taking leadership from abroad. For neo-​Nazis, the most obvious example would be their idealisation of Hitler and the National Socialist era in Germany. For some neo-​Nazis, this takes a cultic dimension, and they believe a new epoch started in 1889, the year of Hitler’s birth, and have created an alternate calendar focused on the Year of the Führer (so from 20 April 2022 we are in YF 133). In terms of more recent transnational leadership, the 1960s saw new developments setting in process a high degree of influence from America. This included the formation of the World Union of National Socialists network, active throughout the 1960s before falling into decline by the early 1970s. It drew British activists like Jordan and Tyndall into a relationship with the US charismatic figure George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party until his death at the hands of a fellow activist in 1967. Yet as with Hitler, Rockwell’s death has not been an impediment to exerting influence on the British extreme right, and he is one of a number of martyr figures identified by the movement. Hitler’s memory has employed tropes presenting him as both a prophet and a martyr for the cause. In such ways, dead leaders are helpful figures for political movements to focus on, and the fascist past is replete with examples of 91

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leaders who take on new roles in death, from Corneliu Codreanu in Romania to Primo de Rivera in Franco’s Spain. Contemporary extreme right figures often look to the British past to find figures of earlier generations to interpret as their martyrs and inspiration. Rockwell’s writings and story can be found on websites linked to groups such as Blood & Honour and Combat 18, and he is often heroically idealised as a leader of a previous generation who died young for his cause. Other now-​dead leaders often turned into martyrs by the extreme right also include Ian Stuart Donaldson, whose idealised martyr status is used to evoke a powerful sense of white pride especially within the white power music scene. Both John Tyndall and Colin Jordan have been memorialised in death too, though with less emotive resonance than others. Building on Rockwell, other influences from America have been important on the British extreme right. These include William Pierce, who in the later 1960s edited the intellectual journal of the World Union of National Socialists, National Socialist World, and by the 1970s led the National Alliance, one of the larger neo-​Nazi groups in later twentieth century America, and promoted his ideals through pulp fiction, such as The Turner Diaries (discussed in Chapter 8), and even helped style a new neo-​Nazi religion, Cosmotheism. David Lane was another US neo-​Nazi to exert influence, especially through his role in the group The Order, a terror organisation active in America during the 1980s that carried out bank robberies, distributed funds to the wider movement, and in the end also killed an outspoken Jewish radio presenter, Alan Berg in June 1984. While in prison, Lane later coined the ‘14 Words’ slogan, which has become a mantra used widely within British neo-​Nazism in recent times. He also coined terms such as ‘white genocide’, which have helped underpin a range of hyperbolic variants of conspiracist thinking arguing white people are subject to 92

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ethnic destruction.13 Related to Lane is the memory of another neo-​Nazi martyr figure, Robert Jay Matthews, or Bob Matthews. Another member of The Order, he died in a violent shootout with the FBI in December 1984. Colin Jordan’s 2002 book The Uprising was dedicated to Matthews, underscoring ongoing interactions between British and American neo-​Nazi cultures. The influence of American leadership has continued into recent times as well. For example, Richard Spencer of the white supremacist National Policy Institute, a central figure in the US ‘alt-​right’ movement of the mid 2010s in America, has spoken in Britain. A white supremacist who flirts with Nazi-​era references, Spencer has defended the rights of white people, and spoken in favour of neo-​ Nazis of an earlier generation, not least Lincoln-​Rockwell. Others from the American context who have exerted some influence in Britain to varying degrees range from figures such as Trump strategist Steve Bannon, to Holocaust denier Jared Taylor, to promoter of the ‘cultural Marxism’ conspiracy themes Patrick Buchanan, to counter-​Jihad figures such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. The Anglo-​American dimension of influence is important to note, especially due to a shared language, and will be discussed further in Chapter 7, exploring the links between the recent so-​called ‘alt-​ right’ movement in America and British activism. A range of leading European ideologues exert influence on British figures as well. For example, the French intellectual Alain de Benoist developed the philosophically sophisticated Nouvelle Droite movement at the end of the 1960s, which was later influential on some in the BNP, and also became an intellectual trend developed by Michael Walker’s British new right publication The Scorpion in the 1980s and 1990s. While de Benoist’s intellectualised outlook has appealed to some, his neo-​pagan vision has also had limited uptake in Britain. Nevertheless, his and many other 93

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intellectualised forms of extreme right are promoted through booksellers such as Arktos. This also includes the Russian intellectual Alexandr Dugin, who again has a profile among some British activists. Dugin offers another philosophical version of fascism for contemporary times, one that promotes extreme anti-​liberal views as a pathway to an authentic way of being. He has also called for a new Eurasian empire dominated by Russia to compete with America’s leadership of the west. Via outlets such as Arktos, the wider European Identitarian movement has also helped to make British activists aware of theories such as Renaud Camus ‘great replacement’ concept. Like many other extreme right narratives, this argues white people are being replaced by those who are not white and so face an existential threat to their existence. Other key concepts from this milieu include ‘remigration’ a euphemism for deporting people deemed undesirable from Europe. Meanwhile, the green dimension of the extreme right also has been influenced by some European anti-​liberal thinkers. One of the most prominent here has been Pentti Linkola, a Finnish writer who critiqued the over-​population of the planet and called for strong dictatorial leadership to overcome the errors of liberalism. He among others has promoted the idea that the world is akin to a small lifeboat, capable of saving only so many human survivors of the environmental crisis. In this context, only a limited number of people can live, and so others are doomed to die. This has become a central argument within contemporary forms of ‘eco-​fascism’, extreme right perspectives that use variants of green politics to justify racist and even genocidal themes, sometimes more superficially but also like Linkola seeing this as an authentic type of ecologically concerned activism. Finally, a newer type of leadership approach has been developed by extreme right terrorists. Figures such as Anders Breivik, who 94

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killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, and Brenton Tarrent, who killed 51 people in New Zealand in 2019, have justified their deadly attacks in manifestos outlining their political views. These texts remain available online after their terrorist acts and become inspirational to others. Breivik’s manifesto, 2083 –​A European Declaration of Independence argued that a civil war had broken out in Europe, and in future generations this would develop into a full-​scale conflict, and white conservative figures such as himself would ultimately be victorious, in the year 2083. This is a typically fascist vision of national regeneration and renewal. Tarrant linked his manifesto to aspect so the European Identarian movement, and even claimed green credentials as part of his justification for mass murder. Titled The Great Replacement, it also powerfully promoted to the wider movement the conspiracy theory that white people are subject to a hidden genocide. As this chapter demonstrates, leadership within the extreme right takes many forms. To think about how this movement is ‘lead’, it is important to be expansive, and think beyond charisma alone as the criterion for defining extreme right leadership. As has been discussed, some leadership can be seen as charismatic, but this is more often only at the level of coterie charisma within the movement, not appealing beyond it. Over multiple generations, the extreme right has been unable to offer leadership that truly captured the imagination of the masses. Nevertheless, its many organisations have offered other forms of leadership that have been crucial to sustaining the movement. These forms of leadership span the many often unsung stalwarts who have dedicated their lives to the movement, to the varied ideologues who have tried to shape thinking and tactics, to the youth activists that have reinvented the presentational style of the extreme right’s underlying narrative to draw in new generations. Women have always played a notable part in 95

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the leadership in the extreme right as well. As the extreme right is essentially groupuscular in nature, the ways it develops across a wide range of organisations also provides activists with many leadership opportunities, though these can prove burdensome. Finally, it is important to recognise that Britain’s extreme right has often looked beyond the nation’s borders too, and over a number of generations has drawn on the leadership from aboard, including from terrorists.

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By May 2013, the EDL was in steep decline, yet suddenly was able to muster a crowd of over 1,000 supporters, who gathered at a demonstration in central London. Stephen Yaxley-​Lennon expanded in impassioned tones to the gathered crowd why Islam was to blame for the murder of the soldier Lee Rigby, a terrorist attack that had occurred the previous week. Protestors chanted ‘Coward’ as Lennon explained that David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, remained on holiday in Ibiza; others chanted Robinson’s claim that ‘They’ve had their Arab Spring. This is time for the English spring’.1 An emotionally charged demonstration, this flashpoint helped attract new interest in the movement. It is easy to see why. The death of an unarmed white British soldier at the hands of murderous Islamist terrorists offered a powerful embodiment of the EDL’s core message. The ability of the extreme right to engage and exploit emotions in such ways is crucial to explaining support, and this affective dimension is central to why the extreme right attracts followers. The many groupuscules that make up the extreme right, past and present, are adept at using emotions to generate a range of moods and feelings which allow them to shape political identities, and appeal to a diverse community of supporters. These emotions 97

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certainly do not only emanate from leaders either. They are genuine expressions found among many supporters and activists who bring their own emotional contexts to these movements, and often would not remain within this space if such sentiments were not reflected in the cultures of the extreme right in some way. Activists are also attracted for more practical reasons, but the emotional landscape of this type of political extremism is crucial to understanding the activists of the extreme right. Emotional appeal of extremism Increasingly, historians and others researching social phenomena are taking emotions seriously, often easily dismissed as unimportant or lesser, including exploring them as a way to analyse the extreme right. One important theorist in the history of emotions, William Reddy, argues that until emotions are externalised and given linguistic shape, they remain amorphous and un-​defined within people. Activity gives them shape and provides meaning to people’s emotional dimension. Emotions for Reddy are guided into specific forms by wider cultures that render them into more precise words and action, what he calls emotional regimes.2 Extreme right culture generated by its activists as well as its leaders, therefore, can be seen as developing an ever-​shifting emotional regime, one largely distinct from wider society. This extreme right emotional regime is both created by and resonates with those drawn to it. It typically projects powerful, negative emotions towards the political mainstream and those its discourses deem threatening, and contrastingly evokes positive emotions towards those in its community of activism. How these emotional contours unfold can vary dramatically between groups, and across time. Considering the emotional as well as rational manner in which activists value the extreme 98

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right’s endeavours helps develop a deeper understanding of those who are drawn to the movement as complex people with hopes and fears which the movement addresses and, importantly, allows them to feel they have a sense of agency. Appreciating this affective dimension also helps explain why this movement can attract activists from across a range of classes and social backgrounds. Indeed, as well as being emotionally charged, as noted in previous chapters the extreme right is often groupuscular in nature, meaning it is made up of many tiny organisations which appeal to different demographics. The Traditional Britain Group draws those who are wealthier, more educated and middle and upper class. Its events have featured older, more eminent figures within the wider movement, as well as a younger generation. In class terms this is a quite different demographic to the English Defence League, which was a primarily working-​class network, and was not so attractive to the more educated. Meanwhile, Blood & Honour used to be attractive to youth activists, but as many of its activists have got older with the movement it is certainly no longer solely a youth movement. Newer neo-​Nazi accelerations groups, such as National Action and Sonnenkreig Division, have attracted younger people from the 2010s, including teenagers who have been convicted of terrorism offences, and a number of these have been university students as well. Typifying this appeal to the younger educated, in June 2021 a politics student in his twenties who called for the extermination of Jewish people, Andrew Dymock, was convicted of a range of terrorism related offences after running two accelerationist groups, System Resistance Network and Sonnenkreig Division.3 Moreover, identities of all such activists are intersectional. Class, age, education, gender and so forth intersect in each and every activist, and there is certainly no single ‘profile’, or neat set of profiles, that captures those drawn to the extreme right. Relating 99

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the extreme right to a particular class, age or even gender profile is inherently limiting. Yet getting to know these supporters is difficult. After all, these are secretive groups and even the most publicity hungry organisations, like the BNP in the 2000s, have been guarded over their member details. Moreover, many of these consider themselves as clandestine and so engaging with their activists has been very difficult for researchers. With this limitation in mind, what follows will focus primarily on ethnographic research of the National Front, British National Party and English Defence League supporters. Even with this focus there is a diversity of people. From the BUF to the National Front It is worth reflecting on early groups to help capture a sense of the many social types drawn to the extreme right space. Studies of interwar fascist groups, such as the British Union of Fascists, have highlighted how the movement appealed to various classes in society, helping overturn older Marxist positions framing fascism as the politics of the angered and worried middle classes. Though based on limited data sets, G. C. Webber’s account of the appeal of the BUF suggests it had up to 50,000 members in 1934, on the back of positive endorsement from the Daily Mail, but that within a year this dropped to 5,000 following the bad publicity at the Olympia rally of 1934, and this number steadily grew to about 20,000 by the outbreak of the Second World War. Regionally, London was where it found strongest support, as well as Yorkshire, Lancashire and the South of England. As with later groups, then, the BUF did not appeal across Britain, and can be more accurately considered a movement active in some regions of England. Weber also drew out how the BUF attracted larger numbers of working-​class supporters

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in the early and mid 1930s, but by the end of the decade was more predominantly a middle-​class organisation. Mosley himself was of course from an upper-​class, aristocratic background.4 Thomas Linehan has also shown that the BUF’s messages, as with other interwar forms of British fascism, had cross class appeal,5 and could even attract specific groups that might have been resistant to the extremism of fascism, such as practicing Christians. Some lower members of the clergy were active in the organisation, as with Christians elsewhere in Europe who turned to fascism as they saw it as a defence of Christianity in an era of rising Communism. This was an attitude more common following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War as emotive stories of nuns being burned alive by anti-​nationalist forces. Other groups appealed to different classes at the same time in quite stark ways. An unusually extreme example was the English Mistery, which as Dan Stone shows attracted an upper-​class leadership, including Lord Lymington and other metropolitan elites, but also included a large contingent of working-​class Northumbrian miners. The diametrically opposed demographics of this curious groupuscule were between, as Stone puts it, those who owned their own dining suits and those who were unable to even attend such formal events. The English Mistery underscores the ways fascist-​sympathising groups of the period had a wide class appeal.6 Post-​1945 extreme right groups also attracted a range of types of followers. Speaking to the activists who make up the extreme right has become a crucial method to understanding both its emotive and rational appeal. Some of the earliest explorations of the mentality of those drawn to extreme right activism in Britain came with Michael Billig’s 1978 book Fascists, which offered what he described as a ‘social psychological view’. Based on interviews with a small selection of 11 male activists, as well as study of the ways the 101

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movement developed its political discourses through scrutiny of publications like Spearhead, Billig presented a curious picture of the types drawn to the National Front. One interviewee, a longstanding member anonymised as N, conformed to what Billig described as an ‘authoritarian’ type. He saw Hitler’s Germany in positive terms, despite the Holocaust, and felt National Socialism had both united and drawn out the best in the country. Interviewee N also saw the National Front as a uniting and positive force, praising the ways it offered a sense of patriarchal structure for younger, more wayward male activists who it kept in line. It offered the possibility of hope for the future through its racist agenda, and N stressed it would focus on removing black people in particular, an endeavour which he saw as both necessary and positive. Another interviewee was more inclined to violence, and named only as P in the book. He was frustrated with the organisation and was disappointed with the lack of sanctioned opportunities to carry out violence, criticising what he saw as Tyndall’s seeming moderation. For Billig, these two men represented two underlying general tendencies within the National Front in the 1970s, one was happy to be limited by its structures while the other pushed against them, often violently. Billig had struggled to get activists to engage with his research, a common problem, and to his credit his other participants were varied. He interviewed activists who were working class and middle class, who were previously from the left and the right, and aged from their 20s to their 50s. He explained that they were all adamant that the movement was more than a single-​issue phenomenon focused on race alone, and believed it sought a general sense of change. As one put it, the party was ‘a revolution against the trendies’. One of Billig’s most important observations among activists was a distinction between a surface level, exoteric ideology designed to attract a wide range of disaffected people, which often focused on the 102

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politics of race in 1970s Britain, and an esoteric ideology. Beyond the more accessible exoteric ideology, was an inner worldview for the core protagonists that was far more clearly rooted in the fascist past, and was antisemitic and conspiratorial in nature, though this was not really for external expression. Billig claimed that those who believed in the inner core were really playing a long game, keeping fascism and antisemitic conspiracy theories alive for the future; the outer ideology sought immediate impact. This dynamic bred tensions among activists, and certainly limited the effectiveness of the organisation. Its membership, potentially as high as 20,000 at any one time, was also likened to a tap running through a sieve, able to appeal to new people but unable to keep them for long within the group. Finally, emotion as well as rational argument was central to the movement’s discourses. Billig also examined party publications like Spearhead, which he highlighted often focused on the politics of emotion: ‘the masses do not collectively have an intellect, but they do have emotions’, one Spearhead article quoted by Billig stated. He added the movement was adept at locating what Spearhead described as ‘the “emotional trigger-​spots” of the masses’.7 The National Front was notable for achieving a significant electoral impact, even though they did not get any members elected to office. This raises the question of who voted for it as well. Christopher Husbands explored this issue in his 1982 book Racial Exclusion and the City and concluded that, though in decline after 1979, the factors allowing the National Front to appeal to sections of the electorate in the previous decade had not gone away. Husbands identified there was little to distinguish the demographic of National Front supporters in the areas where it was more successful to those from other areas where the party lacked strong support. Instead, the cultivation of emotive, localised issues were important to explaining 103

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bases of support in some localities, especially where the National Front had been successful in promoting anxieties around the stability of the home and a sense of decline in a local neighbourhood. These concerns were more significant than fears over issues such as economics and the workplace, Husbands concluded. Anxiety over crime was particularly emotively resonant, expressed in racial terms seeing black people as specifically threatening. He also found the movement was more successful in working class areas, though was clear the National Front should not be reduced to a racist working-​class phenomenon. Either a reformed National Front, or a new political party would be able to exploit these concerns in the future, he also concluded somewhat presciently.8 The British National Party in the 2000s In 2008, media commentators pored over a leaked BNP membership list. Many on the list were themselves anxious that their support would become public knowledge. Such leaks have been revealing, as far as they go. For example, leaked BNP lists included the occupations of many of the party’s members, and the examples here included some interest from middle class professions such as teachers, doctors, nurses, members of the armed forces and solicitors.9 However, while these more respectable figures highlight the cross-​class appeal of the extreme right, primarily the party remained one attractive to the working classes. Matthew Goodwin’s New British Fascism explored both those who voted for, and those who became involved in, the BNP. His analysis of the electorate of the BNP in the 2000s has again drawn out a picture of localised pockets of especially working-​class support for this electorally focused variant of British fascism. Goodwin concluded the BNP’s appeal among voters at its height in the 104

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2000s was once more limited regionally, to sections of outer East London, the Midlands and parts of the North of England, including Yorkshire. Again, this is hardly suggestive of a truly ‘British’ party. He also stressed the emotions of the typical voter, who were not only older and male but for him were specifically ‘angry white men’. They were angered by the economic system, angered by racial diversity in their broader locality, and angered by a loss of trust in mainstream politics which they felt was no longer effective at addressing their concerns.10 Similarly, James Rhodes concluded from interviewing BNP voters in its strongholds in the 2000s that a sense of ‘white backlash’ was important to understand. The party was able to successfully connect with white communities that felt marginalised and ignored. However, Rhodes adds it only had a limited ability to offer a credible agenda to these concerned and often racist white voters.11 Stuart Wilks-​Heeg likened the BNP to a canary in a coalmine and rightly stressed that the BNP’s growth at a local level spoke to a dangerous level of decay in the credibility of local politics more broadly.12 Goodwin also conducted ethnographic interviews with the BNP’s party activists in the 2000s. He broke these down into three general types: the old guard; the political wanderers; and the new recruits. The old guard was the smallest in number, and akin to stalwart leaders noted in the previous chapter. The political wanderers were more numerous and had been active in other forms of politics before joining the BNP. Finally, the new recruits were the most common, consisting of those who joined the party having no prior political experience. One such old guard interviewed by Goodwin was Bill. He explained that he had joined the National Front in the 1970s, motivated by opposing immigration, and later moved to the BNP. He took on various roles in the party, such as local organiser and regional activist. He stressed he chose to become active in 105

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the party after careful consideration, having excluded others as not being right for him, and his political engagement was a deliberate decision. The newer ‘wanderers’, meanwhile, included people like Val, who told Goodwin she had joined after becoming disillusioned with both the Referendum Party and then UKIP. Nick Griffin’s supposed charisma did not inspire her turn to British fascism. Rather, she was introduced to the party by a personal contact and went on to stand for the BNP at elections. Wanderers were often drawn to the party through personal links, such as husbands or friends. Contrastingly, for new recruits without prior political experience it was the party’s website that often opened the door to the BNP’s alternate politics. New recruits interviewed by Goodwin regularly stressed they both engaged with and agreed with the website’s rich content, often comparing and contrasting this to other political party websites. While a sense of social anxiety about joining the party due to its public reputation remained, new recruits explained that at initial meetings they were reassured when they found these to be comfortingly normal environments, rather than being dominated by clichéd neo-​ Nazi skinheads. So, as well as agreeing with the party’s agenda, new recruits often felt welcomed to the organisation at an emotional level. In terms of explaining motivation, Goodwin added that most party members felt embattled, often describing their activism as being engaged in a type of warfare. They spoke too of a sense of urgency, and a fear of racial extinction in the near future, developed by the party as a powerful narrative to sustain motivation and ongoing support. In terms of their makeup, Goodwin stressed party members reflected their voters: though some women and younger people were part of the mix of the old guard, the wanderers and 106

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the new recruits, the main category was older, less well-​educated working-​class men.

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The English Defence League’s activist base The larger extreme right groups have often capitalised on working class support, and notably two extreme right groups, the BNP and the EDL, were particularly attractive in this regard in the later 2000s at the same time. The latter attracted a wide range of people, and there have been a number of studies of these activists, often highlighting the movement’s emotional resonance in expressing a wider sense of frustration at a lack of political agency, concern over urban decline, and fears around Muslim communities. Accounts of such concerns have included The Rise of the Right. Here, Simon Winlow, Steve Hall and James Treadwell stress that while anti-​ Muslim groups like the EDL have broad relationships with older forms of activism, their rise should be contextualised in a decline of Labour Party credibility among working class voters, combined with unresolved fears over immigration that often drew its activists to critical views towards Muslims in particular. Unlike the BNP, which could attract middle class support as well, and indeed was led in the 2000s by a middle-​class Cambridge graduate, they stressed a working-​class identity was central to the EDL. Like the BNP, the emotion often found in EDL activists was anger.13 With Alex Garland, James Treadwell also engaged in demographic interviews as the movement evolved, published in a series of significant articles on the early growth of the movement. Such fieldwork highlighted the working-​class dynamics of the EDL as it developed, as well as the ways it focused on fear and anxieties over Muslim communities in particular. This, they stressed, was often articulated in different ways to older racist agendas, but also was 107

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often no less offensive. For example, one male activist on a 2010 EDL demonstration, interviewed in Leicester, explained in his mind he was not racist, but opposed Muslims because they: Can’t live like us cos they are not evolved for it, they are simple, made for backward villages in the mountain where they can sit around eating stinking curries and raping chickens. They come over here and ruin England, I mean, would you want to live next to them? I don’t, but they are taking over. That is why I want them gone.

Such visceral fears of an identity being eliminated by a threatening other are common among extreme right activists. Another interviewee explained his loss of any trust in the political mainstream as follows: It all started with the fucking politicians mate, I would shoot them with all the scum Muslims. The Conservatives never gave a fuck cos they know they don’t have to live with dirty Muslims in their big London houses, but Labour, they are worse than them. I remember Labour sticking up for blacks, and that was fair enough because they [black people] came here and got on with it, they didn’t rock the boat … but Labour didn’t give a fuck when the Muslims came in and started taking the piss, they did nothing.14

This interviewee added that immigration needed to be capped, and it was migration from Muslim countries specifically that he now feared. The combination of concerns, fears over demographic change and animosity towards mainstream politics is clearly expressed in such comments, and so is a call for greater agency over political and social change. Joel Busher has also interviewed EDL activists, for his book The Making of Anti-​Muslim Protest. His interviewees were based in London and Essex and typified the wider profile of the EDL as primarily working class, less likely to be successful in formal education, and predominantly male and younger. His approach 108

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highlighted the distinctiveness of the movement and focused on framing it as an anti-​Muslim group rather than a far right one. This echoes other ethnographic work on followers but is probably less applicable to the leadership of the movement, which more clearly networked within a wider extreme right context, which included developing a short-​lived political party the British Freedom Party and creating relationships with the international counter-​Jihad movement. While the EDL can be placed in a wider framework of far and often extreme right activism, Busher’s conclusions focused on the uniqueness of the organisation for its activists, and this is important for understanding its distinctive support base. The EDL’s aim to be a single-​issue protest group was taken seriously by many activists, who genuinely felt their approach made it quite different from the BNP. Busher’s study also helps draw out the wide range of emotions the group generated as its activists moved through the network. Anger, outrage and fear were all common emotions as people entered the organisation. However, as they journeyed through the group, more positive emotions became common as well. The sacrifices of engaging in activism helped to develop a sense of pride in their achievements, and some noted a sense of increased moral satisfaction and dignity. Working together also helped foster a sense of camaraderie, and gratitude towards others who shared their cause. The ebbs and flows of activism were experienced emotionally, from anxiety over fellow protestors who had got into trouble with the police, to frustration when activists behaved in a drunken manner discrediting the movement, to relief when events were well attended. As Busher rightly stresses, understanding better these processes of pride and shame would also help develop effective interventions, leading other political means to address concerns animating such movements in ways that are not also steeped in extreme prejudice.15 109

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Another important ethnographer to consider the emotional aspects of the EDL’s activism, among other issues, is Hilary Pilkington. The title of her book, Loud and Proud, epitomised for her the manner in which the movement’s street protests resonated for its activists. It was seen as a vehicle for people who felt marginalised and ignored, and allowed them to feel seen and heard. The media and academic critics who described its agenda as racist she stressed were interpreted by activists as part of the process of being silenced that many felt required their activism. These underpinning affective and emotive aspects helped explain the movement’s wider appeal more than its ideological narrative. Pilkington’s interviewees were often younger men, most were not engaged in higher education, and many were also unemployed. Most also identified as white English, rather than British, and were resentful that other nations such as Scottish and Welsh could identify as such. Pilkington’s analysis drew out the ways people found themselves engaging with concerns that were often messy but gravitated around some common identifiable trends. Some were motivated because they saw Islam as a threat, and so events such as 9/​11 or the murder of Lee Rigby were central to the desire to become active in the movement. Support for the British Army in Afghanistan was also important, and interviewees included several people interested in joining the armed forces. Also, her work again showed that entry developed through engagement with football-​firm activities. Some were drawn to the EDL through family links, and so prior knowledge and support of groups such as the National Front and the BNP in their personal worlds helped to normalise the EDL, overcoming barriers that were critical of the organisation. Pilkington’s analysis highlighted that family contexts were also important to consider how those drawn to the movement were marked by personal instabilities. Family backgrounds were often 110

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disrupted among those she engaged with, and some had experienced childhood traumas. It is crucial not to generalise about such activists, each has his, her or their own story, but these observations help to draw out a picture of EDL activists that goes beyond merely allocating them to a social class.16 The work of Goodwin, Treadwell, Busher and Pilkington all also highlight the high levels of energy activists often give to the movement. Busher and Pilkington in particular have both been influenced by the work of Kathleen Blee, an expert ethnographer of the American extreme right who has also written on the development of grass roots politics more broadly in Democracy in the Making. Here, she explains that while outward depictions of grass roots political organisations often focus on their exciting qualities, the reality is often marked by lengthy periods of ‘sagging energy, wearisome discussion and irritating tedium’, even ‘quiet despair when members slip away and plans unravel’. Overcoming such problems is also crucial for extreme right groups, and failure maintaining inner momentum can help explain the reasons why people move away from groups and disconnect from activism.17 Many ethnographers in particular highlight that activists are aware of the costs of their engagement, and the negative attitudes towards them, from family, friends and society more widely, all disincentivise continued support. Pilkington noted one of her interviewees saw his ongoing engagement as akin to the ‘hokey-​cokey’, as he repeatedly stepped in and out of the EDL’s activism. The emotionally draining nature of the commitment required can be a particularly important barrier to sustained activism. Finally, while the work of such ethnographers highlights the ability of the EDL and the BNP to appeal to relatively small and often localised sections of the working class, this does not mean they necessarily represented working class concerns as a whole. 111

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This is an important point to stress, even if such groups are active in areas with genuine issues of deprivation and political failure. It is highly problematic to argue they represent the racialised demographic ‘the white working class’, a point easily revealed by listening to the opinions of others who do not support these groups where they are active. Most people in wider communities they are active in do not identify with the extreme right. For example, one study led by Paul Thomas surveyed both EDL activists and wider society in Dewsbury. Here, 81 per cent of residents who were questioned regarded the EDL’s impact in a negative light, even though they shared broader concerns over a lack of political representation.18 The extreme right are outliers, not typical. While their perspectives are crucial to understand, and while engaging with the extreme right entails connecting with them on a human level, it is also vital to not forget their divisive impact. As Benjamin Zephaniah explained in a powerful Foreword to Hsiao-​Hung Pai’s fascinating Angry White People, which interviewed a range of leaders and activists, ‘I have to agree with those who claim that the political elite has neglected the white working class … what is also true is that there are poor black people living in ghettos all over Britain’.19 The extreme right appeals to a diverse range of people, young and old, rich and poor. We know much more about those who connect to groups who are willing to be interviewed, and this chapter has focused on ethnographic accounts of the National Front, and especially the BNP and EDL. These activists help paint a picture of the complex people who come to see the extreme right as a solution to their concerns. Such research shows its political cultures offer an alternate emotional regime that cuts through simple class dynamics, one felt and expressed by followers who collectively foster a meaningful sense of community among their fellow activists. People drawn to such extreme right communities feel anger 112

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towards a system they consider does not work for them, to the point at times of considering themselves at war, but activism can also allow them to feel pride and camaraderie through successful shared endeavours. Such activism also offers a way to do something about problems they identify, providing a sense of agency and control. The appeal of the extreme right has always been regionalised as well, and it is important to stress that its supporters are typically minorities within these communities. This limited level of support suggests commentators would do well to avoid using its limited activism to generalise about the views of white people in working class areas. Though the extreme right is often made up of far more ‘normal’ people than many journalist clichés might suggest, it also has a much more limited resonance than media hype around the movement often claims.

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Gendered activism

A few months before it was proscribed in December 2016, National Action provocatively ran what it called the Miss Hitler 2016 beauty pageant. Primarily a stunt for media attention featuring online images of female activists performing Hitler salutes, it revealed some important aspects of the gendered dynamics of the extreme right. Though deeply misogynistic in tone, as well as antisemitic, it highlighted that some female activists were both active and ideologically committed within the groupuscule. This was confirmed when, at a trial in 2020, one of the supposed contestants was revealed as the ex-​partner of a leading male activist. Both were convicted for their ongoing, committed engagement showing clear sympathy with its neo-​Nazism.1 While National Action had several female activists, they were in the minority. Typically, while extreme right groups are predominantly made up of male activists, often up to around a fifth are female. Behind this admittedly overly sweeping generalisation there are, of course, many gendered identities and attitudes towards women. Some male activists support women’s rights in the form of a benevolent sexism that idealises white women but sees them as inferior to white men. Others are misogynistic and aggressively hostile to women, seeing them 114

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as quite threatening. Some are deeply homophobic and call for a strong sense of ‘traditional’ male and female identity. Some male and female activists are gay and keep their sexuality a secret while a few are openly gay and actively promote the extreme right. As the last chapter stressed, the people who make up the extreme right are diverse. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the movement’s gendered dynamics, past and present, are just as multifaceted as those found in British society more broadly. Studying gender and the extreme right It is important when discussing the gendered dynamics of the extreme right to make clear distinction between terms such as sex, gender and sexuality. While increasingly theorists are turning away from the clear distinction they once made between sex and gender, since the emergence of gender theory in the 1990s the word ‘sex’ has been used to make biological distinctions between the binary sex categories of men and women. Analysing gender goes beyond this and explores the social and cultural constructions of forms of masculinity, femininity and other gendered characteristics. Sexuality refers to sexual orientation, such as straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual and so forth. There are often significant differences between what extreme right groups idealise as desirable in their propaganda, and what they actually do. Even the Nazis, whose male fantasies romanticised women’s roles in the home and in reproducing the race, ended up in reality developing policies to support women in the workplace and in higher education, for pragmatic reasons. Acknowledging such historical ambiguities does not detract from acknowledging that women’s experiences in the Third Reich was highly gendered and were certainly not emancipatory though some female Nazis claimed to be liberated by fascism. Moreover, as with 115

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other sectors of society, the gendered cultures found in the extreme right are both dynamic and hierarchical. Male and straight identities dominate. These gender hierarchies relate to the societies they operate within, and Britain in the 2020s certainly remains a patriarchal society where straight masculinities are more powerful than other gendered identities, though perhaps in less stark and overt ways than in previous generations. History reveals the nuances of the gender identities and the extreme right in curious ways. For example, the small-​ scale National Fascist included in its membership base Colonel Victor Barker, known for leading physical training and who was married to an actress. Yet when prosecuted in 1929 it was revealed that Barker was a woman living as a man. As a thoughtful blog by the National Archives highlights, we do not know the full gender identity of Valerie Arkell-​Smith, who became Colonel Barker, so it chose to gender Barker as he/​him as Barker had chosen to live as a man from 1923.2 As the first chapter demonstrated, women as well as men were a central part of the first fascist group in Britain, the British Fascisti, which was founded by Rotha Lintorn-​Orman. While not a feminist, she is an excellent example of the types of extreme right women that Julie Gottlieb discusses in her classic account of fascism and gender in Britain’s interwar organisations, Feminine Fascism. In a Preface to a recently reissued version of this pathbreaking study, Gottlieb adds her interest in such right-​wing women can sit awkwardly with the Women’s History movement, which sought to recapture the memory of women often forgotten by historians as a liberating exercise. Gottlieb’s work, which now extends to examining a wider range of antisemitic and conservative female political figures beyond the extreme right, has shed much light on this important issue.3 While casting a detailed eye on the many women drawn to interwar British fascism, she recognises 116

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that though important and often forgotten, they were in many ways outliers as well. For example, three former suffragettes became prominent in the BUF, Mary Richardson, Nora Elam and Mary Allen, women who genuinely saw their fascism as an extension of earlier feminist radicalism. While this trajectory is important to highlight, Gottlieb adds that most radical feminists did not associate with British fascism, and over time it lost its allure for figures such as Richardson as well. Just like fascist men, fascist women of the British Fascisti and the BUF came from a variety of class and social contexts. The BUF certainly boasted of a significant minority of female members, up to one third according to Mosely, who nevertheless saw women in more ‘traditional’ terms. For Mosley, pragmatics were also important to consider. He was leading a new political party in search of votes, and so attracting a female electorate helped incentivise its efforts to appeal to women. The BUF was also often a homosocial organisation, and Gottlieb notes that roles for women were often separate from those of male activists. Despite groups attracting women, their fellow male fascists could often be deeply misogynistic. As another key historian of British fascism and gender, Martin Durham, has observed in his key book Women and Fascism, these dichotomies merely alert us to the complexity within the fascist movement at this time. Some men spoke of the need for equal pay for women, others thought that the BUF would ensure that in the future men would be men and women would be women. Nevertheless, Durham adds that, while disagreements were clearly documented, most interwar British fascists, male and female, seemed to think that fascism offered a solution to the sexual degeneration they saw elsewhere, such as Weimar era Berlin and the seamier parts of London. The study of women is often seen as the focus for analysis of gender, but if the bulk of the extreme right consists of men, then 117

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their masculinities are also crucial to understand. One of the key historians of fascism to think about masculinity and fascism is George Mosse, who argued that fascists saw the agency of male figures as central to the revolutionary project.4 If fascism would bring about a new era, then it would be the new fascist man, seen as a sort of a virile redemptive figure, who would act as the foot-​soldier of the fascist revolution and so was needed to bring about the new era. Klaus Theweleit’s sprawling, speculative masterpiece examining fascist masculinities, Male Fantasies, studied extreme fascist manliness in interwar Germany. He drew out a stark picture of fascist masculinity forged in the militarism of the First World War, and unable to engage with women other than by idealising them, or by killing them.5 However, British fascist masculinities have often seemed more nuanced, and perhaps less extreme. Sporting achievement, for example, was central to the construction of the BUF’s specifically British fascist masculinity, according to Michael Spurr. He has analysed how the movement evoked a new man ideal through restoring physical prowess, as the following typical extract from an edition of the BUF’s journal Fascist Quarterly reveals: … we want men, not eunuchs, in our ranks … We expect our members to keep fit, not only in mind, but also in body … No man can be far sunk in degeneration so long as he excels, or even performs competently, in some branch of athletics.6

Fascism wanted to foster a re-​energised nation, Spurr stressed, and male physicality was the opposite to the degeneration found in the supposedly decaying liberal society. Others who have studied Mosley’s fascists, such as Tony Collins, have stressed that references to the Edwardian and Victorian ideals of militarism were also part of the BUF’s cult of masculinity.7 More recently, Liam Liburd has also explored how the BUF developed a sense of fascist masculinity that viewed wider society as effeminate 118

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and weak and promoted the need for a fascist revolution steeped in notions of power and strength. Liburd highlights the role of idealised history and especially the Empire, as the British past was ransacked in order to find potent male leaders for the movement to idealise. These included Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Robert Clive, Baden Powell and Rudyard Kipling. The ‘great men’ of the British expansion and empire were romanticised repeatedly, and they helped inform a fascist frontiersman ideal,8 an extreme sense of Britishness. The BUF’s gendered messages were not always steeped in masculine ideals of warfare and reveries of male redeemer figures though. When campaigning against a new war with Germany in the later 1930s, BUF material targeted mothers, raising fears their male children would be killed in a new war. In other words, it supported Nazism but not through a typically fascist idealisation of warfare as manly. Gendered dynamics of postwar fascist activism After the Second World War, both women and men continued to play important roles in fascist groups, which were often glad for any level of committed activism. Men have typically been leaders of these organisations, and still are today. However, to deny that women have played instructive roles in groups would miss important aspects of this activism. Some were largely unseen, but crucial. For example, Arnold Leese’s widow, May Winifred Leese, helped to fund groups like the National Socialist Movement, and aided the public activism of male leaders such as Jordan and Tyndall. Meanwhile, the women who founded and led the anti-​feminist British Housewives’ League often spoke in similar tones to the National Front by the 1960s and 1970s. After its high point immediately after the Second World War as an anti-​rationing campaign 119

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group, British Housewives’ League opposed permissiveness, defended Apartheid South Africa, and promoted less state intervention. While its hard social conservatism steered it away from overt racial nationalism, it formed part of a wider activist landscape with which the more racist groups of the postwar period also engaged. Another group founded in the early postwar years, the League of Empire Loyalists, also had significant minority of female activists. This included Nettie Bonnar, who was central to the running of Candour in particular, until her resignation in 1958. More high profile externally was Rosine de Bounevialle, who stood for the league in the 1964 general election, and later edited Candour after A. K. Chesterton’s death. For one of the league’s provocative stunts, she once even dressed in an Indian-​style outfit and appeared at a Conservative Party rally, announcing to Harold MacMillan ‘Indian Empire Loyalists say you must go’.9 The National Front was another group that had a complex gender politics, and it offered prominent roles for women from the outset. After its formation in 1967, Chesterton helped ensure de Bounevialle became part of the National Front’s National Directorate, and other women were also later elected to this body in the 1970s. The National Front’s Huddersfield branch had a female Chairman, Rita Buckley, among other leading female figures, while over the four general elections in the 1970s Martin Durham estimates that around 10 per cent of those who stood for the party in these elections were women.10 Women could also be featured in National Front marches, though not commonly as speakers. While significant, women’s positions were gendered, and directed often by male activists of influence. For example, Martin Webster felt that women were particularly effective as fundraisers, and John Tyndall approved of younger, more attractive female activists leading collections for donations, such as by carrying buckets at events. 120

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In such ways, the National Front’s politics and activism often quite overtly expressed a patriarchal outlook. This could also intersect with its other prejudices, such as stoking fear of crime in ways that focused on female anxieties. When one female activist, Helena Ware, stood for the party, she gave out a leaflet saying most mugging victims were women and that this was a crime typically committed by immigrants. In such ways, black men were presented as a danger to white women and only the National Front had the solution, a common subtext to a benevolent sexism that saw women as needing protection. The gendered dynamics of the group’s racism fed into its youth cultures too. Joe Pearce’s Young National Front magazine, Bulldog, tried to make the movement appealing to both younger men and women. Male members were introduced to a ‘Rock Against Communism Bird’, essentially a female activist photographed at a racist white power music concert. The misogynistic magazine could also feature a limited number of female activist voices. One saw 19-​year-​old Sue Makenzie praising the movement for offering a new type of politics that was not stuffy and boring. In the 1980s and 1990s, the BNP’s approach to female members operated in a similar mode to the National Front before it. Initially few women were to be found; in the 1983 General Election, out of 54 candidates only two were female, one was Tyndall’s wife and the other his mother. As leader, Tyndall used new issues, such as the HIV crisis, to update his hysterical discourses, and even claimed that modern Britain’s decay was a form of ‘political, economic, social and spiritual AIDS’. While his misogyny continued, some women played more complex roles, such as Christine Yanni, prominent in the movement during the 1980s. However, it was not until Nick Griffin’s leadership from 1999 that the party fundamentally recalibrated its attitudes to gender to increase its support, though there were red lines it would not cross. For example, it remained 121

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staunchly anti-​feminist, and aside from a few comments that were not approved by the leadership, remained clearly anti-​abortion as well. The party’s voters remained predominantly male in the 2000s, with Goodwin suggesting the split was around 70 per cent male to 30 per cent female.11 Around three in four of its elected councillors were men too. Both statistics point out the typical extreme right ‘gender gap’, but also underscore a smaller but still significant degree of interest from women, who as with previous groups also had a degree of agency over the party’s direction. Griffin sought to distinguish himself from his predecessor by making the BNP seem family friendly as well, toning down the image of violent masculinity, and introduced various innovations to achieve this. The Red, White and Blue Festival was a patriotic event adapted from Jean Marie Le Pen’s Front National and became an annual occasion where the family values of the BNP could be enacted. Such developments sought to distance the party from the skinhead profile that was deemed unattractive to women and so prevented the party from appearing respectable to men as well. In this way it espoused a variant of extreme right familialism, or the idea that the traditional family was at the core of the real nation. Over his period of leadership, Griffin made a range of comments stressing that the elevation of women into prominent positions would benefit the party’s profile, though he was aware of the tension of being seen as watering down the party’s patriarchal values in doing so, and in private Griffin was more overt in his dismissal of the abilities of women. Women who took on more prominent positions included Sharon Edwards. This one-​ time Deputy Leader helped develop a family-​focused division of the BNP, Renaissance, until her departure to form the Freedom Party in 2000, a split that followed a financial dispute. Another prominent female leader was Lynne Mozar, who ran the PROFAM 122

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group. Prominent male figures also targeted women in provocative ways, echoing tropes of the National Front. For example, Richard Barnbrook ran a campaign called London Mothers Against Knives in 2008, in a typically crime-​focused effort to exploit the anxieties of female voters. Like the National Front before it, the BNP was also clearly homophobic in the 2000s, and Griffin’s change of direction did not embrace liberal attitudes towards sexuality. Indeed, he felt more comfortable expressing homophobia openly. He decried the newfound ability of teachers to discuss homosexuality in schools under New Labour, and happily described the sight of men kissing as ‘a bit creepy’. Despite such brazen homophobia, gay men had always been part of the British extreme right, sometimes taking prominent roles. For example, Martin Webster’s homosexuality was well known within the National Front during the 1970s. Yet this only became a concern for Tyndall after the 1979 election failure, when he accused Webster of leading a ‘homosexual network’ in the organisation. Webster himself later alleged that he had engaged in a four-​year relationship with Griffin when he was running for leader in 1999, an accusation Griffin dismissed as a smear. Other prominent gay activists of particular note included co-​founder of Blood & Honour, Nicky Crane, who as well as being a leading neo-​Nazi activist lived a double life as a gay man who worked as security for LGBTQ clubs. He died of an AIDS related illness in 1993, but not before the Sun newspaper ran the headline ‘Nazi Nick is a Panzi’ following a documentary about Crane’s life.12 Such media reporting typified the casual homophobia present not only among readers of that paper, but also in much of the wider political and cultural mainstream at that time. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Crane was also denounced by many of his former fellow activists once his sexuality was revealed. 123

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Gendered aspects of the contemporary extreme right The contexts of extreme right activism have changed in the 2000s. Despite Griffin’s continued homophobia, there were a small number of openly gay members of the BNP, such as Joshua Wren who was active in Swansea.13 Nevertheless, he resigned in 2013 due to the homophobic views of his fellow members. More high profile has been Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversialist who has made a virtue of the incongruity of his gay identity in the far and extreme right space, who came to the milieu as a technology journalist for outlets such as the Daily Telegraph and then Breitbart News. British born, he was a high-​profile member of the US alt-​right movement of the mid 2010s that was supportive of Donald Trump, which also included figures such as white supremacist Richard Spencer, whose own comportment epitomises a more traditional sense of masculinity. A less extreme voice than some, Yiannopoulos has been characterised as a part of the alt-​light, though both terms are problematic. He once even blamed New Zealand authorities for the Christchurch massacre of March 2019 as he felt they were ‘pandering’ to the far left and Muslim interests. His pronouncements on gender and sexuality issues include decrying feminism and lesbianism, while he not only married his husband in 2017 but also declared in 2021 that he is ‘ex-​gay’, adding that his now ex-​ ­husband is just a housemate. His views have also seemed to endorse paedophilia between boys and older men, which saw him lose a lucrative book contract, though he has distanced himself from such positions.14 Recent groups including the EDL have developed a nuanced perspective on gay activists, developing varieties of homonationalism or the embrace of LGBTQ identities as part of an extreme right agenda. The EDL made a virtue of a pro-​LGBTQ outlook, and scholars such as Hilary Pilkington argue convincingly that this 124

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was more than a cynical ploy by its leadership. The LGBTQ rainbow flag was a regular aspect of the movement’s demonstrations, though there was also a variant of extreme right Islamophobia underpinning this: its promotion of pro-​LGBTQ positions fitted with its wider narrative caricaturising Muslim communities though clichés of extreme conservative attitudes to suggest Islam was one dimensionally dogmatic and incompatible with modern Britain. Moreover, the EDL’s anti-​Muslim attitudes also help reveal the gendered nature of its anti-​Muslim discourses: Muslim men were oppressors, and women were oppressed by them. Often Muslim men were described by the group as a sexual threat, to both white women and even children. The patriotic anti-​Muslim politics of the movement was couched in defending women’s and even LGBTQ freedoms, a tactic sometimes described as femonationalism. This anti-​Muslim and pro-​LGBTQ territory was a politics developed prior to the EDL, including by a hero of the movement, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, and before him the openly gay anti-​Muslim figure in the Netherlands Pim Fortuyn. Pilkington notes that, while the EDL could certainly include homophobic activists, in her research she encountered gay, transgender, lesbian and bisexual women who all felt comfortable within the movement. Moreover, she noted that while activists were happy to support LGBTQ issues in principle, perhaps even carry a rainbow flag at a demonstration, some objected to actually seeing fellow activists engage in same sex kissing. Overt homophobia was also much more prevalent on the fringes of EDL culture, such as the Infidels groups. As with so many earlier such groups, the EDL also made a significant minority of female activists feel welcome as part of the group’s activists and organisers. Pilkington’s research shows that female identities promoted by the network often transgressed traditional notions of femininity and presented a more active and 125

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dynamic role for women within the movement. ‘EDL Angels stand beside their men, not behind them’, one slogan ran. Women played important roles in EDL administration at a local and regional level, and some such as Helen Gower were crucial to the group’s overall leadership. While such positions helped give some women in the movement greater agency, male members in the movement interviewed by Pilkington saw women in more traditional terms. Men often idealised women as mothers and as people in need of male protection, so again, a sense of benevolent misogyny was often also present.15 As the extreme right has developed online cultures, its activism has blended into the wider online misogynistic worldview often called the manosphere. Echoing a wider trend in this arena, Yiannopoulos for example has argued against feminism by stating that men should be proud of their masculinity, such as by claiming ‘what feminists allude to as patriarchy is in fact Western civilisation’. The wider sphere of blogs, websites and other online fora that make up the manosphere plays host to a wide range of ideological entrepreneurs, not all of whom are clearly far right, who debate notions of male rights under serial attack, and argue that traditional masculine ideals face existential threat from feminism.16 This wider misogynistic milieu emerged from phenomena such as the culture of pick-​up artists, who especially from the 1990s taught men how to manipulate women for their own purposes, typically sexual. Steeped in victimhood, some Men’s Rights Activists have helped foster a range of sub-​identities, from Incels, who view themselves as being forced into a state of involuntary celibacy by wider society, to those who promoted the idea of male separatism, the Men Go Their Own Way movement. Intellectual voices also sit within this sphere, such as Jordan Peterson. His voice in this broader milieu of male victimhood again asserts that a sense of renewed male pride 126

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is needed as this has been eroded by the modern, liberal world. Figures such as Peterson appeal to predominantly male audiences by giving credence to arguments such as the way to overcome a crisis of modern masculinity is by exerting a sense of male power. This will help them appeal to women, who in turn are happiest when suppressed in such ways. While not a white supremacist, it is not difficult to see why an academic eristic like Peterson would appeal to those who are. Indeed, the arguments in favour of patriarchy from Peterson echoes the work of more credible academic figures, such as Michael Kimmel, whose book Healing from Hate featured interviews with the young male activists drawn to the extreme right.17 He drew out some important observations about the extreme masculinity developed by the movement. He stressed the young men he interviewed felt they had been promised lives of male authority, yet their lived experiences led to feelings of shame as these masculine ideals seemed compromised. They felt thwarted, aggrieved, and yearned for alternate ways of living, which would offer a powerful sense of manhood. The extreme right’s appeal to young men was through a type of ‘masculine compensation’, an alternative way to be a man that meant they did not have to make compromises. Kimmel’s research is helpful to explain a phenomenon that seems quite central to understanding the appeal of the extreme right, especially to younger men. Boys and young men are drawn to an otherwise hopeless cause as it is an arena that offers not only male bonding and camaraderie they struggle to find elsewhere, but also its idealised and heightened notions of masculinity, often developed through discussions of violence (and to a far lesser extent actual acts of violence), confers a greater sense of power and agency. Others to consider the hypermasculine ideal as crucial to explaining the appeal of the extreme right to male activists include 127

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Cynthia Miller-​Idriss.18 She has examined ways in which aspects of a male identity are embodied for extreme right activists. She has focused on material phenomena such as clothing and stresses the importance of the physicality of the body itself in representing the idea of the nation for activists. The extreme right’s imagined national community often focuses on politicised, biological understandings of the body, from an obsession among some neo-​Nazis with blood as the carrier of national identity, to other notions of ‘whiteness’ framed around understandings of the physical form. Clothing, sometimes in the form of evocations of a more traditional style of dress, or other times stylish to engage young people through striking designs, forms a crucial, performative aspect of gender in extreme right cultures. People’s pride in their sub-​culture is manifest physically in how they look, what they wear and the ways they carry themselves. Fashion branding has often been crucial to the far right. Some brands are specifically aimed at white supremacism, and make their politics very clear, such as the Russian label White Rex (‘rex’ translates from Latin in this context as ‘rule’). Others are not, and this interest in specific brands has a long history, including the label Lonsdale. This was once popular as it has most of the letters of the NSDAP in it. There are many other more coded brands now sold in online spaces that combine aspects of the fascist past with designs that may seem innocuous to the uninitiated in extreme right codes and references. For a time in 2020, Benjamin Raymond founder of National Action, sold T-​Shirts with graphic designs linked to extreme right culture online. Meanwhile, to its credit, Lonsdale has done much to counter its reputation and supported anti-​racist causes.19 Finally, though hypermasculine ideas are crucial to explaining aspects of the extreme right context, as noted in Chapter 4 there are a number of prominent female leader figures in recent 128

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times. Internationally, recent female leaders finding success, and much media attention, in their endorsements of intolerance have included: Sarah Palin in America, Marine Le Pen in France and Beatrix von Storch in Germany. Often, a lazy assumption in many commentaries on such figures is that female leadership generates a more moderated, ‘feminine’ form of far-​right politics. As the case of Marine Le Pen exemplifies, when expert of the French context James Shields closely scrutinised Front National policies, many of its policy changes did not actually moderate the party position,20 suggesting the discourse of softening or moderated positions under female leadership is more a media assumption than a reality. Recent female leaders in Britain include Anne Marie Waters, whose identity as an openly gay leader again allows her to juxtapose issues such as LGBTQ rights with Islam. Indeed, For Britain’s homonationalism paints Muslims in a highly negative and caricatured manner and incompatible with modern society. Waters demonstrates a strong ability to lead her organisation, and has clear agency to express her own brand of prejudice. Other recent female figures that have developed prominent roles also include Laura Towler, a central figure in Patriotic Alternative and Jadya Franzen, who was Deputy Leader of Britain First , and recently also launched the British Freedom Party. However, this came after she left her leading role in Britain First in a manner that demonstrated the enduring patriarchy within the milieu. Franzen claimed that she suffered four and a half years of physical abuse from Golding, who for his part has not denied such allegations. She decided to quit to escape such abuse.21 There are few generalisations to make regarding the gender dynamics of the British extreme right. Like other aspects of this movement, the people found within the extreme right are complex and variegated. Nevertheless, examining the gendered structures 129

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within the movement is crucial to revealing the appeal of the extreme right. Its primary attraction is to men, and this explains the prevalence of masculine and at times hypermasculine ideals. Yet women have always been an important part of the picture and their activism should not be ignored. The movement has imagined their role in various ways, sometimes through more traditional ideals, other times embracing women as active figures, even leaders. Women have also considered their views differently from the men they rub shoulders with, and certainly have agency within the movement. Nevertheless, there is often resistance to giving women too much power, or to giving too much recognition to a wider range of LGBTQ activists who become attracted to aspects of an extreme right politics. This has a clear, patriarchal logic which ultimately remains dominant: if the movement becomes too inclusive, how will it appeal to its largest demographic of men with a grievance and who see their position in society as under attack?

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In February 2021, an unnamed teenage boy was convicted of downloading extremist content, including neo-​Nazi material as well as instructions on how to make napalm, Molotov cocktails and an improvised AK47 assault rifle. While indicative of what sorts of extremist material are easily available online, the case was also striking as the boy was just 13 years old when he began engaging with this milieu, which he found easily accessible through online spaces. By the age of 14, he ‘headed’ the British division of the neo-​ Nazi accelerationist network Feuerkreig Division, and through online forums he connected with others and idealised the killing of Jewish people and gay people.1 Such cases show how the online space has become central to extreme right activism in a post-​digital age. Some have used tools to develop online content to engage with the wider public, and so put on a glossier and more respectable external appearance. Others have focused on specific demographics, such as boys and younger men, while others use online tools to engage in far more clandestine sharing of extremist content, which can veer into terrorism offences. The online dynamics of the extreme right have also aided transnational networking between groups, allowing ideas to spread across borders. However, the ways 131

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the online space is used varies dramatically from activist to activist, and from group to group. Initially, online tools were seen as a novel way to modernise specific organisations, now they are central to the maintenance of loose networks of extremists that lack clear centralised structures. In sum, the past 30 years has seen the British extreme right reflect an international trend of online activism identified by Maura Conway, Ryan Scrivens and Logan Macnair. This started with the creation of websites, then led to the establishment of online forums, before moving to exploiting social media, and most recently has seen a turn to messaging apps.2 These migrations demonstrate a commitment within the movement to take advantage of new communication technology, a trend that will continue into the future potentially taking advantages of developments such as the metaverse. New media and political extremism The role of new communication technology as a tool for extreme right activism is nothing new. Precedents can be identified well before the age of computers, including the BUF’s sale of records of speeches by Oswald Mosley and his interest in commercial radio. In the postwar period, grassroots groups also thought of ways to use new technology to engage activists. In the 1960s, activists in Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement were treated to a tape-​recorded speeches of US neo-​Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, and Jordan sometimes used recordings of himself to engage with regional units, to save him travelling in person. Computers emerged as an important tool in the 1980s. Chip Berlet has documented some of the earliest use of networked computers by American extreme right activists. These included George P. Dietz, who began to distribute antisemitic material on a public 132

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bulletin board system, or BBS, in 1984 using an early Apple computer. Others in America soon joined him, including Louis Beam, who developed Aryan Liberty Net, an online forum linked to the Aryan Nations neo-​Nazi group; and the White Aryan Resistance BBS, created by Tom Metzger using his Commodore 64 computer.3 As Heidi Bierich highlights, a key development came in 1996, when a former Ku Klux Klan activist Don Black set up a new website on the internet, Stormfront, which is still active today. Since its formation it has become one of the central hubs for online extreme right activism. It has not only allowed a wide range of neo-​Nazis and other racist activists to chat online, but also is a focal point for documents and the sharing of hyperlinks to related groups.4 Such developments help underscore the point that the extreme right has always been an early adopter of such technology. By the 1990s and early 2000s, a wide range of groups in Britain was also turning to online spaces. Most notably, as well as reinventing itself electorally in the 2000s, the BNP was able to ‘modernise’ by adapting to new communication technologies. In 1999, Griffin discussed how his modernisation strategy was linked to the new power of the internet, and he argued that, just as the Nazis had used new technology such as radio to inspire the masses, so should the BNP. He predicted that within a decade the party could develop its own alternative television, radio and text media on its website, bypassing the traditional gatekeepers, to communicate directly with the public. This was prescient, and over the next decade a complex and sophisticated website was largely achieved by the party. The BNP’s website in the 2000s became a highly visited space, useful for activists as well as others who wanted to know more about the party. Those who studied it included Chris Atton, whose analysis drew out the paradox of the movement calling for voluntary activism yet maintaining a strong ‘party line’ over the BNP’s 133

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position.5 While being directed in a largely top down manner, rather than creating sustained two-​way interactions with those drawn to the BNP, the online arena offered an ever-​increasing range of resources, from donation tools to help generate income, to PDF guides for activists on legal rights for campaigners, to documents outlining how to communicate with the public using appropriate language. Over time, it hosted YouTube films, offered regular news updates and promoted the activities of the party. While the BNP leadership maintained a central hold over the website, it did allow a range of local activist blog sites to emerge, which were branded as independent of the party and offered a degree of grass roots perspectives to develop. However, despite being pioneers in ways that put mainstream parties’ online activism of the 2000s to shame, the BNP failed to fully capitalise on the social media revolution that was developing by the later 2000s. While Nick Griffin joined Twitter in 2009, and still tweets to this day, his party was not a leader in the turn to developing more decentralised networks through platforms such as Facebook. As well as the BNP’s effort, a wider range of groups of the 2000s period developed their own websites. As a competitor political party, the National Front tried to generate a variant of the BNP’s site, but activism reflected on its website looked a pale imitation in comparison. The online space also became an arena for voicing discontent within the movement. After losing leadership of the BNP, John Tyndall took his magazine, Spearhead, online and from here critiqued Griffin’s stewardship in the 2000s. The neo-​Nazi fringe also generated online spaces. The British People’s Party was one that developed a website at this time. The Blood & Honour music network was another that created websites promoting its magazine, and wider culture. Related sites also sold CDs, helping spread the lucrative sale of white power music. Smaller, more overly neo-​Nazi 134

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online activism of the period also included the White Nationalist Party, which offered a website that included online texts, and mail order products. Some websites directly and aggressively targeted those deemed to be enemies of the movement, such as Redwatch, which listed the names and addresses of anti-​fascists and anti-​racists. This website built on the legacy of a magazine of the same name linked to Combat 18 and published in the 1990s, to create an early form of online doxing, or releasing the personal contact details of opponents to allow them to be threatened or even attacked. The more entrepreneurial also created spaces to raise their profile, such as David Irving’s Holocaust denial site, Focal Points Publications. Websites for extreme right intellectual journals such as Michael Walker’s The Scorpion and Troy Southgate’s Tera Firma: National Anarchism Online also emerged.6 With limited resources, Britain’s extreme right groupuscules, like their American relations, were creating a diverse online ecosystem from the early 2000s onwards, seeing in this new type of media the potential to communicate directly with likeminded audiences at low cost. The growth of social media While the BNP was innovative, the rise of the EDL demonstrated the powerful new role for social media for extreme right activists. The group emerged from a spontaneous response to a protest in May 2009, but its savviness to the value of online content was epitomised at an early demonstration in June 2009. Stephen Yaxley-​Lennon paid £450 for a film to be recorded and uploaded to YouTube, which he posted online and promoted in football forums afterwards, helping the group to grow through online exchange. Jamie Bartlett and Mark Littler offered one of the first 135

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analyses of the EDL’s reliance on new social media platforms, especially Facebook, highlighting its ability to develop a new type of networked activism.7 In 2009, this was still a fairly novel platform, as Facebook had been offering accounts to users from 2006. It quickly became a central tool for growing and maintaining the EDL’s network from its outset, which also developed a presence on Twitter and YouTube, as well as a static website. A variety of local divisional social media spaces quickly emerged into an online network of anti-​Muslim activism. Some grassroots blogging sites also offered detailed ideological instruction, such as the English Defence League News blog that combined news stories from the mainstream press critical of Islam, set alongside additional, more overtly anti-​Muslim commentary and links to international counter-​Jihad sites. As such it presented a sustained, fearful narrative of Muslim people as threatening. The diverse yet focused online spaces developed by the EDL allowed rapid interaction between movement’s activists, which lacked a clearly formalised membership structure. As with the BNP’s website, these spaces were also a point of access for the wider public as well. Such use of online tools, and empowerment of grassroots activists, was to a degree a contrast to the BNP’s approach, which sought to maintain a sense of hierarchy. Such exploitation of the power of social media to grow and maintain a network pointed to a new and different type of extreme right activism. However, the central leadership and regional branches still felt compelled to maintain discipline over the narrative, to keep activists on message. Joel Busher discussed the crucial role of Facebook when he interviewed activists from the EDL, which was used to keep together regional divisions of the network, with various activists. His interviewees explained how EDL administrators censored Facebook postings, such as removing links to overtly neo-​Nazi online content, while also 136

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promoting those linked to the international counter-​Jihad movement, such as the Gates of Vienna website, and Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch. At various levels of the EDL, there was curation of its online spaces, to ensure it remained focused on anti-​Muslim issues. This helped shield some activists from other forms of extreme right activism, as those interviewed by Busher were often unaware of the details of other aspects of the extreme right space.8 The EDL certainly helped pioneer exploitation of what is also sometimes referred to as Web 2.0, a general term for the many types of dynamic internet sites such as social medial sites that rely on user-​ generated content, in contrast to static websites that first characterised many online spaces. Web 2.0 sites included the mainstream social media sites, streaming platforms such as YouTube, as well as more niche spaces such as 4chan, 8chan and Reddit. In 2014, from these more hidden spaces emerged a controversy that both reflected the cultures of online misogyny discussed in the previous chapter and opened the way for more overly extreme right activism to develop in such online fora. The Gamergate phenomenon unfolded from August 2014, when women working in the video games sector were targeted for sustained, anti-​feminist online abuse. Typically, male users started posting extreme misogyny towards women, including rape and death threats. Defenders of women under attack were often branded Social Justice Warriors, while the movement’s proponents argued they were really focusing on a relationship between journalists and game developers that promoted overly progressive issues. The Gamergate phenomenon revealed a strong, anti-​progressive online culture that could easily express the most extreme views. It was also a variegated development, not based on a single perspective, and was a precursor to a turn in online spaces, including anonymous forums, being used to express deeply hateful positions that then emanate more widely into the online sphere. This type of 137

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amorphous, extremist content later became a central aspect of what was often dubbed by media commentaries the ‘alt-​right’ by the mid 2010s, which itself was a problematic term created by the movement to rebrand itself. It has been useful for media discussions due to its ability to point to a wide range of phenomena, often online, which promoted pro-​white and anti-​liberal content, especially in America around the period of the 2016 Presidential election campaign. The term ‘alt-​right’ can be linked back to Richard Spencer’s online magazine The Alternative Right, shortened to alt-​right and this term spread on fora such as the /​pol/​section of the anonymous imageboard forum 4chan as a new branding for older racist activism. The value of the term alt-​right for the movement was its ability to recast white supremacism in a way that made it sound both new and directed to a younger audience.9 A wide variety of phenomena emerged from this milieu. One of the most striking was the development of a fictional nation set against liberal values, Kekistan. This emerged from 2015, and even developed a new flag, a variant of the German Imperial flag used by the Nazi regime, though with the swastika replaced by the symbol of Kek, an ironic deity invented by contributors to the 4chan site. The flag of Kekistan has been seen at various rallies subsequently. Many aspects of Kekistan have been discussed in online fora as well, where Kek was deemed to be a bringer of destruction and chaos. The transgressive cultures surrounding this development epitomise the sense of online humour, and irony, found in such digital spaces, which dismiss those who did not get into this milieu as normies.10 Memes and the post-​digital age Online trolling and harassment of opponents, broadly inspired by the Gamergate phenomenon, has become ever more widespread 138

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within the extreme right’s cultures. Its online spaces are now diverse and complex, and since the 2010s digital communication has offered a powerful new language for activism. To take a striking example of how online content has led to a new form of communication, the role of memes has become widely commented upon, both within the extreme right space and beyond. Typically, for most people these are innocuous and silly, but for the extreme right they are also powerful tools for connecting to others and expressing a political viewpoint. Analysts of extreme right memes include Benjamin Lee, who highlights the modern internet meme is something quite different to Richard Dawkins’s original concept. Examples of extreme right memes are simple to identify, and the Pepe the Frog meme is a prime example. This features a cartoon misanthropic frog character, first developed in 2005. At that point the Pepe the Frog character was not part of an extreme right internet discourse. It was then appropriated by extremist cultures in the 2010s, and in America and internationally was turned into myriad variants, often circulated on the more anonymous sections of the internet, such as 4chan, 8chan and Reddit and became prevalent on more mainstream sites such as Twitter and Facebook as well. While each such extreme right variant of the image is offensive as a single entity, collectively they form a referential discourse linking together a complex set of often disparate expressions of extremist sentiment. Some presented Pepe the Frog in front of Auschwitz, or dressed as a SS officer, others depicted him with Donald Trump’s hair. Each such variant of the meme exists in implicit relation to the many other variants, creating a sustained culture both steeped in humour and a bewildering array of clearly racist references. Such images in memes can be easily dismissed as trivial, unimportant, and ephemeral. But successful memes such as Pepe the Frog also carry an emotional content 139

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that alludes to a deeper element of a political worldview. Impactful memes relay a set of associations that can draw a user into a particular extremist outlook, and they are designed to be shared to grow its influence. This ensures that engaging with them becomes an active, social act of reproducing politicised viewpoints, a process that takes just a moment of time, clicking a ‘like’ or a ‘share’ button. In terms of being able to flirt with the taboo, memes are an ideal way to appeal to people’s instincts, and promoting them in online spaces are seemingly both low risk and low effort.11 Sometimes, memes remain limited to the extremist sphere, carrying meaning for knowing activists but failing to engage more widely. Again, Pepe the Frog is an example here. However, others can develop a much wider appeal, and can mask their extremist origins. By the mid-​2010s Britain First was notable for pioneering a relatively speaking more subtle use of shared online content to engage within a wide audience through Facebook. Sometimes these were simply patriotic images, such as poppies. Others were more overtly political, criticising immigration for example, but lacked clear reference to the group itself. A mix of more innocuous and more loaded content was an important part of this mix. In 2017, the website BuzzFeed analysed 2,000 Britain First posts that collectively gained over 1.1 million likes over a six-​week period. Some of these messages were more banal, such as stating MPs who falsified their expenses should be jailed, though others focused on demonising Muslims and refugees. The study found about 350,000 people shared one such post, 19,000 shared at least 10, and a smaller core of 559 people shared over 100 posts.12 However, while memes and other online content can help draw people to the movement, and can probably have an influencing impact on some, they have limitations as well. They are unlikely to spontaneously convert people to extreme right positions who do not already have views broadly 140

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sympathetic with the movement, and the phenomenon points to the need to develop strong critical digital skills, not only among younger people but also among older social media users as well. The cumulative impact of the rise of online communication has also shifted the boundaries of acceptability, and ideas once taboo have become prevalent again online. Moreover, technologies such as smartphones that in the 2000s were rarities have become ubiquitous. In the past 10 years, the extreme right has clearly adapted to what some analysts describe as the ‘post-​digital’ age, and its activism incorporates the digital space as a normal feature of modern activity, rather than as a novelty. Whereas in the late 2000s groups such as the EDL capitalised on the newness of online activism, most people now expect many engagements, from complaining to the local council to falling in love, to be conducted through online platforms of one description or another.13 Like other online media, extreme right generated content competes for clicks, views and likes, using sensational content to attract attention. For their part, social media companies have been established on business models that essentially make a profit from the quantities of traffic their sites generate, incentivising them to promote extreme right material alongside other content as this is likely to draw users to their platforms. In a drive to extremes, these models have also incentivised online conflict as a means to encourage spiralling, conflicting content and such sites typically use algorithms that push more sensational material to users, again to elicit engagement. Yet despite social media’s business model in many ways being designed to fuel awareness of provocative, even extremist, content, other market forces have also come into play. Like any business, social media and tech companies have become increasingly concerned regarding the respectability of their brands and are increasingly less willing at least to be seen as hosting and 141

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enabling extremism, though for commercial rather than moral reasons. In 2016 the European Commission announced a new Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech online, a move it announced with the support of leading industry representatives from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Microsoft, suggesting a new willingness to be seen to behave responsibly. This shift to taking greater responsibility by tech companies has been, and is likely to remain, limited. For example, Donald Trump’s removal from Twitter and long-​term suspension from Facebook is a clear indication of the tensions. Twitter was happy to host Trump’s high-​profile and prolific account while he was President but felt compelled to remove him once his political career was in decline, especially after the events of 6 January 2021 where he became ever more overtly associated with violence. Yet Facebook chose only to suspend him after this controversy, and so has kept the door open to his return to their platform, possibly coinciding with news of a new presidential campaign. For their part, such platforms argue they have a duty to free speech, which limits what they can and cannot remove. In other words, even with more restrictive legislation, extreme right access to social media platforms will be based on a commercial logic. The question is whether platforms want to include extremist online content to generate traffic, or to remove it to be seen as acting in a respectable manner. For civil society and campaigning organisations, shaming such platforms is likely to be an impactful way to encourage a greater degree of social consciousness from them. Stronger legislation to enforce more active curation of these spaces by social media companies is also likely to mitigate the issue. Due to their negative profiles and specific breaches of rules, high-profile British activists have increasingly been removed from social media sites. This includes Stephen Yaxley-​Lennon and Paul 142

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Golding. Some groups, such as Britain First, the EDL and the BNP, have also had accounts removed from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This should not be confused with a complete takedown of all content linked to the extreme right, and such removals have and will remain patchy and partial. Even so, the stymying of some of the most prolific accounts has significantly limited their reach. For example, at his height Yaxley-​Lennon had over 1 million Facebook subscribers and 413,000 Twitter followers, while in 2018 his posts achieved an incredible 1.5 billion individual appearances on screens. By the end of 2021, he had only around 140,000 social media followers on smaller more niche sites and has nowhere near the level of reach he once had.14 While a turn to mass social media helped the extreme right to find new outlets in the 2010s, a partial removal from such platforms inevitably has a limiting effect on how they can generate larger off-​line activities. This issue is often portrayed as one of limiting the right to free speech by extreme right figures, yet this is also a misnomer. Such removals do not stop extreme right activists from voicing their views in other ways, it merely denies them the ability to amplify their views to millions, often for free, on commercial platforms.15 The diversification of platforms The albeit limited effort to prevent the extreme right from populating mainstream social media spaces has led to the growth of an array of more specialist sites on less well populated platforms, where activists are less restricted. A good example here is Gab, an alternate social media space created in 2016 when its founder, Andrew Torba, saw the potential for an alternate platform that offered a home to vocal figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard 143

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Spencer and ‘Tommy Robinson’. It has also become host to a number of British groups, such as Britain First and Patriotic Alternative. Its main disadvantage for these activists is that it lacks the same connectivity with much larger mainstream social media audiences, and so prevents the ways in which Britain First succeeded at widespread dissemination of its messages when active on Facebook. Another social network sometimes used in these ways is the Russian site VK. For groups seeking a wide impact, such options offer significant limitations. However, other more specialist online social media spaces can offer the extreme right access to potential new recruits. This has included an embrace of the video gamer chat network Discord. For example, promoting itself through gaming culture networks, Patriotic Alternative offered Call of Duty: Warzone tournaments during the pandemic. Livestreaming himself playing, Mark Collett’s YouTube videos have even included people who referenced Britain’s fascist past during such gaming sessions, by taking usernames such as Arnold Spencer, an allusion to Arnold Leese.16 In more extreme ways still, video games and real life have become horribly blurred. Brenton Tarrant, for example, killed over 50 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, and live streamed his attack, presenting it as something akin to a first-​person perspective shooting game. The video of the attack was subsequently shared and proved difficult for Facebook and other platforms to remove quickly. While these sorts of extreme media have a limited appeal, such content can be important for the radicalisation of some. For the most part the extreme right wants to connect with others, either smaller circles of already likeminded activists, or a larger pool of those they seek to draw into this heterogenous milieu. Another important platform is Telegram, used by various British groups including the British Movement, Britain First and Patriotic Alternative. It is also used by many more interested in neo-​Nazi acceleration ideas 144

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and who lack clear formalised organisational structures. Meanwhile, the video sharing platform TikTok has featured material from the extreme right with antisemitic and racist content. As the list of newer platforms becomes ever longer, others including Parler and Zello have also become part of an increasingly complete picture. One particularly notable growth area for content generation in the post-​digital era has been vloggers using various video hosting platforms. According to Hope not Hate, by 2019 at least, Britain had some of the most watched vloggers and influencers within the international far right.17 These included Katie Hopkins, Stephen Yaxley-​Lennon and Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as Carl Benjamin and Paul Watson. Benjamin, also known as Sargon of Akkad, has grown a YouTube channel with over 900,000 subscribers, and in November 2020 launched a sophisticated alternate news site, Lotus Eater Media. Paul Watson, meanwhile, has a YouTube channel with over 1.8 million subscribers that has supported Donald Trump’s presidency, critiqued feminism, and promoted conspiracy theories around Covid lockdowns. The successes of these figures in establishing impactful online presences while maintaining these within the bounds of acceptability for YouTube demonstrates an excellent set of skills in adapting to online spaces. Other vloggers of significance, though less impactful internationally, include Colin Robertson, who also uses the name Millennial Woes and expresses a range of extreme right and misogynistic perspectives in a unique, sardonic outlook. His videos are hosted on video platforms such as BitChute and YouTube, and have featured interviews with a range of British and international activists. As well as this, others in this vein who have found an audience in the past few years have included the anonymous antisemetic YouTuber Way of the World, Nick “UNWAShED” Cotton, Morgoth’s Review, the Iconoclast, and Edward Dutton’s Jolly Heretic.18 145

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Finally, the growth of online accelerationist cultures developed by groups such as National Action, Sonnenkreig Division and Feuerkreig Division, noted at the start of this chapter, demonstrate some further issues. National Action engaged in various public arenas, and used tools such as provocative YouTube videos to gain attention. Its activists also engaged in online attacks, perhaps most notably in 2014 when Garron Helm targeted the then Labour MP Luciana Berger, tweeting a picture of her with a star of David on her forehead, evocative of Holocaust era antisemitism, and adding the hashtag HitlerWasRight. He was jailed for this, which drew the attention of the international extreme right who send Berger thousands of similar offensive messages on Twitter.19 After the group was proscribed, online tools were central to retaining its activism in clandestine ways as well. For example, figures formerly linked to National Action developed their own private encrypted network after the group was banned. One was called Triple K Mafia and used Telegram to effectively keep the Midlands branch of the group together. National Action leaders also networked with likeminded activists, especially in America, through a website called Iron March, first developed by a Russian activist called Alexander Mukhitdinov in 2011. As this site developed, it attracted interest from a range of international neo-​Nazi groups, including the Azov Battalion in Ukraine, Greece’s Golden Dawn and the Nordic Resistance Movement. As Ben Lee and Kim Knott have highlighted, Iron March allowed National Action activists to exchange ideas with groups such as Atomwaffen Division, a US neo-​Nazi youth group, and Antipodean Resistance, a similar group in Australia.20 Iron March closed in 2017, but was followed by a broadly similar site, Fascist Forge, which again offered a hub for online neo-​Nazi youth activism. 146

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Such online activism has led to new forms of transnational online ideological exchange. One of the more unexpected developments in recent times has been the revival of the ideas of James Mason, a neo-​Nazi of the 1960s generation and for a time active in the American Nazi Party. By the 1980s, his influence was negligible though he developed a newsletter called Siege, later published as a book in 1992. He became celebrated by Atomwaffen Division in the 2010s, which promoted Siege, and Mason’s idealisation of race war has been repeatedly reproduced in wider accelerationist networks. Atomwaffen Division promoted Mason through their networks, as well as via specially created websites, especially siegeculture.biz which become a hub for Mason’s ideas. It also hosted an array of other neo-​Nazi-related literature linked to the accelerationist variant of neo-​Nazi youth culture epitomised by National Action and Atomwaffen Division. This included scanned editions of the 1960s neo-​Nazi magazine Stormtrooper and online copies of Mein Kampf. The rediscovery of Mason by a new generation of internet-savvy younger activists highlights the role of the internet in recirculating older phenomena, and turning them into new types of activism, epitomising both the continuity and the change between the pre-​ digital and post-​digital eras. As Cynthia Miller-​Idriss highlights in her important book Hate in the Homeland, this new online culture is international, while its ubiquity in online spaces, blending the banal of everyday life with extremist positions, is likely to continue to radicalise young people and adults for the foreseeable future.21 Those who want to understand the development of the extreme right need to work hard to keep abreast of the changing nature of these patterns of online activism and organisation. Ideally, they need to be further ahead of this technology curve than the extreme right itself. Moreover, while analysing the newest trends is important, it is also necessary to continue to monitor older types of 147

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online activism and established mainstream social media outlets as well. As new groups form, they often operate from a position of being able to create new accounts on mainstream sites, at least until they engage in activity that justifies their removal, and not all have been removed from mainstream social media either. As we all live in a post-​digital reality, the extreme right will likely never be removed entirely from online spaces. In terms of mitigating this development, strategies such as restricting access to mainstream social media, encouraging tech companies to use algorithms that limit the visibility of extremist material, and embarrassing those that do not do enough to limit abuses on their platforms, are all impactful. However, ultimately solutions to minimising the risks posed by online extremism will be found through efforts to tackle the underlying appeal of the extreme right, and developing better critical skills among all internet users, old and young.

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In November 2020, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu noted that 10 of the 12 people convicted of terrorism offences in the previous year were linked to the extreme right. This followed a warning the previous month from MI5 claiming that a quarter of attacks were linked to the extreme right and racist groups, and that as these were becoming more attractive to young people a threat of violence would remain for some time to come.1 While such comments are concerning, they raise the basic question: is the threat of extreme right violence really increasing? The answer here is complex, and context is important to consider. According to the most recent iteration of an authoritative annual survey of extreme right violence by the Centre for Research on Extremism (C-​REX) based at the University of Oslo, contrary to some of the more sensationalist media narration of an ever-​growing threat of extreme right violence, the past 30 years saw the number of extreme right fatal attacks fall in Europe. The year 1992, for example, saw 25 fatal attacks in Europe, whereas in 2019 there were only 4 fatal attacks, and in 2020 there were 2. The year 1992 also saw 28 fatalities, a number never exceeded subsequently, aside from 2011 when there were 80 fatalities. Yet 77 of these tragic deaths occurred as a result 149

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of the horrific mass killing carried out by a single terrorist, Anders Breivik, and so in many ways 2011 was a highly anomalous year. Despite a general pattern of declining extreme violence, what C-​REX’s data show has been increasing in Europe in recent times is the lone attacker category. This is also epitomised by Breivik, and it has become the most significant type of extreme violence in Europe. While the 1990s saw violence across Europe often coming from gangs and from more unorganised attacks, these forms of violence have decreased, while lone attackers, and foiled plots from potential attackers, have increased. Thankfully, more restrictive firearms legislation has prevented many of these attacks resulting in mass casualties as has been seen in America and elsewhere in recent times. Focusing on Britain, C-​REX’s dataset shows that over the past 30 years it has been one of the two most affected European countries. Only Germany, which has a much more complex neo-​ Nazi subculture for obvious reasons, has been significantly higher in terms of extreme right violence compared to the UK.2 Such reports present a common theme: while violence is perhaps less common than is often suggested by media coverage, its real risks need no exaggeration, and the extreme right movement produces attacks and plots that merit ongoing efforts to mitigate such risks. Cases from David Copeland to Thomas Mair exemplify the concern, but these are merely the most well known and so what follows aims to capture many more of these cases, especially from the 2000s. Roots of contemporary fascist violence An aura of violence has always been part of the cultures surrounding British extreme right. While sometimes this profile has been cultivated by the movement itself as part of its hypermasculine 150

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hubris, historically the image of the movement as violent has also been amplified, often as a means to discredit groups. Mosley’s 1931 New Party included a militia, his ‘Biff Boys’, though despite the fears of some they were hardly in the same league as Germany’s paramilitary elite, the SS. The BUF also developed a paramilitary style, again inspired by the violent street politics of continental fascisms, and activists like William Joyce seemed happy to extend their politicking to violent confrontations. However, Stephen Cullen has shown that at its marches and demonstrations at least, the BUF was more commonly the recipient of anti-​fascist attacks, not the initial instigator of aggression. Its activists were responsible for attacks on competitor fascist groups, such as the British Fascists and those linked to the Imperial Fascist League. BUF members also attacked those it opposed outside of marches, Cullen adds, and from January 1934 to September 1938, he documents there were 24 recorded assaults by fascists, targets including eight Jewish people and six Communists (one of whom was also Jewish). Many more attacks probably went undocumented, especially in London’s East End.3 Daniel Tilles broadly concurs, and while no apologist for the BUF’s antisemitism he highlights that the BUF were often portrayed stereotypically as the bullies of the political scene, and this helped to discredit them in the eyes of the public. On occasion, BUF actions certainly justified a violent reputation, such as the ways antifascists were dealt with by BUF stewards at the notorious 1934 rally in Olympia. However, these were outliers, and more commonly the BUF attempted to steward their marches to avoid actual violence. Tillis also stresses that violence linked to the group increased as its antisemitism became more overt, sparking militant antifascist responses.4 In the postwar years, Mosley’s Union Movement was another with a reputation for violence. Like the BUF before it, the UM was 151

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purposefully provocative in periods of social conflict, for example in Notting Hill in 1958, and exploited racist attacks such as the murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959. Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement, meanwhile, rekindled the uniformed fascist dynamics of Nazism for the 1960s era. The paramilitary unit he and John Tyndall developed, Spearhead, engaged in training events, developed a Nazi-​style uniform and even went on military-​style exercises in the countryside, but this was shut down in 1962 following a raid on their headquarters. While these neo-​Nazis certainly took their militarised endeavours seriously, these were easily quashed. Jordan’s continued extremism throughout the 1960s did help give licence to a series of attacks on synagogues though, carried out by groups of young men linked to both himself and François Dior. Other neo-​Nazi groupings of the 1960s linked to Jordan, such as the tiny National Socialist Group, also tried to develop a paramilitary dynamic, but ultimately failed despite attracting a few willing to engage in violence. Extreme right violence became more widespread by the 1970s, as leadership of the National Front endorsed aggressive street activism as part of demonstrating the muscular dynamics of the organisation. Public order issues at marches were again an important factor. Many National Front marches, such as in Lewisham in August 1977, became violent, and police were often aggressive towards antifascist campaigners opposing such purposefully provocative protests. David Renton highlights that the murder of New Zealand antifascist Blair Peach at a National Front rally in Southall in 1979 was a clear example of fatal police violence, used to ensure an extreme right protest could occur.5 Police were also often simply indifferent to people of colour who were killed in racist attacks in the 1970s. In June 1976, Gurdip Singh Chaggar was killed by racist attackers in Southall, West London, and his death became a 152

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rallying point for the Asian community of the area and elsewhere, who used the killing to make clear their deep, and justified, frustrations with the ways police had treated the incident as a triviality. Others killed within the racist cultures of the 1970s included Atlab Ali, murdered in May 1978, and Ishaque Ali who was killed by attackers in June 1978. As with Chaggar’s death, these murders were seen by the affected communities as related to the heightened racist climate provoked by National Front activism. The ways the National Front’s profile gave licence to violence was also indicated by the case of Fred Challis, who was not a National Front member but who killed a homeless man. Demonstrating his political leanings, he scrawled on an adjacent wall ‘NF Rules OK’ using the murdered man’s blood. When he was sentenced, Challis admitted to 300 further attacks on Asian youths and homeless people. Alex Carter highlights that sometimes those in the National Front planned to attack its antifascist opponents. For example, in 1978 two of its members, a Branch Security officer from Newcastle, Alan Birtley, and another activist from Devon, James Tierney, were convicted for possessing explosives.6 The National Front’s culture of violence was certainly something tolerated by its leaders, while aggression linked to the movement mainly came in the form of public order issues stemming from its protest as well attacks on people of colour inspired by the movement. By the 1980s, terrorism imported from continental fascisms was increasingly part of the picture. Activist turned antifascist informant Ray Hill revealed in 1984 that there was a terrorist plot to carry out such an attack, targeting the Notting Hill Carnival, which was being developed by neo-​Nazi groups. Hill recorded undercover conversations with Italian terrorists for the Channel 4 documentary The Other Face of Terror, which he later also used as the title for an excellent book, co-​written with Andy Bell.7 Other activists engaged 153

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in terrorism in the 1980s included the BNP’s Tony Lecomber, who in 1985 was sat in his car parked outside the headquarters of the far-​left Revolutionary Workers Party when a homemade bomb exploded, earlier than planned. Police later found bomb-​making equipment at Lecomber’s home, and he was given a three-​year sentence for explosives offences in 1986. Lecomber was convicted again in 1991, following an attack on a Jewish schoolteacher.8 The BNP’s links with violence by the 1990s also included its security unit, Combat 18, which was ejected from the party in 1993 due to its violent reputation. It was overtly neo-​Nazi and even celebrated rather than denied the Holocaust. It printed literature with the names and addresses of political opponents, while other material featured bomb-​making instructions. In 1997, its one-​time leader, Charlie Sargent, along with another activist, Martin Cross, was convicted of the murder of fellow Combat 18 activist Christopher Castle, following internal disputes within the violent groupuscule. After this, Charlie Sargent’s brother, Steve Sargent, formed another new group, the National Socialist Movement. Among its most prominent activists was its Hampshire organizer, David Copeland. Previously a member of the BNP, in 1999 Copeland planted three nail bombs in London, targeting black, Bengali and finally LGBTQ communities. His case, discussed further below, was also one of the first of this type of lone attacker who found the internet useful, including researching ways to carry out attacks. By the turn of the millennium, the British extreme right scene experienced a new period of growth, and those disillusioned with the BNP created small breakaways that offered extreme neo-​ Nazism. For example, in 2005, five activists from another Combat 18 splinter, the Racial Volunteer Force, were convicted of offences linked to the organisation’s magazine, Stormer. One edition had idealised Copeland’s 1999 attacks and detailed how to make a nail 154

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bomb. One of the most concerning of the 2000s period was a neo-​ Nazi group called the Aryan Strike Force. Led by Ian Davidson and his son, and with a small online following of around 350 people, it was closed down in 2009 when police discovered bomb making equipment and ricin at their home.9 Its website was operated by two others convicted of terrorism offences in 2009, Michael Heaton and Trevor Hannington.10 By the 2000s, then, there was a growing culture idealising terrorism and political violence more broadly among an amateurish though dedicated milieu of typically neo-​Nazi inspired activist. Such activism now often formally falls into the category of terrorism, defined in law under the Terrorism Act 2000 as using or threatening violence against the government or the public in order to promote a political, religious or ideological cause. However, these attacks represent the energies of a relatively small section of the extreme right. For a movement steeped in idealisations of violence, often seen as offering the only solution to overcoming a political and social order deemed corrupt, this raises the question of why only a relatively small number of its activists have turned to actual violence. If this milieu is constantly idealising attacks, why has there not been more such violence? Brakes on violence and the idealisation of violence The concept of ‘brakes on violence’, a term that emerged from an important project funded by the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats and carried out by Graham Macklin, Joel Busher and Dominic Holbrook, is important for recent thinking on the topic. By asking why such extremists choose not to engage in violence, they developed a framework for explaining the factors that inhibit and limit acts of violence from such milieus, including 155

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the extreme right. This is important as it helps to explain why extreme right culture has created many leaders, past and present, who have promoted violent ideals, yet the main category of violent actor is the fringe activist or activists, typically boys and men who use a high degree of personal initiative to develop specific attacks. Extreme right groups often do not direct violence, and while idealising attacks in principle they also put a series of internal brakes on violence. These include issues of organisational strategy, and often extremist groups are aware that a largely non-​violent approach will be more useful in the short term, as this will help stop them being simply shut down. Another ‘brake’ relates to the moral issues of creating a context where people can think violence is justifiable. Groups that promote violence in principle need to do a lot to radicalise people, to overcome moral inhibitions to carrying out violence, and this is often difficult to achieve. Another ‘brake’ comes with the issue of how exactly to define an enemy to target, and this can again at least limit those for whom violence can be justified. A final ‘brake’ relates to the notion of path dependency. Over time the impact of such ‘brakes’ on violence helps to institutionalise their continued use as established practice, again curtailing or at least limiting escalations into sustained violence from groups themselves.11 These internal brakes on violence help unpick the complex dynamics of why a group like National Action, designated a terrorist threat, was both threatening and also deceptively innocuous. Though it was proscribed under terrorism legislation, one of the key reasons for this was glorifying terrorism in the wake of the murder of Jo Cox. For the most part, it was a group that certainly liked to talk about violence, and developed materials that revelled in the idea of the political soldier leading the rise of a new era through violence. It engaged in some restricted events that offered 156

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activists forms of violence, such as armed training for affiliates in private settings, but more often its members preferred to avoid physical confrontations in public. Rather, its impactful activism focused on non-​physically violent, yet sometimes still criminal, tactics such as online abuse, creating striking YouTube films, organising provocative ‘white man’ marches, and stickering sites such as Aston University with antisemitic material. However, one member on the fringes of the movement’s active participants, Zack Davies, exemplifies the risks such a group poses in terms of incubating unpredictable violence. In January 2015, Davies attacked a man he encountered in a supermarket with a machete, who he took for a Muslim but was actually a Sikh man. Davies later explained that the attack was in revenge for the killing of Lee Rigby and was convicted of attempted murder. Questions were raised about his mental health at his trial and sentencing, though this issue certainly does not explain away his violence.12 One issue with a figure such as Davies was how activism with National Action led to his exposure to an array of extremist material. This literature did not directly incite his attack but was crucial in taking him to a point where an extreme violent act was deemed desirable, it helped give a licence to carry out violence. Police released images of books of interest to Davies, and these texts both typify and exemplify the culture of extreme right leaders, past and present, offering powerful frameworks that help overcome moral qualms to violence, authorising aggression. Some of these, like Mein Kampf, need little introduction. This text is more than just a taboo book though, and its pages offer a powerful depiction of the world seen through an antisemitic conspiracy theory lens, framing Jewish people as intent on domination over white people; in other words presenting the world as in a battle between forces deemed ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Other texts in his collection demonstrate the powerful 157

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influence of American neo-​Nazism on British contexts. Leader of the American Nazi Party in the 1960s, George Lincoln Rockwell’s book White Power not only coined a key white supremacist slogan, drawn on by British extreme right groups from the 1970s onwards, but also offers an updated version of Hitler’s antisemitism, addressing postwar contexts. Other crucial texts owned by Davies and commonly found in the book collections of extreme right violent actors included William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries and Hunter. Both books promote extreme violence. The Turner Diaries offers its readers a fictionalised diary of Earl Turner, who helps lead a white supremacist takeover of America, defeating Israel and the supposed Jewish conspiracy in the process. As well as offering a blueprint for a violent revolution and the rise of a new era of white domination, a fascist vision of a revolution away from a liberal democratic order, it features many evocative scenes fantasising about extreme violence. These include the Day of the Rope, where those deemed race traitors, including journalists and white women in mixed marriages, are all killed during one day. Hunter, its sequel, documented a fictionalised lone attacker who becomes engaged in targeted killings to undermine a supposed Jewish conspiracy. The main protagonist’s journey into political violence sees him become ever more politically conscious of the threats posed to white people, and the book acts as a sort of prequel to The Turner Diaries, both published under Pierce’s pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. A final curious text was a copy of Ben Klassen’s Nature’s Eternal Religion. Klassen was the founder of the neo-​Nazi Creativity movement in America, a sort of extreme right new religious movement that sporadically promoted political violence from the 1970s to the 2000s. Its activists developed slogans such as RaHoWa, or ‘Racial Holy War’, and again such texts offer frameworks for thinking violence directed 158

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in particular ways can be morally justified. As Roger Griffin has explained in his book Terrorist’s Creed, interest in such ideologically marked texts from attackers is often related to a search for deeper meaning.13 The issue of mental health is often referenced in coverage of extreme right attacks, including Zack Davies’, and can be noted in media reporting in prominent ways that seem quite different to how such issues appear in reports of Islamist attacks. The reality is that mental health issues can play a role in both forms of terrorism, while one major study of the phenomenon carried out by the Royal United Services Institute showed that only around 35 per cent of European lone attackers had a mental health issue, against an average of just over a quarter for the general population.14 Moreover, mental health can encompass a wide variety of phenomena. While deployed as a factor explaining violence it can refer to a wide range of problems from depression to autism spectrum disorders, issues that are both common and for the vast majority of sufferers do not lead to violent attacks. While significant, most mental health conditions do not stop someone being responsible for their actions and extreme right violence should not be written off as acts of lone madmen. The term ‘lone wolf ’ is also often used in media commentary and is again highly problematic. It was promoted by US neo-​Nazi figures such as Tom Metzger, who purposefully idealised the lone wolf myth as someone disconnected from the wider extreme right milieu, but who operates in its interests. Emphasising this disconnect was crucial as it would allow quasi legal groups such as his own White Aryan Resistance to distance themselves from acts of extreme right violence, yet both could work for the same ultimate end goal. Another key American activist, Louis Beam, promoted the concept of Leaderless Resistance, to again idealise a context 159

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where violence would be developed spontaneously, meaning there would be no networks of violent actors that state action could disturb.15 To overcome this issue, analysis should stress both that there are always relationships between extreme right lone attackers and the wider movement that has inspired their attack, and that there are sections of the extreme right which will celebrate attackers. Raffaello Pantucci is one who has examined the lone attacker phenomenon. In 2012 he set out a model that focused primarily on Islamist cases which can be developed into a useful typology for thinking about the ways lone attackers develop relationships to the wider milieu that they identify with, and which provides them with the discourses that radicalise them. For the extreme right, Pantucci’s model can be refined to three key categories. Loners have a one-​way relationship to a wider extreme culture and do not tend to meet with others in the movement. These are distinct from ‘lone actors’ who have a two-​way relationship with group or networks but still develop violent actions by themselves. Finally, Pantucci highlighted that sometimes violent activists spontaneously come together in small groups, that form when a small number of likeminded figures decide to carry out violence collectively. Pantucci also identified the category of single attackers who are directed by a wider group in Islamist contexts, but this has not been commonplace in contemporary extreme right cases, though could become so in the future.16 These categories are often more difficult to establish in practice, but the model helps focus discussion on ways individual attackers are always related to a wider political context, otherwise they could not be categorised as extreme right attackers. To ground the model in some examples, Anders Breivik epitomises the loner type, given his very limited links with active groups

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but a deep immersion in a violent extreme right culture. Brenton Tarrent seems to sit somewhere between a loner and a lone actor, as he had a more complex relationship with European Generation Identity groups in particular. A clearer example of a lone actor with a two-​way relationship to a wider milieu would be Michael Wade Page, who killed 12 people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in August 2012. He had a longstanding engagement with the wider extreme right and played for white power bands such as Blue Eyed Devils. Finally, examples of small groups include Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, who in 1995 worked together to bomb a government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring many more. McVeigh is often the protagonist who is remembered for this attack, but he worked with others. He is also a figure often idealised by more recent attackers. Another prominent example here is the National Socialist Underground, a German cell active in the late 1990s and 2000s that carried out a series of murders and included a female member as well as two men. The wider extreme right ideology plays a crucial role in radicalising, but lone violent actors tend to do something further with it as well. Ramon Spaijj, for example, has noted the issue of personalisation of ideology. While attackers certainly see their activism as part of a wider political cause, they also include personalised elements into their justifications. Finally, consideration of non-​ideological issues is crucial too.17 Here, Paul Gill’s important work on this topic, from a behaviouralist perspective, is worth highlighting to help to draw out the contextual factors in people’s lives that play a crucial role. He identifies both longer and shorter-​term factors that often help explain the ways an attack develops, from a generalised sense of grievance, to a more deep-​seated engagement with an ideological position, to planning and sometimes even carrying out violence. Gill identifies a range of longstanding or distal factors that are 161

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commonly found in cases of lone actor radicalisation, which include living alone, extended periods of social isolation, prior criminality, and mental health issues that may hinder socialisation, though others are also common.18 These issues are fairly w ­ idespread, and certainly do not explain the attacker’s development. Gill adds that long-term issues like mental health are often a ‘cause of a cause’. Rather than directly explaining an attack, such problems or issues may explain why someone has lost a job or has become socially isolated, giving them time to develop a powerful sense of grievance and plan an attack.19 A range of often equally un-​ideological and commonplace short-​term factors helps provoke either an interest in political extremism, or the intensification of long-​held views. Such stressful, proximate factors for Gill can include losing a job, moving house, the end of a personal relationship, or many other stressful, and potentially triggering, developments. Once triggered, intensification of views can then lead to frustration that others are not acting on the ultimate aims of the ideology, leading to the development of a plan to act alone, and then in some cases also preparing and actually carrying out an attack. Recent examples of loners Some loners have been active for several years, going undetected as they engaged in terrorist actions. For example, between 2003 and 2007, Jefferson Azevedo posted over 150 letters to the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, other MPs, churches, schools, mosques, the mobile telephone network O2’s offices in Slough, Portsmouth Royal Navy Dockyard and a local curry house. His letters were marked AF, for Aryan Force, and signed RaHoWa. They often included caustic soda wrapped in foil, relatively harmless but resembling anthrax letter attacks that were sent in America at a similar time, 162

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and which Azevedo explained had inspired him. Some letters referenced Timothy McVeigh. He once even put a hoax bomb on a bridge above the A27. His defence team noted that he suffered from depression that made socialising difficult for him. He was a loner, but also clearly inspired by a wider movement that gave meaning to his terrorist activities.20 Other loners have included Pavlo Lapshyn, a Ukrainian student who came to the UK in April 2013 and within five days carried out the racist murder of Mohammed Saleem on the evening of 29 April. In May and June of that year he also planted three improvised explosive devices outside mosques in Walsall, Tipton and Wolverhampton. These attacks were initially linked to the EDL, but in fact were not related to that group. After murdering Saleem, Lapshyn’s VK social media site included images of Timothy McVeigh, and references to a Russian version of William Pierce’s book Hunter as well as the National Socialist Underground, and his computer files were later found to have included a recording of The Turner Diaries.21 He did not have sustained links to Ukrainian groups, nor did he network with British ones while in Britain before his arrest. His case helps to underscore the difficulty of detecting such loners. There have been quite a few more examples, cases that have often been forgotten and which even at the time received limited coverage. Convicted in 2009, Neil Lewington was discovered when he was arrested by police for urinating in public. His home was searched and was found to contain a range of terrorist-​related material, including chemicals and equipment to manufacture bombs. Lewington claimed to have created his own group, Waffen SS UK, but this seems to have been a fantasy. He had also disclosed to a girlfriend on an online forum that he wanted to hang a black person. Lewington was convicted of seven charges related to terrorism and explosives.22 More recently, in 2014 Ian Forman was 163

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imprisoned having planned to blow up a mosque and an Islamic centre near his home in Liverpool, after police found chemicals at his home. Work colleagues had disclosed their concerns about Forman’s behaviours and internet use at work.23 Another recent loner was Ethan Stables, who in 2018 was convicted and sentenced to an indefinite hospital order for possessing explosives, making threats to kill and preparing an act of terrorism. Stables had been diagnosed as having an autism spectrum disorder before these offences, and later also added he felt shame in his bisexuality, which provoked extreme online posts.24 As well as more neglected cases, some of the most high-​profile attacks such as those carried out by Thomas Mair and Darren Osborn have been by socially isolated loners lacking an ongoing two-​way relationship with the wider extreme right. These are quite contrasting examples. Mair was a long-​standing believer in neo-​Nazi ideals. He first became interested in neo-​Nazi material in the 1990s, and shortly after his attack the US watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center released data showing in 1999 he purchased extremist material including bomb-​making instructions from the US group led by William Pierce, the National Alliance. He subscribed to The Oak, a 1990s era magazine linked to a British branch of Pierce’s National Alliance. Police photos from Mair’s home revealed how he developed a shrine to the extreme right, with books by credible academics on Hitler and the Third Reich sitting alongside highly ideological material, and neo-​Nazi runes. Though fascinated by neo-​Nazism, Mair had little to no two-​way interaction with the various groups and activists in his area. Mair suffered from depression, struggled to hold down a job and in the years before the attack lived alone. He was even interviewed by the Huddersfield Examiner in 2010, telling them that he volunteered at a nearby park to help deal with ‘Feelings of worthlessness’ that were ‘mainly caused by long-​term 164

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unemployment’. Reporting shows that close to the time of his attack he carried out research using a computer at a local library, and he certainly seems to have been triggered by the Brexit referendum issue that reached a peak by this point. His victim, Jo Cox, had a profile locally as a pro-​Remainer, which likely helped develop his aggression towards her as a symbol of a political mainstream his worldview condemned. Unlike many such attackers, Mair did not release a detailed manifesto explaining his political motivation, all that can be analysed in terms of motivation are statements from eyewitnesses who heard him state during the attack ‘Britain first’, ‘keep Britain independent’, and ‘Britain will always come first’. Convicted of murder, and confirmed as a terrorist, Mair himself remains something of a closed book. However, his violence was not isolated, as others in the extreme right, such as National Action, saw his horrific attack as something to celebrate. Indeed, each of these cases have built into a set of cultural reference points drawn on for inspiration and heroisation by subsequent attackers.25 Compared to Mair, Darren Osborne was a quite dissimilar loner terrorist, and his reference points were primarily linked to the counter-​Jihad type of extreme right activism. In June 2017 he drove a rented van into a crowd of Muslim worshipers leaving the Finsbury Park Mosque. His attack left one man dead and others wounded, including one man who had life-changing injuries after becoming trapped under Osborne’s vehicle. The van itself contained a hastily written note linking the attack to grievances including a loathing of ‘Muslim grooming gangs’, and hatred of politicians such as Sadiq Kahn and Jeremy Corbyn. His trial revealed the father of four was an alcoholic with issues of depression and had been suicidal in the weeks before launching the attack. Police investigations suggest that unlike Mair’s case, radicalisation was fast, possibly around a month-​long process, which included engagement with 165

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extreme right materials such as posts by Stephen Yaxley-​Lennon under his football hooligan ‘Tommy Robinson’ persona, and also Britain First’s Jadya Franzen. Osborne was also deeply concerned by the Rochdale child sex abuse ring, featured in the BBC drama Three Girls. Collectively, these were the focus for his intensification of views ahead of the attack itself, which again was rightly identified as a form of terrorism as it was an act of violence to develop a political message.26 Recent examples of lone actors While Mair and Osborne typify those who act alone and are disconnected from direct engagement with groups, many recent cases of violence, and planned violence, have come from those who are radicalised while surrounded by like-minded activists. This was certainly the case with David Copeland, whose links to both the BNP and the National Socialist Movement of the late 1990s have been well documented. His attacks in April 1999 were inspired by the bomb planted at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and ahead of the attacks he downloaded bomb-​making instructions and purchased explosive materials and nails. His first target was London’s black community, and he planted a bomb in Brixton that injured 50 ­people, despite it being discovered and moved. The second target was London’s Asian community, and here he planted a bomb in Brick Lane. Again a passer-​by spotted Copeland’s bomb and moved it to a car boot, where it nevertheless injured 13 people. The final bomb focused on London’s gay community, and for Copeland this was a personal rather than a political attack. His homophobia was a prejudice he had developed from childhood and predated the ideological beliefs that explained his other targets. He told police that this attack was ‘personal’, echoing Spaaij’s observation that attackers 166

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personalise aspects of a wider ideology. While Copeland’s defence argued he had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and was only guilty of manslaughter, this was rejected by the court. He explained in police interviews that he hoped to spark a race war, and that groups like the BNP would benefit from this. He read The Turner Diaries, and other such material, and clearly believed in a Jewish conspiracy as well. A final critical issue with his case was the way it reveals failure by the police and security services to detect him. Copeland was engaged in a number of groups and unlike with more disconnected loners, there were many more opportunities to monitor such an individual and gather intelligence. After the attacks police promised to increase their efforts to monitor the extreme right, yet during the attacks they were playing catchup in terms of understanding this milieu.27 In the 2000s especially, there was a spate of attacks, and potential attacks, that were often linked to the BNP. One notable, often-​ forgotten case here was John Laidlaw, who in May 2006 shot three people in two incidents on the same day in north London and was convicted of three counts of attempted murder.28 Aside from this shooting, others included David Tovey, who was convicted in 2002 of racially aggravated criminal damage and possessing illegal firearms and explosives.29 From 2003 to 2005, Terry Collins targeted several Asian families, damaging windows, slashing car tyres and putting fireworks through their letterboxes.30 Collins was even provided with a recipe for explosives by another BNP activist, Allan Boyce, in his 70s at that time who himself was given a suspended sentence for inciting Collins to possess explosives.31 In 2006, Mark Bulman threw a petrol bomb into a mosque in Swindon before graffitiing the building with anti-​Muslim and antisemitic abuse. Another in 2006 was Robert Cottage, who following a police raid on his house was discovered to possess illegal explosives. 167

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In 2008, police found Nathan Worrell also in possession of a range of explosives.32 In 2009, Terence Gavan was discovered with a large cache of weapons, including 12 firearms and 54 improvised explosive devices, located in the bedroom of a house he shared with his mother.33 In 2010, Darren Tinklin of the British Movement and the BNP was another to be convicted of possessing illegal firearms and explosives.34 Also in 2010, David Lucas, a BNP parish councillor and one-​time MEP candidate, was discovered to possess illegal gunpowder and ammunition. Lucas was known prior to this point as an eccentric who in 2006 built gallows for export. Lone actors have come from other groups as well.35 In 2007, a police raid on the home of an organiser for the small neo-​Nazi British People’s Party, Martyn Gilleard, led to the discovery of an array of knives, machetes, guns, bullets and four nail bombs, alongside ideological and bombmaking literature.36 There have also been cases linked to the EDL, such as Ryan McGee, who was convicted in 2014 of making a nail bomb.37 Previously, he had attended an EDL demonstration, and his mother had bought him for his eighteenth birthday the EDL’s ‘No Surrender’ jumper, t-​shirt and flag. In terms of the most recent threats, the majority have been linked to National Action, which by 2020 had been linked to at least 15 court cases, often related to terrorism charges, two of which were retrials.38 The most prominent of these was Jack Renshaw. Like Copeland, Renshaw was another longstanding activist who was not detected by police and security service monitoring. Rather, Hope not Hate was informed that he was plotting to kill the Labour MP Rosie Cooper, and they in turn alerted the authorities. Renshaw had been active in BNP Youth, becoming a face for the group and featuring in its highly offensive videos, such as one from 2014, ‘BNP Youth Fight Back’. He became active with National Action by 2015 and made a range of antisemitic and racist comments publicly. 168

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Separately, he was also at this time engaged in the online grooming of teenage boys, was under investigation for this and later convicted of offences. His terror plot revolved around these issues, and he planned to kill both Cooper and the female police officer investigating him for child sex offences. He got as far as purchasing a machete, and then revealed his plan to fellow activists, one of whom, Robbie Mullen, had by that point become disillusioned and had become an informant for Hope not Hate. Renshaw’s case highlights again how serious violence emanated from National Action.39 The manner in which his plot combined his anxieties over prosecution for child sex offences and his political views once more demonstrates how such lone actors incorporate personal as well as ideological components into their justifications for violence. As the many examples highlighted in this chapter demonstrate, the scale of extreme right violence needs no exaggeration to require the issue to be taken seriously. The extreme right’s relationship with violence is also beset by contradictions. It can idealise killings as heroic acts, when the reality is such protagonists tend to target unsuspecting people who are unable to defend themselves. Its leaders claim they are not responsible, when actually their words are read by violent actors as they plan attacks and so are central to radicalising people. While groups and their leaders typically do not direct violence, and legally are not guilty of direct incitement, their role is crucial in fostering an ecosystem, set across a range of groupuscules, that advocates and gives licence to v­ iolent acts. Their authorisation to hate leads others to take this a step further, and believe they have permission to attack, and even kill. The notion of internal brakes on violence helps explain why the movement’s many organisations regularly idealise aggression yet also avoid developing specific attacks, though this also sends powerfully mixed messages to those drawn to the extreme right,  especially 169

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those attracted by a world steeped in excitement, and often masculine compensation through violence. Finally, while this chapter has focused on the many violent attackers generated by the extreme right, this should also lead to reflection on the many people targeted by this violence, who must not be forgotten. Notably, the victims of extreme right violence that have been highlighted by this chapter show that this phenomenon disproportionally affects people of colour and women.

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State and society responses

When interviewed for an edition of Panorama in 1959, the Guyana-​ born writer and author of To Sir, With Love, E. R. Braithwaite, likened the extreme right to a boil or a pimple growing on the body of democracy. He argued that British society was capable of containing extremist views, as espoused by fascists in Notting Hill in the later 1950s, and he for one saw accepting their right to freedom of speech as a strength of democracy. Braithwaite added that should their activism become too painful, then steps would need to be put into place to deal with them.1 This call for a degree of moderation and perspective in responding to the extreme right is important, yet raises the important question of how this line ought to be drawn. When does the ‘pimple’ need attention, and how should this happen? Braithwaite’s principle of allowing the extreme right the space to exist, as preventing it would be more damaging to democracy, is a common position in such debates, though is not one held by all. Many antifascists, for example, aim to achieve the elimination of the extreme right which they see as a necessary preservation of democracy. Such discussions then raise a range of challenging questions. How can the extreme right be confronted, challenged, or even eliminated? Moreover, can political and state interventions hinder as well as help in this process? 171

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To unpack these questions this chapter explores firstly how the British state has responded to the concerns of the extreme right. Sometimes state actions have obstructed activism, but at other times policies have, intentionally or otherwise, benefitted and even legitimised the movement. Politicians have played a similarly ambivalent role, both condoning and mainstreaming views from the political fringes. However, this is only part of the issue, as state and political leaders are not alone in shaping moral boundaries. Notions of what should be seen as acceptable and legitimate are defined by wider society as well. Civil society responses, therefore, have come to play crucial roles, and many organisations, from moderate advocacy groups to militant antifascists, have worked to stymie the wider impact of the extreme right. This chapter demonstrates that while cultures of racism and discrimination clearly continue to exist in contemporary society, Britain also has a diverse culture that already respond proactively to the threats posed by the extreme right. These groups have often shown a deeper commitment to solving the problems posed by the extreme right when compared to people such as recent prime ministers of the left and the right, and government policies. One question that this chapter poses to its readers is what can you do to contribute to a robust culture able to resist the extreme right? This chapter does not have all the answers. Migration policies and the cultivation of a foreign ‘other’ Some of the earliest concerns among extreme right groups were around Jewish immigration, at the turn of the twentieth century. As the first chapter highlighted, the first notable group to campaign on this agenda in the last century was the British Brothers’ League. Its energies helped to bring about some of the first legislation to 172

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restrict  immigration to Britain. Prior to the twentieth century, the 1826 Aliens Act and the 1836 Aliens Registration Act had been focused on recording, rather than restricting, entry to the country. The 1905 Aliens Act, a response to the concerns of Jewish migration also animating the British Brothers’ League at this time, gave powers to the state to refuse permission of entry and powers to expel. This framework was then presided over by both Conservative and Liberal administrations and was extended after the First World War. By the interwar period, the state could refuse entry to migrants lacking work or means to support themselves. This was particularly significant in the later 1930s. Despite provision to allow entry to those suffering from political and religious persecution, Britain was notably reluctant to allow Jewish migration seeking refuge from the Nazi regime. The Kindertransport programme from 1938, for example, has been hailed in recent times as an example of Britain helping Jewish refugees. The reality was this programme received very limited state financing, and while it helped around 10,000 children, typically their parents were victims of the Holocaust. British extreme right politics after the Second World War focused even more forcefully on the issue of immigration, a crucial aspect of its narrative. This came at a time of British decolonisation, and the end of empire helped to create a set of new issues. In the simplistic extreme right worldview, people of colour coming to Britain has often been seen as a novelty after 1945, ignoring a much longer history of black experiences in Britain, a point easily countered by referring to the work of historians such as Peter Fryer,2 and more recently David Olusoga.3 The essays in Jennifer Craig-​Norton, Christhard Hoffmann and Tony Kushner’s Migrant Britain also explore the details of this history from a variety of angles.4 As black singer Cleo Laine pithily explained when interviewed for  Panorama in 1959 about the politics of Colin Jordan, 173

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her response to racist calls for her to be sent ‘home’ was that for her ‘home’ was Southall, Middlesex. While Britain had existing black communities for centuries before the end of the Second World War, the much-​remembered arrival of Empire Windrush in 1948 initially brought about 500 Jamaican British subjects, starting what was at this point a relatively small-​scale new influx of migrants. The legality of such postwar migration was established through the 1948 British Nationalities Act, passed following the granting of independence to India. While it distinguished between Commonwealth citizens and British citizens of the United Kingdom, it was clear that all citizens had the right to live and work in the country. Meanwhile, again underscoring the issue of labour shortages in post-​1945 Britain, the later 1940s saw other patterns of migration, as over 70,000 Irish immigrants settled in the country, and a larger quantity, over 100,000 people, also came from European countries including the Baltic states, Poland and Yugoslavia. As David Cesarani notes in his book Justice Delayed, these more frequently forgotten European migrants were often poorly vetted, though Jewish people were largely excluded, and among their number were even a small number of Nazi collaborators with questions to answer about their engagement in the Holocaust.5 Regarding the public concerns over new forms of immigration from the 1950s, following the relatively small numbers of migrants taking advantage of calls for work, there were certainly growing fears of ‘coloured’ immigration. These anxieties helped connect a rise in populations that were not white in Britain to perceptions of a ‘crisis’ in national identity. Such issues emerged at a time of empire in decline and Britain’s place in the world changing. As A. Sivanandan once explained as to why more diverse communities developed in Britain, ‘we are here because you were there’. This was an issue the extreme right certainly engaged with but was discussed 174

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more widely as well, and the 1950s was typically not a period of welcoming migrants of colour. Rioting in Notting Hill in 1958 was an important flashpoint in these tensions, but throughout the decade there was concern over rising levels of migration that left- and right-​wing politicians were alert to. From the 1960s, a wave of new legislation reflected and helped reinforce public and political concerns about people of colour being ‘other’. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, for example, was effectively designed to restrict migrants who were not white. This was strengthened with the 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act, developed to limit the impact of Asians being expelled from Kenya at the time, and notably was rapidly passed in just a few days to help ensure this was the case. Further legislation around controlling migration, such as the 1971 Immigration Act and the 1981 British Nationality Act, added further levels of restriction. The issue of asylum seekers also became increasingly politicised, especially in the 1990s as a consequence of the wars in Balkans. By the 1990s, the term ‘bogus asylum seeker’ became more prevalent in the mainstream press, a trope often deployed by extreme right groups such as the BNP. The 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act, updated in 1999, and the 2006 Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act set out further legislative powers to manage such immigration. While legislation often moved towards placing greater restrictions in various ways that tacitly focused on racial characteristics, entry into the European Economic Community in 1973 started to allow freedom of movement from fellow member states, and this too became an area of focus for the extreme right. As John Solomos’ masterly Race and Racism in Britain demonstrates, a range of legislative developments has helped ensure that issues of race and immigration were elided in emotive ways in postwar Britain.6 175

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Restricting the political space for extremism While early twentieth century legislation around immigration echoed the antisemitic extreme right’s fears over larger levels of Jewish migration and helped lay the foundations for further immigration restrictions after the Second World War, legislative developments of the 1930s also impacted on political freedoms. Most notably before the outbreak of war, the 1936 Public Order Act was hastily developed in the wake of the standout street protest involving ­fascists and antifascists of the period, the Battle of Cable Street. This built on prior public concern regarding fascist violence, and further associated the BUF with paramilitarism. The Act restricted the use of political uniforms in public and required police permission to be granted ahead of political demonstrations. As well as impacting on the BUF, its effect later stretched to restricting Irish Republicanism in the 1970s, and surviving elements were even used in 2016 to charge leaders of Britain First with wearing political uniforms. However, the most striking state measure to restrict the political views of the extreme right came with the outbreak of the Second World War. Defence Regulation 18B allowed British nationals to be interned if they were deemed to present a political threat. It sat alongside similar measures that allowed the state to intern those deemed to be aliens who posed a threat, and paradoxically this included a number of German Jews who were imprisoned on the Isle of Man. Defence Regulation 18B was used extensively against around 1,500 British fascist sympathisers, and effectively ended all the main British fascist organisations of the 1930s. However, after the war, British fascists were allowed to develop again, as James Chuter Ede, Clement Atlee’s Home Secretary, believed the principle of banning such political groups would be more damaging to Britain’s democratic political culture than allowing tiny bands of fascists to regroup. Though monitored by the state during the later 176

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1940s, British fascists were again given the political space needed for their politics to grow. As discourses demonising immigrants, especially those who were not white, developed in the 1950s and 1960s, political pressures to limit overt racism also grew. These concerns led to the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968. Colin Jordan was prosecuted under the 1965 iteration for distributing a racist pamphlet, The Coloured Invasion, and so this legislation did have a direct impact on such vocal extremists. These pieces of legislation also created new institutions such as Race Relations Boards and the Community Relations Commission. These limited developments were augmented by the 1976 Race Relations Act. Again, this had a direct impact on some activists, for example when National Front and British Movement activist Robert Relf attempted to turn himself into a nationalist martyr. Relf was prosecuted under the Act after trying to sell his house while putting a sign outside saying, ‘For Sale –​to an English family only’. Briefly jailed for his activities, his case sparked a national debate regarding the new legislation, with some deeming it as draconian. This version of the Act also developed a clearer focus on systemic racism as well as more overt or intentional racism and established the Commission for Racial Equality from the previous Race Relations Boards and Community Relations Commission. This in turn became the Equality and Human Rights Commission in 2007, whose remit is also now underpinned by the 2006 and then 2010 Equalities Acts. As well as this, moments of tension and crisis have helped influence legislation and wider public attitudes. For example, while limited, the 1981 Scarman Report, commissioned in the wake of the 1981 Brixton riots, drew attention to racial division and called for renewed efforts to overcome structural disadvantages faced by people of colour. While making notable criticisms, 177

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the 1999 Macpherson Report also referred to Scarman’s limited impact and highlighted that many recommendations had been ignored after it was published. The murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, combined with the lack of police effectiveness in dealing with this crime as well as the dreadful manner in which the Lawrence family were treated in the years subsequently, have all underscored the need for Macpherson’s important identification of institutionalised racism blighting modern Britain. His landmark report helped develop new awareness of racist structures within institutions, not only the police, and articulated the important point that an act or crime that someone, including a witness, describes as racist should be assumed to be racist and recorded as such, not dismissed. Macpherson helped to create a new, more critically aware landscape for many, though notably he was critiqued at the time by some, including by Boris Johnson. By this point there were many other important critiques of British state and society efforts to challenge racism, including Paul Gilroy’s 1987 classic There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. This intervention was rich in critical observations, such as the ways anti-​racist messages commissioned by state bodies including the Greater London Council in the 1980s were imposed on communities rather than allowing authentic expression of the richness of black experiences to develop. Aside from critiques of state multiculturalism of the period, Gilroy’s work, like many others, has highlighted that racism in modern Britain was not a phenomenon on the fringes of society that would be eliminated if the most extreme versions of it, as articulated by the National Front and the BNP, were no more. Instead, his important intervention helped develop the argument that an idealised sense of whiteness formed a core part of the ways modern Britain is imagined, and the problems this creates need much deeper reconsideration.7 178

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In the early 2000s, another flashpoint that led to a new language for discussing issues of race and racism included the responses to 2001 disturbances in northern towns between whites and Asians. In particular, the Cantle Report that followed stressed the need for a new focus on ‘community cohesion’. Cantle argued that tensions had turned to violence as sections of society were dislocated from each other. Future state interventions, such as funding for community development projects, needed to try to overcome isolated communities and bring together white, Asian and other ­ethnicities around shared ideals offering opportunities for all. Paul Thomas has explored these problems in his book Responding to the Threat of Violent Extremism, identifying the need for more substantive efforts to bring communities together in order to move beyond earlier, more limited forms of state multiculturalism of the 1980s and 1990s that could treat specific community identities as separate, and also essentialising what specific community identities were. Thomas added that community cohesion approaches, that by the 2010s were being increasingly sidelined, had the potential to not only bring people together but also consider community identities in a more clearly intersectional manner.8 Mike Makin-​Waite has also written about the challenges of delivering this agenda in Burnley in the wake of the rise of the BNP from 2001.9 While community cohesion could descend into placing expectations on monitory communities to conform, it could also be developed in ways that moved beyond the pressure for people to simply assimilate. The issues drawn out by interventions such as the Cantle Report highlighted how the 2000s brought a new set of issues. While not superseding those that came before, these gave those seeking to tackle prejudices new problems. In particular, by the 2000s the issue of Islamist terrorism led to a range of new legislation that helped establish in the public imagination a new and fearful ‘other’: British 179

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Muslims. This built on a longer tradition of seeing Asian people as a threat. While the term ‘P***’, which was often used indiscriminately by the extreme right for anyone of Asian appearance, was a clear racist identification of skin colour, the new anti-​Muslim agendas of the BNP and later the EDL developed a language of discriminatory discourses ostensibly focused on faith, though in effect this clearly focused on a faith held predominantly by a population that is not white. The Runnymede Trust identified the issue in a pioneering report from 1997, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. This turn to anti-​Muslim bigotry allowed a new slipperiness in terms of prejudices within the extreme right, one reinforced by the liberal racism often found in legislation and a political and media discourse that securitised public perceptions of entire Muslim communities. This has cut against efforts to work through divisions promoted by initiatives inspired by Cantle’s community cohesion theme, a problem most clearly seen in the Prevent policy area. This was created as part of the UK’s counter-​terrorism strategy CONTEST from 2003, and started to become a key part of public messaging to tackle threats from terrorism following the 2005 London bombings. Prevent was one of four ‘Ps’ which also included: Pursue, which focuses on those developing specific plots; Protect, which focuses on infrastructure and public spaces; and Prepare, which focuses on ensuring services know what to do during an attack to limit its impact. Prevent’s bold ambition has been to operate in the pre-​criminal space, to try and stop people becoming terrorists. It has fed into standard training within many organisations, is central to school and university policies, and has been led by Police and local councils. One of its most unfortunate consequences has been to further draw attention to one sector of society in particular, Muslim communities, as posing a security threat. While critical media coverage has sometimes been exaggerated and has often 180

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been unfair, its reputation has cut against Cantle report’s calling for cross-­community initiatives rather than policies that focused on one sector of society alone. Funding for Prevent was initially based on the size of Muslim populations,10 and much of the focus has been around threats deemed to be posed by Islam. More recent news reports on the increased focus on the extreme right has partly helped to shift perceptions, but this has been limited. So, while most who have delivered the Prevent Agenda have been engaged in important work, and while the policy has undoubtedly helped many people from a variety of ideological positions move away from extremism, as a policy area to address both the risks presented by the extreme right, it is in need of significant redevelopment. Indeed, Craig McCann’s recent study, The Prevent Strategy and Right-​wing Extremism highlighted these limitations. McCann, who has carried out academic analysis but also writes from the perspective of having held a senior police role, made several revealing observations. As well as the extreme right being poorly understood at a policy level in general, efforts to include it within the remit of Prevent have been limited. The broadening of Prevent over time to more clearly include the extreme right often also led to confusion about what the extreme right actually was, and while many saw the phenomenon as posing public order threats, frequently it was not taken seriously as posing any sort of risks of violent extremism.11 Prevent’s efforts to engage people in the pre-​criminal space has been augmented by other aspects of recent terrorism legislation, also now used to tackle extreme right activists who do enter into criminality. The recent effort to proscribe neo-​Nazi organisations starting with the Home Secretary’s proscription of National Action in December 2016, for example, marked a shift to taking the threats posed by the extreme right seriously rather than dismissing them as relatively insignificant. More recently, MI5 has taken 181

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a lead in monitoring extreme right terrorism,12 and rightly recognises the phenomenon has an international context and requires a multi-​agency approach and a responsiveness to local expertise and knowledge. The proscription of neo-​Nazi groups from 2016 developed for a range of reasons, not only pressure from Jewish voices who were rightly frustrated that more was not being done to tackle antisemitism. The murder of an MP in 2016, celebrated by National Action, undoubtedly helped to consolidate new thinking. The policy response of proscription of a group has been interesting to follow. At the time, expert on Islamophobia Chris Allen expected that the policy would not stop such activism, but rather, as with many Islamist groups that were proscribed in the same manner under terrorism legislation, would lead to a range of new organisations emerging in its wake.13 This did occur, and several more have been similarly proscribed. However, such proscriptions have also allowed for a more comprehensive policy of arrests and imprisonments of leading activists, and certainly this has stymied the accelerationist neo-​Nazi culture in Britain, limiting serious terror risks and also helping to curb hate crimes from accelerationist neo-​Nazism. Responding to such political extremism will never prove entirely satisfactory, and there have been clear merits to the recent, firmer position limiting neo-​Nazism glorifying violence, as well as limitations. Politicians and the role for civil society Among a number of recent political leaders, there has been an ambiguity between critiquing and adopting aspects of the extreme right’s agenda. For example, Gordon Brown was often critical of Nick Griffin’s BNP when Prime Minster in the late 2000s, but he also had no regrets in repeatedly using the phrase ‘British Jobs for British Workers’. David 182

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Cameron, a signatory supporter of Unite Against Fascism, once teased him on this by showing him two leaflets featuring the slogan, one created by the National Front the other by the BNP.14 Cameron also set out his credentials by calling UKIP the BNP in suits, to try and discredit primarily the threat he saw from the radical right by likening it to the extreme right. Nevertheless, in 2011 he also denounced ‘state multiculturalism’ in rather similar tones to groups such as the EDL, which marched on the same day as he made this major intervention. Such mainstreaming of aspects of extreme right positions by politicians has developed further in the 2010s. While it was Theresa May, as Home Secretary, who ordered the proscription of National Action in 2016 she was also responsible for developing the racist hostile environment policy, which treated many people of colour in deeply antagonistic ways to encourage them to leave the country. When he was Mayor of London, Boris Johnson recognised the need to restrict the normalisation of the extreme right when he intervened to save the Queen the embarrassment of being formally required to invite Nick Griffin to a garden party. Yet throughout his career Johnson has also made a litany of exclusionary comments, such as in 2018 likening Muslim women to letterboxes, after which Generation Identity activists released images of men wearing Boris Johnson masks posting letters into the eye slots of women wearing burkas. The Conservative Party recently commissioned a report into Islamophobia in its ranks, which was highly critical and revealed a clear diagnosis of issues that needed to be addressed by the party.15 In 2021, ahead of the Euro 2020 football tournament, Johnson even defended football fans booing players making the antiracist gesture of taking the knee, a position he later modified.16 Meanwhile, the Labour Party allowed a culture of antisemitism to develop in the later 2010s, and was only the second party to be investigated by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission,17 183

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the first being the BNP. In sum, mainstream political parties certainly need to do more to demonstrate leadership on issues of race and prejudice. What seems to be often lacking among left- and right-​wing politicians at a national level is an ability to talk with moral authority on issues of race in ways that move beyond narrow culture wars talking points, to offer pragmatic and meaningful positions likely to help create an inclusive and respectful society. One approach would be to promote a fuller understanding of the principles of multiculturalism as a type of mature liberal democracy compatible with a positive sense of national identity and community pride. Often those drawn to the extreme right feel a lack of agency but also have the potential to be engaged by other types of political activities. While aware of its many shortcomings, Tariq Modood has set out well-​ reasoned advocacy for multiculturalism that is worth revisiting for those disillusioned with the term.18 As his extensive work shows, developing an integrated, mutually respectful multicultural society that understands and reflects differences between groups in society, as well as individuals, is the hallmark of an advanced liberal democracy. This point and his more recent contributions on the topic help establish a pathway to being both reflective and critical of the past, while also offering a sense of Britishness that can appeal across community divides.19 Such a mature liberal democracy is nothing without a vibrant and diverse civil society. Britain’s experiences of the extreme right have helped foster a wide range of groups and organisations that have challenged it and added to the richness of the democratic process as a consequence. Most notably, an array of antifascist groups has challenged the extreme right, sometimes in a militant fashion but more often in non-​violent and far more constructive ways. Indeed, only crude analysis sees antifascists as one dimensionally 184

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militant far-​left version of the violent extreme right. This erroneous point was made most pithily by Donald Trump, after the Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville in 2017, but is often articulated elsewhere. The ‘two sides of the same coin’ depiction does not stand up to close analysis, as the growing academic analysis of antifascist cultures demonstrates. The extreme right worldview is predicated on hierarchical, exclusionary and racist positions, while antifascists are not. This is a crucial point made by Nigel Copsey in his definitive history Anti-​Fascism in Britain where he shows that while often a left-​wing phenomenon, antifascism can come from a range of political and religious positions. What defines it is not militancy or street demonstrations, but an identification of actions as having the aim of opposing something deemed to be fascist and being driven by a defence of an idea of democracy.20 This point of antifascism being a phenomenon concerned with the ways fascism attacks democracy is echoed by Dan Stone, whose major history of Europe since the Second World War, Goodbye to All That, explains how a generalised sense of resisting fascism was central to the reconstruction of European identities after 1945. Here, Stone worries that in recent times such attitudes have waned as the e­ xperience of the Nazi regime has faded from living memory.21 Some of the first antifascist organisations in Britain included the National Union for Combatting Fascismo, a socialist group based in Yorkshire founded after the rise of the British Fascisti in 1923, the creation of the poet Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, which published a magazine called The Clear Light. The Communist Party of Great Britain also developed antifascist activism from the early 1920s, especially after its leader, Harry Pollitt, was kidnapped by the British Fascists in 1925. By the 1930s, as the BUF became overtly antisemitic, a spectrum of critical Jewish positions emerged as well. The Board of Deputies of British Jews discouraged 185

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militant antifascism, while another key institution of the British Jewish community, The Jewish Chronicle, called for more action at this time. Some younger Jewish activists were drawn to more direct confrontations with the BUF, alongside Communists and others who opposed fascism in Britain. Antifascism was also something that artists engaged with at this time. The poet Stephen Spender went to Spain to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, part of the International Brigades who opposed fascism, and like other artists such as Picasso reflected on fascism in his creativity. The writer Dylan Thomas scripted propaganda films during the Second World War to oppose fascism in Europe. After the war, new antifascist groups emerged, such as the militant 43 Group, comprised of mainly Jewish activists. They developed an aggressive antifascism in the years after the Second World War, fuelled in part by recent revelations of the Holocaust.22 The 43 Group waned by the 1950s but was followed by others, such as the 62 Group and later in the decade a magazine called Searchlight, which re-​emerged in 1975 as a monthly magazine and became thereafter central to British antifascist culture. Antifascist groups that emerged in the 1970s also included the Anti-​Nazi League, which was linked to the Socialist Workers Party and developed mass antifascist activism from 1977, targeting the National Front. Despite its left-​wing core, this was a mass organisation and many took part in its protests and wore its badges, people who often were not ardent Trotskyists. The Anti-​Nazi League was formed a year after Rock Against Racism, a network that developed in part as a response to musicians including Eric Clapton vocally supporting National Front agendas. It pioneered the combination of music and politics, and the staging of large-​scale concerts for a political cause. David Renton’s recent book, Never Again offers an expert tour through the antifascist cultures of the later 1970s, drawing out again underlying 186

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concerns for a more equal and democratic society motivating these activists, an ideal not found in those they opposed.23 The principle of no platform for fascists also developed among postwar activists. The 43 Group tried to embarrass anyone who offered fascists the opportunity to vocalise their views. Evan Smith’s recent book No Platform has examined the ways the no platform tactic became formalised by the National Union of Students in the 1970s to combat the National Front and has since been extended to limiting a much wider range of people whose views have been seen as reactionary.24 David Renton’s No Free Speech for Fascists also examines the phenomenon, and stresses the need for the tactic in certain, specific contexts to limit those truly threatening democratic freedoms but worries about its extension to many wider areas of debate and discussion.25 Notably on this issue, Deborah Lipstadt, expert on Holocaust denial cultures, argues that historians of the Holocaust should never debate with deniers, as even to do so would suggest there is a legitimate debate to be had on this topic. As well as developing various tactics to stymie the extreme right, antifascist groups in Britain have tended to ebb and flow in size, as the movement they oppose has grown and contracted. By the 1980s, antifascists declined in number and there were fewer mass demonstrations. Core aspects of the milieu, such as Searchlight, continued reporting on the observations of informants within the movement as well as developing other forms of investigative journalism. Militant antifascist groups, such as Anti-​Fascist Action, also emerged at this time, in part a wider far-​left response to Thatcherism and racism in 1980s Britain. Militant antifascists from this group confronted extremists, sometimes violently. One such notorious confrontation was the ‘Battle of Waterloo’, a clash between antifascists and the extreme right at Waterloo Station in September 1992 mythologised by both sides. 187

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The rise of the BNP in the 2000s saw the emergence of new antifascist organisations, such as Unite Against Fascism, a union-​ linked organisation that drew support from across the mainstream political spectrum, and which has led many demonstrations against the BNP. Since 2013, it works with a sister organisation, Stand Up to Racism. Searchlight also developed a new campaigning element in the 2000s, Hope not Hate, and one of its leading campaigners, Nick Lowles, cultivated a central role in this strand of direct action, though not militant, antifascism. Hope not Hate has since broken away from Searchlight, and now publishes investigative reports on extreme right groups, and has led many campaigns against extreme right figures standing for election. It also produces an annual State of Hate report, which highlights some of the latest developments in the extreme right milieu. Meanwhile, Searchlight also continues to report on the extreme right space, now a quarterly magazine published by Gerry Gable, a legendary figure for many connected to the history of British antifascism. Joining these longstanding institutions are a range of groups that have emerged to advocate for specific community sectors. The Community Security Trust, for example, is a charity founded in 1994 that grew out of an earlier group called the Community Security Organisation. The CST is focused on the physical protection of Jewish people, and works with police forces, local Jewish communities and others to provide support and advice. Importantly, it records annually incidents of antisemitism and provides a range of other data on attacks on Jewish communities to help influence policy debates. By the 2000s, the growth of anti-​Muslim bigotry led to the formation of a similar group for Muslim communities, Tell MAMA, and the two have worked closely since 2012. Prominent figures such as the CST’s David Rich and Tell MAMA founder Fiyaz Mughal, have helped to shape debates over issues of Islamophobia 188

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and antisemitism. Former activists have also developed a range of initiatives to help others leave the extreme right, from Small Steps, founded by ex-​Combat 18 member Nigel Bromage, to the work of anti-​hate campaigner Ivan Humble, previously an EDL activist. These organisations and figures are particularly important as they not only provide support for those targeted by the extreme right but also put new information into the public domain, helping shape policy debates and academic analysis. Journalists are also important in adding to our collective knowledge of the extreme right. As Mondon and Winter highlight, poor and sensationalist journalism is problematic as it feeds into the liberal racism that can exaggerate the scale of the extreme right and normalise its racism.26 However, a range of excellent journalists have also enriched the public’s understanding of this milieu, including Daniel De Simone for the BBC, Lizzie Dearden for the Independent and Daniel Trilling, who has written for a range of outlets and wrote an excellent book on the BNP, Bloody Nasty People. Similarly, some think tanks have been helpful in generating datasets and analysis that shed analytical light on the extreme right. The Royal United Services Institute, Demos, and Chatham House have all produced useful studies in recent times, while researchers such as Jacob Dave and Julia Ebner at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, as well as Vidhya Ramalingam, founder of Moonshot CVE, have developed deep insights into the current dynamics of the extreme right and ways to respond to them. American organisations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-​Defamation League and Political Research Associates all develop a wide range of useful materials relevant for understanding British contexts as well. Notably, among those who work in these more high-​profile ways, a number of female journalists and researchers have been targeted by figures within the extreme right, such as Stephen Yaxley-​Lennon, 189

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something which speaks to the underpinning misogyny within the milieu they shed light on. Those who focus on the extreme right have developed a wide range of critical work, but there are distinctions to be drawn between the narrower aims of highlighting the often easy to spot racism among extremists and the more ambiguous racisms that continue to permeate wider society. Britain has also developed a wide range of antiracist organisations, which in part have dealt with the extreme right but have also played a broader role tackling discrimination across state and society. Some such groups were short-​lived, such as the Stars Campaign for Inter-​Racial Friendship that developed after the 1958 riots in Notting Hill.27 Others, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, are only now becoming impactful. A number of important groups have been long-​lasting, contributing to the national debate for several generations. The Institute for Race Relations, for example, was formed in 1958 and has sought to develop positive understandings of racial differences and promote deeper understanding. Today its website offers a detailed record of racist incidents, and it publishes the important journal Race & Class. In a similar vein, the Runnymede Trust was founded in 1968, and has led debate on issues of race, including at a policy level in Britain. There is also a wide range of antiracist educational organisations working with schools, such as Show Racism the Red Card. Moreover, the many teachers supported by such groups play crucial roles in developing a society resistant to the narratives of the extreme right. The work of scholars such as Kalwant Bhopal highlights how race permeates twenty-​first century contexts, showing how the idea of living in post-​racial society is a myth and that classical liberalism alone is not the solution either.28 Her work is an important corrective to interpretations such as that found in 190

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the highly problematic Sewell Report denying institutional racism exists; instead Bhopal points to the importance of recognising white privilege in contemporary society, and developing a deeper awareness of the limitations of liberal individualism in protecting people from racial discrimination and promoting black and minority inclusion in all sections of society. Initiatives like the Think Project in Swansea demonstrate how focused engagement with disadvantaged young people can move them away from prejudice and develop positive attitudes to migrants and diverse ­communities.29 It is often people who know their local communities who are best placed to develop interventions to respond to issues posed by extremism. In sum, dealing with the issues posed by the extreme right is something that is set within a wider context of challenging racism and discrimination more broadly. To echo a useful critique from Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, commenting on those who focused on tackling the National Front alone, to only address the most extreme and blatant forms of racism is a somewhat limited ambition. The types of racism found in the extreme right surveyed in this book are recognised by almost everyone as unacceptable, yet they are embedded in much more common contexts as well. In addition to tackling the extreme right, antiracism rightly calls for effort to address the discriminatory cultures that the far right capitalises on to be extended further and deeper. This is a social good. It is an important aspect of creating and sustaining a mature, multicultural liberal democracy, one open to critical reflections about its past and one that pursues a national culture that does not endorse aspects of the extreme right’s own racism and intolerance. Tackling extreme right activism needs to be carried out with care and consideration, and is always related to wider agendas. Over the 191

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course of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, both state and civil society reactions have been problematic, sometimes even reinforcing extreme right agendas. Yet at the same time sections of British society have resisted political extremism, helping limit its impact. There is nothing inevitable about this, though currently the extreme right remains a marginal phenomenon. There are no neat or simple ways to respond to the many issues it poses either, though its negative impacts on wider society can be mitigated. At a policy level, care is needed so that future legislation does more to avoid tacitly endorsing the views of the extreme right. At the level of political leadership, a long-​term approach showing moral authority in tackling racism and promoting multiculturalism will provide a stronger alternative to trying to disarm this movement compared to taking on some of its signature ideas in watered-​down form. State and government action can also empower the many civil society groups, including antifascist ones, who collectively shed much light on the racist dynamics of the extreme right. Doing more to enable advocacy and monitoring groups, as well as non-​ militant antiracists and antifascists from a range of political positions, will inevitably help augment the limited but significant sense of liberal democratic multiculturalism that Britain has cultivated in the years since the Second World War. Solutions are also better found at local levels, and among those who live and work in communities, who need to be sufficiently empowered, resourced and trusted to deal with the problems they identify.

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Conclusions

This book has tried to crystallise the knowledge of someone who has spent the last decade researching and teaching about the history and current dynamics of the British extreme right. It has also drawn on a wide range of experience of engagement with organisations focused on understanding and mitigating the impact of the extreme right. Its analysis has interpreted this complex milieu through a historical lens and argues that awareness of the fascist past is vital to understanding such extremism today. While it stresses that some core ideological concerns have remained the same over generations of activism, the style, nature and dynamics of the extreme right has shifted dramatically in the years between the formation of the British Brothers’ League at the turn of the twentieth century and the rise of neo-​Nazi accelerationists that develop clandestine networks on Telegram. This final discussion reflects briefly on each of the chapters and draws out a few key ‘takeaway’ points that help summarise some of the most significant developments within the extreme right, past and especially present. Chapter 1 demonstrated that British fascism before the Second World War was not an alien import, but rather a radicalised form 193

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Conclusions

of British nationalism that was rooted in British contexts and supported by leading British figures. Antiliberal and anti-​democratic agendas were clearly used to express emotive and racist senses of Britishness that also took inspiration from the political visions of an alternate type of modern state found in fascisms aboard. Fascists in interwar Britain also embedded their activism in wider phenomena, such as fears of Communism and the left, broader currents of antisemitism in British society, and the idealisation of male hero figures from the British empire to help legitimise their ideologies. Moreover, this discussion showed that these fascists and wider extreme right activists were of limited impact, and so while able to develop as a countercultural movement, Mosley’s BUF, like most of its postwar counterparts, got nowhere in terms of political power. Marginal figures such as Arnold Leese also helped to influence a new generation of extreme antisemites after the Second World War. Chapter 2 showed that, while often marginalised, fascist and extreme right groups after 1945 rekindled activism and took many new forms. These new small groups networked with each other, in ways that were sometimes collegial and other times antagonistic. They formed what academics in this field sometimes call a groupuscular dynamic, one that offered a wide range of choice in terms of style and nature of activism. So while a small-​scale milieu, this helped the movement appeal to people of different ages, classes and levels of education. For historians who study comparative fascism across the twentieth century, these small organisations are seen as the most typical manifestations of fascist activism, and the two fascist regimes in Italy and Germany were the outliers. Finally, groups such as the National Front in the 1970s and the British National Party in the 1990s showed there was a growing level of support at the ballot box for overtly racist politics.

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Chapter 3 explained how the extreme right in the last 20 years has been remarkably adept at developing new forms, responding to shifts in society and exploiting the ambiguous prejudices created by wider cultures of liberal racism, such as media discourses and state policies endorsing fears around Muslim communities. Nick Griffin’s ‘modernisation’ of the British National Party was one good example of an extremist politics finding a degree of legitimacy by focusing on such anti-​Muslim agendas, which helps explain how his party become by far and away the most successful fascist organisation in terms of electoral impact in British history. Networks such as the English Defence League also restyled activism, and the many groups that have emerged since the 2010s point once more to the high degree of diversity within this movement. They span intellectual discussion groups, political parties and neo-​Nazi terrorist networks that fantasise the complete collapse of society and the rise of a new era. In many ways, the level of choice in the wide range of recent groupuscules has become more diverse since the collapse of the BNP. Chapter 4 considered leadership, and how influence is exerted within this milieu. It showed that the extreme right is sustained by a wide range of dedicated activists. A few have a degree of charisma, such as Mosley and more recently Stephen Yaxley-​Lennon, but the term ‘coterie charisma’ is more accurate for explaining the limited aura even these figures have cultivated. Most British leaders have not been terribly charismatic, even within their own organisations. However, many figures within the movement have also been respected, idealised and even adored. A range of stalwart figures, for example, have given long periods of their adult lives to the movement, evoking respect, while others exert influence through ideological texts. In these ways, ideological leadership has been international as well as national. Lingering influence can even be 195

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developed by the dead, and a culture of fascist and neo-​Nazi martyrs is also worthy of note. Finally, since the 1920s, women have also regularly taken leadership positions and female activism at all levels of groups is nothing new. Chapter 5 focused on ethnographic studies of activists in a limited range of groups where this type of research has been possible, especially the National Front, the British National Party and the English Defence League. It explained how such studies reflect what ought to be a fairly obvious point: the extreme right is made up of quite everyday people. They often see a significance in its cause and feel embattled in various ways, and so find extreme right spaces relevant because they offer a sense of agency lacking in other types of political engagement. Frequently, their endeavours are marked by periods of boredom and disillusionment, as well as pride and satisfaction when events go well. Thinking about the emotional dimension of this activism helps explain why it offers a lasting appeal, despite leading to stigma and often lacking any material rewards. Looking at the movement in these ways also helps reveal the high levels of commitment these activists maintain. Moreover, while listening to activists is important, this does not equate to sympathising with their views, which are often offensive and racist. Chapter 6 tackled an equally obvious point: like any other context, extreme right cultures have a gendered power structure. Most members of the extreme right are men, typically around 80 per cent, and this helps explain the patriarchal dynamics that dominate this space. Giving too much scope for female activism can lead to push-​back from the majority of male activists, who often feel the movement should predominantly serve their interests. Yet women and are regularly and genuinely drawn to this culture and play important roles in its development. More recently, some groups, 196

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such as the English Defence League, made a virtue of inclusiveness in terms of gender and sexuality, and have developed forms of homonationalism to frame the Muslim communities they seek to demonise as intolerant. Other extreme right cultures are clearly fuelled by types of hypermasculinity. The extreme right’s strong, manly cultures can also explain their appeal, as they can help give disaffected men a greater sense of power, which they feel modern liberal democracy denies them. Chapter 7 considered the extreme right’s increasingly sophisticated ability to use online activism in the past 30 years as society has entered into a post-​digital age. From the late 1990s, the movement was already revealing itself as an early adopter of online tools. It has transitioned from static websites to social media and now often to messaging apps. While at one point many of these developments were seen as a novelty, they have become mundane aspects of everyday life. The tech companies that have developed these platforms are neither saints nor villains, just large corporate businesses who ultimately make decisions on whether to let users access their platforms or not on a commercial logic. Allowing extremists access to them or removing them is not about the principle of free speech, rather it is about the ability to amplify one’s voice using a commercial product. Acknowledging this will not stop those blocked from mainstream social media in recent times wilfully confusing the right to free speech to create emotive senses of being silenced. Meanwhile, online communication has allowed the extreme right to focus on specific demographics, such as gaming networks, to target young men. It has also impacted on organisational styles, and some of the most extreme and potentially violent online activism now happens in less structured online spaces, such as encrypted messaging chats. Chapter 8 assessed a wide range of cases of extreme right violence, and foiled plans for violence, in Britain, especially since the 197

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1990s. It argued that extreme right groups idealise violence more than they engage in it, often as part of their cultures of hypermasculinity. Groups both offer a licence to hate but most also maintain a series of internal brakes on violence, and so the extreme violence that does occur, especially that which now falls into the category of terrorism, tends to come from those on the fringes. It is carried out by men predominantly, who are frustrated that others in the movement are not acting as aggressively as they would like to, and so chose to go further. A range of non-​ideological factors tends to trigger these turns to violence. Standout cases such as David Copeland and more recently Jack Renshaw underscore the limited monitoring of this milieu, and suggest more could be done to gather intelligence and assess current groups. Some lone attackers are not directly engaged with extreme right organisations, and so are more difficult to identify, however many have had an ongoing two-​way relationship with extreme right groups. Finally, in most cases, violence cannot be explained away through woolly references to mental health issues either. Chapter 9 concluded the book by arguing that responses to the extreme right need to be based on principles of strengthening multicultural liberal democracy, a notable contrast to the words of repeated Prime Ministers and other leading politicians who have at times borrowed from the extreme right’s messaging. In the past, policies around restricting immigration in the twentieth century, and more recently the Prevent Agenda, have helped reinforce negative views towards specific communities that are not white, though Prevent, despite its problems, has also done much important work helping veer people away from extreme right violence. The chapter suggested that it is not only politicians who have a role to play in tackling the issues raised by the extreme right. Dealing with these problems is something that wider sections of society engages 198

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with, and it stressed local communities are in many ways better at responding to extremism than government agencies. Deep awareness of problems and issues posed by the extreme right have been developed by a wide range of voices, ranging from antifascist activists, to the work of advocacy groups, to the roles of professionals such as teachers. Finally, it stressed that a strong multicultural society is one proactively engaged in tackling issues of racism more broadly. State and civil society responses to the extreme right therefore need to find innovative ways to promote multicultural values, a marker of the mature liberal democratic society the extreme right sets itself against.

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People

Beamish, Henry Hamilton:

(1873–​1948) Founder of The Britons and a leading publisher of antisemitic material until his death.

Benjamin, Carl:

(Born 1979) Also known as Sargon of Akkad, a successful vlogger and anti-​feminist.

Birdwood, Lady Jane:

(1913–​ 2000) Prolific publisher of racist material who developed links to several British extreme right groups including the National Front and the British National Party.

Brons, Andrew:

(Born 1947) Retired college lecturer and longstanding extreme right activist for groups including the National Front and the British National Party, which he represented as an MEP in 2009, and now is Chairman of the British Democratic Party.

Chesterton, A. K.: (1889–​1973) Propagandist for the British Union of Fascists, antisemitic conspiracy theorist and founder of the National Front. Collett, Mark:

(Born 1980) One-​ time chairman of the Young BNP and currently founder and leader of Patriotic Alternative.

Copeland, David: (Born 1976) Neo-​Nazi terrorist who planted three bombs in London in 1999, and has been idealised by sections of the extreme right community subsequently. 200

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Cotterill, Mark:

(Born 1960) Former British National Party activist who now publishes the magazine Heritage and Destiny.

de Benoist, Alain: (Born 1943) French intellectual whose ideas such as ethnopluralism place in a philosophical language core extreme right principles such as white identities needing to be protected from multiculturalism. Devi, Savitri:

(1905–​1982) Extreme right thinker who combined Hindu and Nazi principles, and was active in a range of networks such as the World Union of National Socialists in the 1960s.

Donaldson, Ian Stuart:

(1957–​1993) Singer for white power band Skrewdriver who co-​founded the Blood & Honour network, and who in death has become a neo-​Nazi martyr also known simply as Ian Stuart.

Dowson, Jim:

(Born 1964) Scottish activist who was central to fundraising activities in the 2000s era for the British National Party and later co-​founded the breakaway group Britain First.

Edmonds, Richard:

(1943–​2020) Longstanding activist and election candidate for both the National Front and the British National Party.

Evola, Julius:

(1898–​ 1974) Philosopher and supporter of Italian Fascism and German Nazism, whose idea of Traditionalism rejected the entirety of the modern world, was influential on 1970s extreme right terrorism in Italy and today is often read by activists looking for deeper meaning in their political worldview.

Franzen, Jadya:

(Born 1986) Former deputy leader of Britain First and founder of the breakaway British Freedom Party, and who in 2018 was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment.

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People Golding, Paul:

(Born 1982) Former British National Party councillor and founder of Britain First who has been convicted of several offences related to his activism.

Griffin, Nick:

(Born 1959) Graduate from Cambridge University who joined the National Front aged 14, by the 1980s became one of its leaders, and from 1999 until 2014 led the British National Party, becoming an MEP in 2009.

Hamm, Jeffrey:

(1915–​1992) British Union of Fascist activist who later led the British League of Ex-​ Servicemen in the 1940s, helped found the Union Movement and became Oswald Mosley’s personal secretary from 1955.

Hastings, Russell: (1888–​1953) Better known as the Duke of Bedford, he helped found and lead the British People’s Party during the 1940s, while his noble background helped ensure he was not interned under Defence Regulation 18B. Irving, David:

(Born 1938) Leading British Holocaust Denier, who in 1996 lost a libel case against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt that irrefutably demonstrated his work was littered with wilful errors and inaccuracies.

Jordan, Colin:

(1923–​2009) Graduate from Cambridge University and central figure in post-​1945 British neo-​Nazism, founding and leading groups including the National Socialist Movement and the British Movement, and networking internationally.

Joyce, William:

(1906–​1946) British fascist also known as Lord Haw Haw who travelled to Germany in 1939 to broadcast English language propaganda during the war, and who was executed for high treason in 1946.

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People Kingsley Read, John:

(1936–​ 1985) Former Conservative Party member who led the National Front from 1974 until 1976, and also founded the National Party.

Lane, David:

(1938–​ 2007) Internationally influential neo-​ Nazi who promoted terms such as 14 Words and White Genocide, and also created his own neo-​Pagan religion Wotanism.

Lauder-​Frost, Gregory:

(Born 1951) Former Monday Club activist, who co-​ founded the Traditional Britain Group, is the UK head of Arktos Media and in 2019 was convicted of a racially aggravated offence.

Le Pen, Jean Marie:

(Born 1928) Longstanding extreme right activist in France and leader of the Front National from 1972 until 2011, he developed a new type of provocative yet electorally successful extreme right campaigning that was influential on the British National Party in the 2000s.

Leese, Arnold:

(1878–​1956) Influential antisemite and founder of the Imperial Fascist League whose ideas have often been central to post-​1945 neo-​Nazism in Britain.

Lintorn-​Orman, Rotha:

(1895–​ 1935) Founder of the British Fascisti and pioneer of female fascist activism, who in her later years became marginalised within the movement.

Mair, Thomas:

(Born 1963) Neo-​Nazi lone actor terrorist who in 2016 murdered Jo Cox MP, and who has been idealised by sections of the extreme right community subsequently.

Matthews, Robert (1953–​ 1984) American neo-​ Nazi and leader (Bob): of the terror group The Order, whose death in a shootout with law enforcement agencies has led to him becoming an international martyr for the movement.

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People Morrison, Eddie:

(1949–​ 2020) Leading activist for a range of neo-​ Nazi groups from the 1970s, including the British Movement, the National Action Party, the National Front, the White Nationalist Party and the British People’s Party.

Mosley, Max:

(1940–​2021) Son of Oswald Mosley who was a prominent figure in the racist Union Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, before developing a career in law and later motor sport.

Mosley, Oswald:

(1896–​1980) Founder and charismatic leader of the British Union of Fascists whose post-​ 1945 political career was more marginal, calling on activists in Britain and Europe to reshape fascist ideology for the Cold War context.

Pearce, Joseph:

(Born 1961) Young National Front activist who in the late 1970s and into the 1980s published the extremist magazine Bulldog, for which he was convicted, twice.

Pierce, William Luthar:

(1933–​ 2002) Influential American neo-​ Nazi and leader of the National Alliance, who also wrote the books The Turner Diaries and Hunter under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

Renshaw, Jack:

(Born 1995) Activist in the BNP Youth and National Action who was convicted of a terrorist plot to murder a female Labour MP.

Rockwell, George (1918–​1967) Founder of the American Nazi Party Lincoln: and leader of the World Union of National Socialist until his death in 1967, and subsequently an international neo-​Nazi martyr figure.

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Scruton, Roger:

(1944–​2020) Leading British philosopher and longstanding editor of the Salisbury Review, whose traditional conservative views have been of interest to the extreme right and who spoke at gatherings of far-​right organisations including the Belgian Vlaams Belang and the Traditional Britain Group.

Spencer, Richard: (Born 1978) White supremacist who is president of the National Policy Institute and who coined the term ‘alt-​right’ to rebrand racist politics in America helping him come to wider international prominence. Tyndall, John:

(1934–​2005) Central extreme right leader figure of the postwar era who promoted neo-​Nazism in the 1960s, led the National Front in the 1970s, founded and led the British National Party from 1982 until 1999, and who published the ideological magazine Spearhead from 1964 until his death.

Waters, Anne Marie:

(Born 1977) Former UKIP activist who stood to be party leader after the departure of Nigel Farage, and after failing founded For Britain in 2017, a party that has received support from former British National Party activists.

Watson, Paul:

(Born 1982) British vlogger whose videos often promote conspiracy theory themes, drawn in part from his work for Alex Jones’s website Infowars.

Webster, Martin:

(Born 1943) British neo-​ Nazi active in 1960s and 1970s groups such as the National Socialist Movement and the National Front who was a close ally of John Tyndall until the pair fell out regarding Webster’s sexuality.

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People Webster, Nesta:

(1876–​1960) British antisemitic conspiracy theorist who opposed feminism and who developed links with the British Fascists and later the British Union of Fascists.

White, Arnold:

(1848–​ 1925) Antisemitic campaigner and eugenicist who was a leading figure in the British Brothers’ League that opposed Jewish migration at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Yaxley-​Lennon, Stephen:

(Born 1982) Came to fame in 2009 as ‘Tommy Robinson’, was the founder and leader of the English Defence League, and since leaving has used this persona, drawn from football hooligan culture, to develop into an influential voice within the extreme right space.

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Glossary

14 Words:

Accelerationism:

Alt-​right:

Antifascism:

Antiracism:

A racist slogan derived from Hitler’s Mein Kampf created by the American white supremacist David Lane: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’. It is often used as a marker of commitment to a neo-​Nazi racial worldview. A term used by some extreme right activists who idealise the rapid collapse of existing society to bring about a racist revolution. Typically, it has been used within recent neo-​Nazi youth cultures. A catchy abbreviation of ‘alternative right’, coined by US white supremacist Richard Spencer in 2010 to help reframe the claim that white people are under attack from liberalism and multiculturalism. Largely an American phenomenon, ‘alt-​right’ can be used to describe white nationalist movements across the globe, usually referring to those that use online platforms to help spread their messages. Politicised activity that defines itself as opposing what it sees as fascist, and broadly speaking is motivated by a defence of democratic values. Activism that in some way attempts to foster a deeper understanding of how racial differences have shaped contemporary contexts and/​or promotes agendas, strategies and activism to overcome prejudice and discrimination. 207

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Antisemitism:

A typically hateful view towards Jewish people that manifests in rhetorical or physical attacks on people deemed to be Jewish. See the IHRA definition of antisemitism for a more detailed description of the term. Charismatic leader: A leader figure whose power is underpinned by a sense of mission that is also shared by a group of followers. Charisma emanates when the leader’s actions are seen as the living embodiment of this mission by a wider band of followers. Civic nationalism: An inclusive type of nationalism that bases entry into the national community on the acceptance of a set of principles, not on an ethic identity. Coterie charisma: A limited type of charismatic leadership where leaders are seen in a charismatic light by activists drawn to a group, but this sense of charisma is not experienced by society more widely. Conspiracy theory: A belief system that imposes a sense of order on a seemingly chaotic world by explaining that a small group of people are controlling either a single incident, a wider set of events, or even entire swathes of human history. Counter-​Jihad A type of extreme right activism that focuses primarily movement: on Islam, and can sometimes even promote Israeli and Jewish causes, as well as progressive values, to frame Muslim societies as one-​ dimensionally terroristic and intolerant, and incompatible with western values. Cultic milieu: A counter-​ cultural space made up of many competing and contrary ideas that are each deemed taboo by mainstream society and that each offer an alternate worldview, connection with a seemingly hidden truth and answer to sense of seekership. Ethnonationalism: A type of nationalism where entry into the national community is based on a perceived shared ethnic or racial identity, such as white, Aryan, Nordic, and so forth. 208

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Ethnopluralism:

A racist ideal espoused by figures such as Alain de Benoist that claims that though all ethic identities are equal, each should be able to exist in a distinct geographic location, and so white people should live in a Europe not populated by other ethnicities. Extreme right: A type of right wing politics that rejects democratic processes and either supports breaking laws or actually engages in law-​breaking, such as hate crimes and violence. Far right: A broad term for any right wing politics that rejects the moderate or mainstream right and seeks a more radical alternative. Fascism: An extreme type of far right politics that specifically calls for a revolution to overthrow a liberal democratic political order, replacing it with a totalitarian state that will seemingly regenerate the nation and /​or the race. Holocaust denial: A type of antisemitism that argues the Holocaust did not happen. These arguments can be based on a range of interlocking tropes, including claiming numbers of Jewish people killed has been exaggerated, there was no centralised plan to kill Jewish people, that Jewish people killed were actually criminals, that victim testimony has been made up, that Germany’s enemies in WWII also killed many civilians, and that the idea that the Holocaust happened has served Jewish interests since 1945. Homonationalism: A type of anti-​ liberal nationalism that promotes LGBTQ causes in order to frame other sectors of society, such as Muslim communities, and incompatible with liberal democracy. Hypermasculinity: An extreme form of masculinity steeped in exaggerated versions of stereotypical male characteristics such as misogyny, physical prowess and idealisation of violence. Islamophobia: Prejudice rooted in a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness. 209

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Glossary See the All-​Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims for a full definition and discussion. Left wing: A generic term for types of politics that argues inequalities in society are not inevitable and need to be overcome. Liberal democracy: A political system that seeks to include voices from a wide range of political perspectives by allowing debate to flourish between multi-​ party politics, pressure groups, a free press and allows open discussion within wider society. Liberal racism: Term to denote the ways some aspects of liberal politics can help reinforce underlying prejudicial and discriminatory attitudes and practices while not using a language of overt racism. Lone actor: A term for someone who carries out an extreme act alone yet sees his or her deed in part inspired by an extreme political ideology. This term is a more neutral way of identifying what the extreme right itself, and sections of the media, sensationalise as ‘lone wolves’. Mythic: The ability to muster powerful and irrational aspects of thought that simplify the world through emotive stories and beliefs. Multiculturalism: A form of mature liberal democracy that develops a politics and a civil society that promotes both respect for the individual freedoms of classical liberalism and protects the cultural dynamics of a range of group identities that are defined by those who form them. Neo-​Nazism: A type of contemporary fascism that overtly takes elements from Germany’s NSDAP, or Nazi party, and combines these with new elements to reinvent Nazi ideas for the world after 1945. Palingenesis: A synonym for rebirth, and a term used by historians of fascism to describe the ideology’s focus on myths of regeneration and rebirth, such as Hitler’s vision of creating the thousand-​year Reich. 210

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Glossary Populism:

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Radical right:

Right wing:

Scientific racism:

Terrorism: Totalitarian:

Transnational:

White Genocide:

A type of political messaging that argues established political elites are corrupt and need to be replaced by a new politics that will act in what it claims are the true interest of the people. A less extreme form of far right politics that rejects elements of liberalism, but engages with the democratic systems. Unlike left wing ideologies, right wing perspectives argue that inequalities are natural in society and so cannot be overcome. A type of racism that emerged from nineteenth century scientific disciples such as early anthropology and craniology that categorised humans into discrete races. It uses such discredited scientific knowledge to assert false distinctions regarding physical differences, steeped in seemingly authoritative sources. The willful use of violence, or the threat of violence, to achieve a political end. A political system that is based on one party, and one worldview. In the past, both Communist and fascist types of totalitarian state have failed to fully control their societies through propaganda and political police forces, as they aspired to create a new type of modern society. A phenomenon that operates across existing national boundaries. This may occur through the movement of individual people and personal relationships, the pooling of ideas via a shared culture, or simply by activists taking inspiration from actions in one country and trying to replicate them in modified form in another. A term first used by the American white supremacist David Lane, and which in various forms argues that white people are being subject to genocide, through

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Glossary policies such as multiculturism supposedly designed to destroy the purity of the white race. White power music: Types of music, often but not always rock-​based genres, that promote a sense of pride in whiteness, and racial solidarity. Its artists often demonise people who are not white, and can express openly Nazi themes.

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Notes

Introduction 1 https://​ban​ned.video/​watch?id=​5e756​5829​2222​900a​22a5​cbb [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 2 https://​w ww.patr​iot-​campai​gns.uk/​video_​britain_​f irst_​helps​_​the​_​ hom​eles​s_​of​_​bir​ming​ham [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 3 https://​bnp.org.uk/​coro​navi​rus-​annou​ncem​ent-​were-​here-​to-​help/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 4 https:// ​ w ww.patri ​ otic ​ a lte ​ r nat ​ i ve.org.uk/ ​ a lt ​ e rna​ t ive ​ _ ​ c ur ​ r icu ​ lum [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 5 https://​jew​ishn​ews.timeso​fisr​ael.com/​twit​ter-​urged-​to-​ban-​nick-​grif​ fin-​over-​lockd​own-​concen​trat​ion-​camp-​post/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 6 Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). 7 Roger Griffin, Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascism Studies (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). 8 https://​cst.org.uk/​news/​blog/​2009/​10/​23/​i-​do-​not-​have-​a-​con​vict​ion-​ for-​holoca​ust-​den​ial [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 9 Nigel Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest for Legitimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); Matthew Goodwin, New British Fascism: The Rise of the British National Party. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).

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1 Roots 1 ‘Alien Immigration’, The Times, 15 January 1902, p. 12. 2 Panikos Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism since 1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014) p. 231. 3 Alan Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), ch. 1. 4 Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002). 5 Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–​ 1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012). 6 Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 2006). 7 Paul Ward, Britishnenss Since 1870 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004). 8 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). 9 Alan Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), ch. 2. 10 Paul Jackson, Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine (London: Continuum, 2013). 11 Roger Griffin, Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University press, 1995) pp. 28–​29. 12 Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923–​1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021) ch. 1. 13 Stocker, Paul (2016) ‘Importing fascism: reappraising the British fascisti, 1923–​1926’ Contemporary British History 30(3): 326–​348. 14 Nick Toczek, Haters, Baiters and Would-​Be Dictators: Anti-​Semitism and the UK Far Right (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016) ch. 1 and 3. 15 Graham Macklin, Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020) ch. 1. 16 Claudia Baldoli, A British Fascist in the Second World War The Italian War Diary of James Strachey Barnes, 1943–​45 (London: Bloomsbury 2014). 17 Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I. B. Taurus, 1998) ch. 3. 214

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Notes 18 Matthew Worley, Oswald Mosley and the New Party (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). 19 Thomas Linehan, British Fascism, 1918–​1939: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) ch. 4. 20 Daniel Tilles, British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932–​40 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 21 Stocker, Lost Imperium Far Right Visions of the British Empire, c.1920–​1980 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021). 22 Colin Holmes, Searching for Lord Haw-​Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

2 Reinventions 1 Ciarán Ó Maoláin, The Radical Right: A World Dictionary (Harlow: Longman, 1987) pp. 293–​331. 2 Roger Griffin, ‘From slime mould to rhizome: an introduction to the groupuscular right’ Patterns of Prejudice 37/​1 (2003) pp. 27–​50. 3 Jeffery M. Bale, ‘ “National revolutionary” groupuscules and the resurgence of “left-​wing” fascism: the case of France’s Nouvelle Résistance’ Patterns of Prejudice 36/​3 (2002) pp. 24–​49. 4 Bonnie Burstow, ‘Surviving and thriving by becoming more “groupuscular”: the case of the Heritage Front’ Patterns of Prejudice 37/​4 (2003) pp. 415–​428. 5 Fabian Virchow, ‘The groupuscularization of neo-​ Nazism in Germany: the case of the Aktionsbüro Norddeutschland’ Patterns of Prejudice 38/​1 (2004) pp. 56–​70. 6 Richard Griffith, What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-​Nazi Right, 1940–​45 (Abingdon: Routledge 2017). 7 Joe Mulhall, British Fascism After the Holocaust: From the Birth of Denial to the Notting Hill Riots 1939–​1958 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 8 Graham Macklin’s Very Deeply Dyed in the Black Sir Oswald Mosley and the Postwar Reconstruction of British Fascism (London: I. B. Taurus, 2007). 9 Martin Walker, The National Front (Glasgow: Fontana, 1978).

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Notes 10 Martin Durham, ‘The British Extreme Right and Northern Ireland’ Contemporary British History, 26/​2 (2012) pp. 195–​211. 11 Roger Eatwell ‘Ten theories of the extreme right’ in Peter Merkl and Leonard Weinberg (eds) Right-​Wing Extremism in the Twenty-​First Century (London: Frank Cass, 2003) pp. 45–​70. 12 Michael Billig, Fascists: A Social Psychological View of the National Front (London: Academic Press, 1978). 13 Ryan Shaffer, Music, Youth and International Links in Post-​War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017). 14 George Mosse The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999).

3 Modernisations 1 2

3 4

5 6 7 8 9

Reni Eddo-​Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) pp. 123–​129. Aaron Winter and Aurelian Mondon, Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream (London: Verso 2020). Essay reproduced online at: http://​libr​ary.flawle​sslo​gic.com/​gri​ffin​_​ 01.htm [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. Jens Rydgren ‘Is extreme right-​wing populism contagious? Explaining the emergence of a new party family’ European Journal of Political Research 44/​3 (2005) pp. 413–​437. Nigel Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest for Legitimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008). Mike Makin-​Waite, On Burnley Road: Class, Race and Politics in a Northern English Town (London: Lawrence Wishart, 2021). Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (London: Penguin, 2018). Paul Stocker, English Uprising: Brexit and The Mainstreaming of The Far-​Right (London: Melville House, 2017). Alexander Meleagrou-​Hitchens and Hans Bruns, A Neo-​Nationalist Network: The English Defence League (London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, 2013).

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Notes 10 Paul Jackson and Matthew Feldman, The EDL: Britain’s ‘New Far Right’ Social Movement (Northampton: University of Northampton, 2011) p. 24. 11 https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​8j7I​X_​5a​_​9M [accessed 01/​ 07/​ 2021]. 12 Mark Littler and Jamie Bartlett Inside the EDL: Populist Politics in a Digital Age (London: Demos, 2011). 13 Paul Jackson and Matthew Feldman, The EDL: Britain’s ‘New Far Right’ Social Movement (Northampton: University of Northampton, 2011) ch. 3. 14 https://​www.inde​pend​ent.co.uk/​news/​uk/​home-​news/​brit ​ain-​first-​ battal​ion-​inva​des-​mos ​que-​demand​ing-​remo​val-​s ex​ist-​entra​nce-​ signs-​9607​978.html [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 15 https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​polit​ics-​38326​446 [accessed 01/​ 07/​ 2021]. 16 https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​polit​ics-​49004​416 [accessed 01/​ 07/​ 2021]. 17 https://​www.inde​pend​ent.co.uk/​news/​uk/​home-​news/​paul-​gold​ing-​ jayda-​fran​sen-​att​ack-​brit​ain-​first-​assa​ult-​record​ing-​far-​right-​a8934​ 336.html [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 18 https://​www.for​brit​ain.uk/​our-​coun​cill​ors/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 19 https:// ​ w ww.patri​ otic​ a lte​ r nat​ ive.org.uk/​ a lt​ e rna​ t ive ​ _ ​ c ur ​ r icu ​ lum [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 20 https://​tra​diti​onal​brit​ain.org/​blog/​arise-​lady-​lawre​nce/​ [accessed 01/​ 07/​2021]. 21 https://​www.inde​pend​ent.co.uk/​news/​uk/​crime/​jer​emy-​bedf​ord-​tur​ ner-​race-​hate-​spe​ech-​antims​emit​ism-​brit​ish-​sold​ier-​engl​and-​jew​ ish-​cont​rol-​a8352​561.html [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 22 Tamir Bar-​On, Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). 23 Chris Allen, ‘The Football Lads Alliance and Democratic Football Lad’s Alliance: an insight into the dynamism and diversification of Britain’s counter-​jihad movement’, Social Movement Studies 18/​5 (2019) pp. 639–​646. 24 https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​48950​672 [accessed 01/​07/​2021].

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4 Leadership 1 https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​Pxot​LDtw​T50&t=​12s [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 2 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013) ch. 4. 3 Ann Ruth Willner, The Spellbinders: Charismatic Political Leadership (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 4 Graham Macklin, Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 5 Roger Eatwell, ‘Charisma and the Radical Right’ in Jens Rydgren (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 6 Luke LeCras, A. K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right, 1933–​1973 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 7 https://​www.hope​noth​ate.org.uk/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2021/​03/​state-​ of-​hate-​2021-​final-​2.pdf [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 8 https://​www.inde​pend​ent.co.uk/​news/​uk/​home-​news/​natio​nal-​act​ ion-​neo-​nazi-​terror ​ist-​group-​foun​der-​b en-​raym​ond-​bla​ckgu​ard-​ b1723​241.html [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 9 Graham Macklin, ‘Co-​opting the counter culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction’, Patterns of Prejudice 39/​3 (2006) pp. 301–​326. 10 https://​www.dav​idmy​att.info [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 11 https://​www.opende​mocr​acy.net/​en/​cou​nter​ing-​radi​cal-​right/​rac​ist-​ occult​ism-​uk-​beh​ind-​order-​nine-​ang​les-​o9a/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 12 Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw, The Cultic Milieu Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization (Walnut Creek: AltaMera Press, 2002). 13 George Michael, ‘David Lane and the Fourteen Words’ Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10/​1 (2009) pp. 43–​61.

5 Supporters 1 https://​www.stand​ard.co.uk/​news/​lon​don/​engl​ish-​defe​nce-​lea​gue-​ and-​anti​faci​sts-​in-​cent​ral-​lon​don-​prot​est-​8633​414.html [accessed 01/​ 07/​2021]. 218

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Notes 2 William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3 https://​ w ww.bbc.co.uk/ ​ n ews/ ​ u k- ​ e ngl ​ a nd- ​ s omer ​ s et- ​ 5 7439 ​ 4 80 [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 4 G. C. Webber, ‘Patterns of Membership and Support for the British Union of Fascists’ Journal of Contemporary History, 19/​4 (1984) pp. 575–​606. 5 Thomas Linehan, British Fascism, 1918–​1939: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 6 Dan Stone, ‘The English Mistery, the BUF, and the Dilemmas of British Fascism’ Journal of Modern History 75/​2 (2003) pp. 336–​358. 7 Michael Billig, Fascists: A Social Psychological View of the National Front (London: Academic Press, 1978) p. 30. 8 Christopher Husbands, Racial Exclusion and the City: The Urban Support of the National Front (Abingdon: Routledge, 1982). 9 https://​www.inde​pend​ent.co.uk/​news/​uk/​polit​ics/​the-​big-​quest​ion-​ what-​does-​the-​lea​ked-​list-​of-​its-​13-​500-​memb​ers-​rev​eal-​about-​the-​ bnp-​1026​178.html [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 10 Matthew Goodwin, New British Fascism: The Rise of the British National Party (Abingdon: Routledge 2011) ch. 5–​8. 11 James Rhodes, ‘White Backlash, “Unfairness” and Justifications of British National Party (BNP) Support’ Ethnicities 10/​ 1 (2010) pp. 77–​99. 12 Stuart Wilks-​ Heeg, ‘The Canary in a Coalmine? Explaining the Emergence of the British National Party in English Local Politics’ Parliamentary Affairs 62/​3 (2009) pp. 377–​398. 13 Simon Winlow, Steve Hall and James Treadwell, The Rise of the Right English Nationalism and the Transformation of Working-​Class Politics (Bristol: Policy Press, 2017). 14 Jon Garland and James Treadwell, ‘The New Politics of Hate? An Assessment of the Appeal of the English Defence League Amongst Disadvantaged White Working-​ Class Communities in England’ Journal of Hate Studies 10/​1 (2012) pp. 123–​141. 15 Joel Busher, The Making of Anti-​Muslim Protest: Grassroots Activism in the English Defence League (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 16 Hilary Pilkington, Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 219

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17 Kathleen Blee, Democracy in the Making: How Activist Groups Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 18 Thomas, Paul Responding to the Threat of Violent Extremism: Failing to Prevent (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). 19 Hsiao-​Hung Pai, Angry White People: Coming Face to Face with the British Far Right (London: Zeb Books, 2016) p. xvii.

6  Gendered activism 1 https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​engl​and-​leeds-​52965​672 [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 2 https://​blog.natio​nala​rchi​ves.gov.uk/​lgbtq-​hist​ory-​the-​red-​rose-​of-​ colo​nel-​bar​ker/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 3 Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923–​1945. (London: Bloomsbury, 2021) p. xv. 4 George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999) ch. 1. 5 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume 1 Women, Floods, Bodies, History (London: Polity, 1991); Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume 2 Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (London: Polity, 1989). 6 Michael Spurr, ‘ “Playing for fascism”: sportsmanship, antisemitism and the British Union of Fascists’ Patterns of Prejudice 37/​4 (2003) pp. 359–​376. 7 Tony Collins, ‘Return to Manhood: The Cult of Masculinity and the British Union of Fascists,’ in J.A. Mangan (ed.) Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon –​Global Fascism (London: Frank Cass, 2000). 8 Liburd, Liam ‘Beyond the Pale: Whiteness, Masculinity and Empire in the British Union of Fascists, 1932–​1940’ Fascism 7/​2 (2018) pp. 275–​296. 9 Hugh McNeile and Rob Black, The History of the League of Empire Loyalists and Candour (London: A. K. Chesterton Trust, 2014) p. 55. 10 Martin Durham, Women and Fascism (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998) ch. 5. 11 Matthew Goodwin, New British Fascism: The Rise of the British National Party (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011) ch. 5. 220

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Notes 12 https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​magaz​ine-​25142​557 [accessed 01/​ 07/​ 2021]. 13 https://​www.hope​noth​ate.org.uk/​2013/​01/​08/​hom​opho​bia-​the-​bnp/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 14 https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​world-​us-​can​ada-​39026​870 [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 15 Hilary Pilkington, Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 16 Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence, Joe Mulhall and Simon Murdoch, The International Alt-​Right: Fascism for the 21st Century? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 17 Michael Kimmel, Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into –​ and Out of –​Violent Extremism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 18 Cynthia Miller-​Idriss, The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 19 https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​commen​tisf​ree/​2019/​aug/​29/​far-​right-​ fred-​perry-​mai​nstr​eam-​fash​ion-​cam​oufl​age-​bra​nds [accessed 01/​07/​ 2021]. 20 James Shields, ‘The Front National: From Systematic Opposition to Systemic Integration?’ Modern & Contemporary France 22/​4 (2014) pp. 491–​511. 21 https://​www.inde​pend​ent.co.uk/​news/​uk/​home-​news/​paul-​gold​ing-​ jayda-​fran​sen-​att​ack-​brit​ain-​first-​assa​ult-​record​ing-​far-​right-​a8934​ 336.html [accessed 01/​07/​2021].

7  Online activists 1 https://​www.cps.gov.uk/​cps/​news/​young​est-​brit​ish-​terror​ist-​senten​ ced-​neo-​nazi-​manu​als-​stash [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 2 Maura Conway, Ryan Scrivens and Logan Macnair, Right-​Wing Extremists’ Persistent Online Presence: History and Contemporary Trends (The Hague: International Centre for Counter-​Terrorism, 2019). 3 Chip Berlet, When Hate Went Online (Boston: Public Research Association, 2001). 221

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Notes 4 Heidi Beirich, White Homicide Worldwide (Montgomery: Southern Poverty Law Centre, 2014). 5 Chris Atton, ‘Far-​right media on the internet: culture, discourse and power’ New Media & Society 8/​4 (2006) pp. 573–​587. 6 Paul Jackson, ‘Pioneers of World Wide Web Fascism: The British Extreme Right and Web 1.0’ in Mark Littler and Ben Lee (eds) Digital Extremisms: Readings in Violence, Radicalisation and Extremism in the Online Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2020) pp. 13–​36. 7 Jamie Bartlett and Mark Littler, Inside the EDL: Populist Politics in a Digital Age (London: Demos, 2011). 8 Joel Busher, The Making of Anti-​Muslim Protest: Grassroots Activism in the English Defence League (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 9 Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence, Joe Mulhall and Simon Murdoch The International Alt-​Right: Fascism for the 21st Century? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 10 https://​www.splcen​ter.org/​hatewa​tch/​2017/​05/​08/​what-​kek-​exp​lain​ ing-​alt-​right-​deity-​beh​ind-​their-​meme-​magic [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 11 Ben Lee, ‘ “Neo-​ Nazis Have Stolen Our Memes”: Making Sense of Extreme Memes’ in Bern Lee and Mark Littler (eds) Digital Extremisms: Readings in Violence, Radicalisation and Extremism in the Online Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2020). 12 https://​www.buzzf​eed.com/​jamesb​all/​how-​550-​faceb​ook-​users-​spr​ ead-​brit​ain-​first-​cont​ent-​to-​hundr [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 13 Maik Fielitz and Nick Thurston, Post-​ Digital Cultures of the Far Right Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2018). 14 https://​ w ww.inde ​ p end ​ e nt.co.uk/ ​ n ews/ ​ u k/ ​ h ome-​ n ews/​ p ar​ l er-​ taked​own-​far-​right-​uk-​tommy-​robin​son-​b1777​645.html [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 15 https:// ​ blogs.lse.ac.uk/ ​ m edia ​ l se/ ​ 2 021/ ​ 02/ ​ 19/ ​ onl ​ i ne- ​ h arms- ​ w hy-​ we-​need-​a-​syst​ems-​based-​appro​ach-​towa​rds-​inter​net-​reg​ulat​ion/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 16 https://​w ww.the​sun.co.uk/​news/​13986​628/​call-​duty-​warz​one-​far-​ right-​patrio​tic-​alte​rnat​ive-​mark-​coll​ett/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 17 https://​ w ww.wired.co.uk/ ​ a rti ​ c le/ ​ h ope- ​ n ot- ​ h ate- ​ u k- ​ f ar- ​ r ight [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 222

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Notes 18 https://​ w ww.hope ​ n oth ​ ate.org.uk/ ​ r esea ​ r ch/ ​ s tate-​ o f-​ h ate-​ 2 021/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 19 https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​uk-​news/​2014/​oct/​20/​man-​jai​led-​anti​ semi​tic-​tweet-​lab​our-​mp [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 20 Benjamin Lee, and Kim Knott ‘Fascist aspirants: Fascist Forge and ideological learning in the extreme-​right online milieu’, Behavioural Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression (2021). 21 Cynthia Miller-​Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

8 Violence 1 https://​glo​balr​iski​nsig​hts.com/​2021/​04/​fut​ure-​tre​nds-​far-​right-​terror​ ism-​in-​the-​uk-​a-​major-​thr​eat/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 2 Jacob Aasland Ravndal, Madeleine Thorstensen, Anders Ravik Jupskås and Graham Macklin, RTV Trend Report 2021 Right-​Wing Terrorism and Violence in Western Europe, 1990–​2020 (Oslo: Centre for Research on Extremism, 2021). 3 Stephen Cullen, ‘Political Violence: The Case of the British Union of Fascists’ Journal of Contemporary History, 28/​2 (1993) pp. 245–​267. 4 Daniel Tilles, ‘Bullies or Victims? A Study of British Union of Fascists Violence’ Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7/​3 (2006) pp. 327–​346. 5 https://​w ww.redpep​p er.org.uk/​blair-​p each-​blood-​on-​t he-​stre​ets/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 6 Alex Carter, ‘The dog that didn’t bark? Assessing the development of cumulative extremism between fascists and anti-​fascists in the 1970s’ in Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (eds) “Tomorrow Belongs to Us”: The British Far Right Since 1967 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 7 Andy Bell and Ray Hill, The Other Face of Terror (London: Grafton, 1998). 8 http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​hi/​engl​ish/​sta​tic/​in_​de​pth/​pro​gram​mes/​2001/​ bnp_​spec​ial/​mem​bers​hip/​advis​ory/​tony_​l​ecom​ber.stm [accessed 01/​ 07/​2021]. 9 https://​w ww.theg​uard​ian.com/​uk/​2010/​may/​14/​neo-​nazi-​ian-​davi​ son-​jai​led-​chemi​cal-​wea​pon [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 10 https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​10413​611 [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 223

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Notes 11 Graham Macklin, Joel Busher and Dominic Holbrook, The Internal Brakes on Violent Escalation: A Descriptive Typology (2019) https://​ crestr​esea​rch.ac.uk/​resour​ces/​inter​nal-​bra​kes-​full-​rep​ort/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 12 https://​w ww.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​wales-​north-​east-​wales-​3 4218​184 [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 13 Roger Griffin, Terrorist’s Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012). 14 Jeanine de Roy van Zuijdewijn and Edwin Bakker, ‘Lone-​ Actor Terrorism: Policy Paper 1: Personal Characteristics of Lone-​Actor Terrorists’ (2016) http://​icct.nl/​app/​uplo​ads/​2016/​04/​2016​04_​C​LAT_​ Tool​kit-​Paper-​1-​1.pdf. 15 Gerry Gable and Paul Jackson, Lone Wolves: Myth or Reality? (Ilford: Searchlight Magazine, 2011). 16 Raffaello Pantucci, A Typology of Lone Wolves: Preliminary Analysis of Lone Islamist Terrorists (London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, 2011). 17 Ramón Spaaij, Understanding Lone Wolf Terrorism: Global Patterns, Motivations and Prevention (London: Springer, 2011); Mark Hamm and Ramón Spaaij, The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 18 Paul Gill, Lone-​Actor Terrorists: A Behavioural Analysis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 19 Paul Jackson, ‘Beyond the “Lone Wolf ”: lone actor terrorism and the far-​ right in Europe’ in Aristotle Kallis, Sara Zeiger and Öztürk, Bilgehan (eds) Violent Radicalisation & Far-​Right in Europe (Ankara: Hedayah/​SETA, 2018). 20 http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​engl​and/​hampsh​ire/​7453​316.stm [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 21 https://​w ww.hate-​spe​ech.org/​ukrain​ian-​stud​ent-​adm​its-​anti-​mus​ lim-​ter​ror-​in-​the-​uk/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 22 http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​uk/​8150​619.stm [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 23 https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​uk-​news/​2014/​may/​01/​neo-​nazi-​terror​ ist-​mer​seys​ide-​mosq​ues-​ian-​for​man [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 24 https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​uk-​news/​2018/​may/​30/​man-​beh​ind-​ mach​ete-​att​ack-​plan-​at-​gay-​event-​detai​ned-​in-​hospi​tal [accessed 01/​ 07/​2021]. 224

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Notes 25 Paul Jackson, ‘Dreaming of a National Socialist World: The World Union of National Socialists (wuns) and the Recurring Vision of Transnational Neo-​Nazism’ Fascism 8/​2 (2019) pp. 275–​306. 26 https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​42910​051 [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 27 http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​hi/​engl​ish/​sta​tic/​audi​o_​vi​deo/​pro​gram​mes/​ panor​ama/​tran​scri​pts/​tran​scri​pt_​3​0_​06​_​00.txt [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 28 https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​uk/​2007/​feb/​23/​race.ukg​uns [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 29 https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​uk/​2002/​nov/​22/​race.world [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 30 https://​www.thear​gus.co.uk/​news/​6706​483.rac​ist-​att​ack-​thug-​jai​led/​ [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 31 http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​engl​and/​southe​rn_​c​ount​ies/​5151​178.stm [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 32 https://​w ww.theg​uard​ian.com/​u k/​2008/​dec/​13/​u k-​s ecur​ity-​nazi-​ ­terror​ist-​jai​led [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 33 http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​uk/​8462​205.stm [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 34 http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​wales/​sou​th_​e​ast/​8532​758.stm [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 35 https://​www.mir​ror.co.uk/​news/​uk-​news/​ammo-​stash-​bnp-​activ​ist-​ david-​229​649 [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 36 http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​uk/​7471​128.stm [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 37 https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​engl​and-​30247​980 [accessed 01/​07/​ 2021]. 38 https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​48279​225 [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 39 https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​stor​ies-​44798​649 [accessed 01/​07/​2021].

9  State and society responses 1 https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​0ljI​2PMU​fwY [accessed 01/​ 07/​ 2021]. 2 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984). 3 David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan, 2017).

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Notes 4 Jennifer Craig-​Norton, Christhard Hoffmann, Tony Kushner (eds) Migrant Britain: Histories and Historiographies: Essays in Honour of Colin Holmes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 5 David Cesarani, Justice Delayed: How Britain became a refuge for Nazi war criminals (London: Heinemann, 1992). 6 John Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain. Third Edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). 7 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002). 8 Paul Thomas Responding to the Threat of Violent Extremism: Failing to Prevent (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). 9 Makin-​Waite, Mike On Burnley Road: Class, Race and Politics in a Northern English Town (London: Lawrence Wishart, 2021). 10 Vivien Lowndes, and Leila Thorp, ‘Preventing Violent Extremism –​Why Local Context Matters’ in Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin (eds) The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). 11 Craig McCann, The Prevent Strategy and Right-​ wing Extremism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). 12 https:// ​ w ww.mi5.gov.uk/​ n ews/​ d irec​ t or-​ g ene​ r al- ​ ken- ​ m ccal ​ lum-​ makes-​first-​pub​lic-​addr​ess [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 13 Chris Allen, ‘Proscribing National Action: Considering the Impact of Banning the British Far-​Right Group’ The Political Quarterly 88/​4 (2017) pp. 625–​659. 14 https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​polit​ics/​2009/​jan/​30/​brit​ish-​jobs-​brit​ ish-​work​ers [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 15 https:// ​ w ww.inde​ p end​ e nt.co.uk/​ news/​ u k/​ p olit​ i cs/ ​ c onse ​ r vat ​ ive-​ party-​rac​ism-​inqu​iry-​islam​opho​bia-​b1853​354.html [accessed 01/​ 07/​ 2021]. 16 https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​footb​all/​2021/​jun/​07/​boris-​john​son-​ refu​ses-​to-​cond​emn-​fans-​boo​ing-​engl​and-​tak​ing-​the-​knee [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 17 https://​www.equa​lity​huma​nrig​hts.com/​en/​inquir​ies-​and-​inv​esti​gati​ ons/​invest​igat​ion-​lab​our-​party [accessed 01/​07/​2021]. 18 Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism, second edition (London: Polity, 2013).

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Notes 19 Modood, Tariq ‘Rethinking political secularism: the multiculturalist challenge, Patterns of Prejudice 55/​2 (2021) pp. 115–​124. 20 Nigel Copsey, Anti-​Fascism in Britain. Second Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 21 Dan Stone, Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 22 Daniel Sonabend, We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-​war Britain (London: Verso, 2019). 23 David Renton, Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-​Nazi League 1976–​1982 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). 24 Evan Smith, No Platform A History of Anti-​Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 25 David Renton, No Free Speech for Fascists: Exploring ‘No Platform’ in History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021). 26 Aaron Winter and Aurelian Mondon, Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream (London: Verso, 2020). 27 Rick Blackman, ‘The Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship and the Notting Hill riots of 1958’ in Trevor Harris (ed.) Windrush (1948) and Rivers of Blood (1968) (London: Routledge, 2019). 28 Kalwant Bhopal, White Privilege: The Myth of a Post-​Racial Society (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018). 29 http://​eyst.org.uk/​proj​ect.php?s=​the-​think-​proj​ect [accessed 01/​ 07/​ 2021].

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Bibliography Makin-​Waite, Mike (2021) On Burnley Road: Class, Race and Politics in a Northern English Town (London: Lawrence Wishart). McCann, Craig (2019) The Prevent Strategy and Right-​wing Extremism (Abingdon: Routledge). McNeile, Hugh and Black, Rob (2014) The History of the League of Empire Loyalists and Candour (London: A. K. Chesterton Trust). Meleagrou-​Hitchens, Alexander and Bruns, Hans (2013) A Neo-​Nationalist Network: The English Defence League (London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence). Michael, George (2009) ‘David Lane and the Fourteen Words’ Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10(1): 43–​61. Miller-​ Idriss, Cynthia (2018) The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Miller-​Idriss, Cynthia (2020) Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Modood, Tariq (2013) Multiculturalism. Second Edition (London: Polity). Modood, Tariq (2021) ‘Rethinking political secularism: the multiculturalist challenge’ Patterns of Prejudice 55(2): 115–​134. Mudde, Cas (2019) The Far Right Today (Cambridge: Polity). Mulhall, Joe (2020) British Fascism After the Holocaust: From the Birth of Denial to the Notting Hill Riots 1939–​1958 (Abingdon: Routledge). Ó Maoláin, Ciarán (1987) The Radical Right: A World Dictionary (Harlow: Longman). Olusoga, David (2017) Black and British: A Forgotten History (Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan). Pai, Hsiao-​Hung (2016) Angry White People: Coming Face to Face with the British Far Right (London: Zed Books). Panayi, Panikos (2014) An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism since 1800 (Abingdon: Routledge). Pantucci, Raffaello (2011) A Typology of Lone Wolves: Preliminary Analysis of Lone Islamist Terrorists. (London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence). Gill, Paul (2015) Lone-​Actor Terrorists: A Behavioural Analysis (Abingdon: Routledge).

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Bibliography Pilkington, Hilary (2016) Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Pugh, Martin (2006) Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (London: Pimlico). Ravndal, Jacob Aasland, Thorstensen, Madeleine, Jupskås, Anders Ravik and Macklin, Graham (2021) RTV Trend Report 2021 Right-​Wing Terrorism and Violence in Western Europe, 1990–​2020 (Oslo: Centre for Research on Extremism). Reddy, William (2001) The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Renton, David (2019) Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-​Nazi League 1976–​1982 (Abingdon: Routledge). Renton, David (2021) No Free Speech for Fascists: Exploring ‘No Platform’ in History (Abingdon: Routledge). Rhodes, James (2010) ‘White Backlash, “Unfairness” and Justifications of British National Party (BNP) Support’ Ethnicities 10(1): 77–​99. Rydgren, Jens (2005) ‘Is extreme right-​ wing populism contagious? Explaining the emergence of a new party family’ European Journal of Political Research 44(3): 413–​437. Shaffer, Ryan (2017) Music, Youth and International Links in Post-​War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Shields, James (2014) ‘The Front National: From Systematic Opposition to Systemic Integration?’ Modern & Contemporary France 22(4): 491–​511. Smith, Evan (2020) No Platform A History of Anti-​Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (Abingdon: Routledge). Solomos, John (2003) Race and Racism in Britain. Third Edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Sonabend, Daniel (2019) We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-​war Britain (London: Verso). Spaaij, Ramón (2011) Understanding Lone Wolf Terrorism: Global Patterns, Motivations and Prevention (London: Springer). Spurr, Michael (2003) ‘“Playing for fascism”: sportsmanship, antisemitism and the British Union of Fascists’ Patterns of Prejudice 37(4): 359–​376. Stocker, Paul (2016) ‘Importing fascism: reappraising the British fascisti, 1923–​1926’ Contemporary British History 30(3): 326–​348.

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Index

14 Words 74, 92 alt-​right 93, 124, 138 American Nazi Party 42, 91, 147, 158 antifascism 48, 185, 186, 188 Anti-​Nazi League 49, 186 Arktos Media 8, 70, 71, 94 Aryan Strike Force 155 Atomwaffen Division 76, 146 Barnbrook, Richard 60, 123 Base, The 76 Battle of Cable Street 28, 176 Beamish, Henry Hamilton 20, 25 Bean, John 37, 41, 45 Beckett, John 35 Benjamin, Carl 74, 145 Benoist, Alain de 70, 72, 93 Birdwood, Lady Jane 33, 86 Blood & Honour 8, 49, 69, 75, 87, 92, 99, 123, 134 Bowden, Jonathan 89 BNP 5, 6, 35, 42, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66,

67, 68, 69, 75, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 93, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 121, 122, 123, 124, 133, 134, 135, 136, 143, 154, 166, 167, 168, 175, 178, 180, 182, 184, 188, 189, 195 Breivik, Anders 94, 150, 160 Britain First 1, 68, 86, 129, 140, 143, 144, 166, 176 British Brothers’ League 13, 19, 30, 172, 193 British Democratic Party 67 British Fascisti 17, 116, 117, 185 British Fascists 17, 21, 151, 185 British Freedom Party 77, 109, 129 British Housewives’ League 119 British Movement 2, 32, 45, 47, 75, 84, 144, 168, 177 British National Party see BNP British People’s Party 35, 36, 168 British Union of Fascists see BUF Britons Publishing Society 8, 20, 21 Brons, Andrew 50, 61, 67 237

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Index BUF 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 38, 46, 81, 83, 84, 85, 100, 101, 117, 118, 132, 151, 176, 185, 194 Bulldog 49, 87, 121

Golding, Paul 59, 68, 129, 143 Griffin, Nick 1, 5, 10, 50, 52, 54, 55, 66, 77, 79, 80, 82, 106, 121, 134, 182, 183, 195

Camus, Renaud 94 Candour 37, 70, 120 Chesterton, A. K. 29, 30, 35, 37, 42, 45, 46, 70, 84, 120 Collett, Mark 66, 69, 88, 144 Combat 18 8, 52, 58, 92, 135, 154, 189 counter-​Jihad 61, 73, 93, 109, 136, 137, 165 Copeland, David 91, 150, 154, 166, 198 Crane, Nicky 49, 87, 123

Hamm, Jeffrey 38, 81

Devi, Savitri 86 Dior, François 43, 86, 152 Donaldson, Ian Stuart 49, 75, 87, 92 Dugin, Alexandr 94 eco-​fascism 94 EDL 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 72, 73, 76, 82, 97, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 124, 125, 135, 136, 137, 141, 143, 163, 168, 180, 183, 189 Edmonds, Richard 74, 85 English Defence League see EDL Feuerkreig Division 131, 146 Football Lads Alliance 72 Franzen, Jadya 68, 77, 86, 129, 166

Identitarianism 70, 71, 72 Imperial Fascist League 21, 22, 30, 70, 151 Irving, David 32, 89, 135 Jordan, Colin 10, 36, 37, 41, 45, 51, 78, 84, 86, 92, 93, 132, 152, 173, 177 Lane, David 74, 92 League of British Ex-​Servicemen and Women 38 League of Empire Loyalists 37, 41, 45, 84, 120 Leese, Arnold 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 36, 37, 41, 51, 80, 119, 144, 194 Lintorn-​Orman, Rotha 18, 25, 116 London Forum 8, 71 McVeigh, Timothy 161, 163 Mankind Quarterly 32, 51 Mason, James 147 Monday Club 33, 43, 45, 48 Mosley, Oswald 3, 7, 10, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 78, 79, 80, 81, 88, 101, 117, 118, 132, 151, 194, 195 Myatt, David 11, 76, 91 238

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Index National Action 7, 8, 23, 32, 75, 76, 86, 88, 90, 99, 114, 128, 146, 156, 157, 165, 168, 181, 183 National Fascisti 21 National Front 6, 8, 10, 32, 34, 36, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 58, 74, 84, 86, 87, 90, 100, 102, 103, 105, 110, 112, 119, 120, 121, 123, 134, 152, 153, 177, 178, 183, 186, 187, 191, 194, 196 National Socialist League 29, 35 National Socialist Movement 10, 42, 84, 119, 132, 152, 154, 166 NF see National Front Nouvelle Droite 51, 70, 72, 93 Order of the Nine Angles 76, 77, 91 Patriotic Alternative 1, 10, 69, 88, 129, 144 Pearce, Joseph 49, 87, 121 Pierce, William 92, 158, 163, 164 Powell, Enoch 45, 71 Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion 20, 22, 29 Racial Preservation Society 44, 45 Ramsey, Maule 23, 30 Raymond, Benjamin 75, 88, 89, 128 Redwatch 135 Relf, Robert 177 Renshaw, Jack 88, 168, 198 Richardson, Mary 85, 117 Rock Against Communism 87, 121 Rock Against Racism 49, 186

Rockwell, George Lincoln 7, 42, 91, 132, 158 Scruton, Roger 71, 90 Searchlight 32, 49, 63, 186, 187, 32, 49, 63, 186, 187 Sonnenkrieg Division 10 Southgate, Troy 90, 135 Spearhead 42, 43, 85, 102, 103, 134, 152 Spencer, Richard 71, 93, 124, 138, 144 Steven Books 70 Stormfront 133 Tarrent, Brenton 95, 161 The Turner Diaries 92, 158, 163, 167 Tommy Robinson see Yaxley-​ Lennon, Stephen Traditional Britain Group 8, 71, 77, 90, 99 Trump, Donald 124, 139, 142, 145, 185 Tyndall, John 5, 37, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 57, 80, 81, 84, 86, 87, 91, 92, 102, 119, 120, 121, 123, 134, 152 UKIP 5, 6, 60, 68, 74, 82, 106, 183 Union Movement 10, 38, 39, 40, 41, 151 United Kingdom Independence Party see UKIP Webster, Martin 37, 47, 49, 84, 120, 123 Walker, Michael 51, 93, 135

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Index Yaxley-​Lennon, Stephen 10, 63, 73, 77, 82, 97, 135, 142, 145, 166, 189 Yiannopoulos, Milo 124, 126, 143, 145

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Waters, Anne Marie 68, 71, 86, 129 White, Arnold 13 White Defence League 41 William, William 20, 29, 83, 151 World Union of National Socialists 43, 91, 92

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