Fascism and Ideology by Salvatore Garau

Author:Salvatore Garau [Garau, Salvatore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, General, Great Britain, Italy, Scandinavia, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781317909460
Google: fA-UBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-03-24T03:37:46+00:00

THE BRITISH FASCISTI (BF)

In Britain, a movement very similar to the groups analysed so far was launched at the beginning of summer in 1923 by a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Rotha Lintorn-Orman. During the First World War she had served both as a member of the Women’s Reserve Ambulance and with the Scottish Women’s Hospital Corps; by 1923 her fear that socialism in Britain might follow the same increasingly revolutionary path that it was taking in most of Europe pushed her to publish a letter in the right-wing journal The Patriot, calling for the establishment of a British fascist movement.49

Although the British Fascisti (BF) proclaimed itself to be fascist, a broad scholarly consensus considers it to be more properly classified as an extreme form of conservatism, and indeed it is best viewed from the same perspective that has been used above to assess the ANI and FL.50 Just as those movements can be seen both within the context of a radicalising nationalism and within the framework of the liberal split, the BF too ought to be seen from both perspectives. With regard to the radicalisation of nationalism in Britain, the BF was certainly the heir of a variety of nationalist movements that, by the time the BF was started in 1923, had already failed to gain any significant political weight51 or to make any decisive and long-lasting political impact on the Conservative Party.52 The Diehards, for example, were a group within the Conservative Party itself who had been influential up until 1914.53 Worried by the rise of the Labour Party and by the growing political role of the trade unions, the Diehards wanted to protect the leadership role of the aristocracy, criticised the democratic system, disliked the Victorian age and high politics, called for tariff reform, believed that military service should be compulsory and supported resistance to Home Rule for Ireland.54 They also opposed alien immigration, cultivated an extreme xenophobia and shared the belief that a Jewish conspiracy was plotting to destroy the British Empire and British society.55

A similar reaction to the mounting strength of socialism also grew up outside the Conservative Party. Some groups declared a distaste for the open system that had allowed the Labour Party to grow stronger, several of which were launched by veterans of the First World War, such as the Comrades of the Great War, the Vigilantes Society and the Silver Badge Party of Ex-Servicemen. Others challenged the idea of class war upon which revolutionary socialism was based, and called instead for collaboration between employers and employees (British Empire Union); or else addressed their message directly to the workers by proposing moderate social reforms, with the aim of diverting proletarian support from the left (Anti-Socialist Union). Still other groups were based on activism and were launched with the express purpose of breaking possible socialist strikes (Middle Class Union, People’s Defence League). These typically mobilised the middle class in the name of protecting national stability from the impending threat of the Labour Party. Several other groups

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