Fascism, as a subject of historical inquiry in twentieth-century Britain, has heretofore been examined predominantly through a lens of political failure.

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Fascism, as a subject of historical inquiry in twentieth-century Britain, has heretofore been examined predominantly through a lens of political failure. Using the undeniable fact that no such movement in the country has ever secured national power as an analytical fulcrum, fascist groups, from the British Fascists of the nineteen-twenties to the present-day British National Party, have been discussed as eccentric at best, and, more often than not, violent and misguided political flops. Despite there having been a number of organizations that have identified themselves as fascist in the last seventy years, much of the existing literature has focused its attention on Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists (BUF) for at least two reasons: Mosley's party of the nineteen-thirties had the greatest following of any of the fascist organizations of this century and is thereby the most significant; and in the last decade the British Home Office has begun declassifying the records kept on both Mosley and the BUF during the inter-war period, allowing a greater measure of precision in illuminating specific points of interest such as membership and the extent of government infiltration within the group.1

However, closely tied to most explanations of fascism's