The emergence of British fascism in the early 1920s was a response to perceived related external and internal threats to the United Kingdom and its Empire. For the extreme-Right the idea of national peril was exacerbated by a number of alarmist publications that appeared in the post-war period, especially the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a work that remained influential despite the exposure of its forged nature as early as 1921. A leader of the National Front (NF) in the 1970s admitted that it ‘was probably a forgery but that it nonetheless retained its value as a work of prophecy of what the Jews are actually planning and doing in reality.’ In the paranoid atmosphere of the post-Great War years the view quickly developed that communism was but one aspect of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy responsible for provoking subversion throughout the British Empire, especially in Ireland and India. From 1921, Ireland, in alliance with international communism, was seen to threaten further constitutional upheaval.

Colonel A. H. Lane's The Alien Menace identified Ireland’s independence struggle as a Jewish–communist conspiracy, as did the more influential Nesta H. Webster. In World Revolution she brought together antisemitism and contemporary post-war anti-Germanism in her argument on the ‘Illuminati’, a ‘terrible and formidable sect’ that had originated in mid-eighteenth-century Bavaria and was responsible for all forms of ‘subversion’ and plans for ‘World Revolution’. Familiar with a pre-war Ireland inhabited by ‘gay, happy-go-lucky … peasants’, the only explanation for its subsequent rebellious state was manipulation by forces located in Germany engaged in ‘a great conspiracy against the British Empire’: ‘It was … Germany who [sic] fanned the flames of civil war now raging in Ireland. … The same organisation is at work in India.’ Webster repeated and reinforced the arguments of World Revolution in Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1924) and The Surrender of an Empire (1931), each embodying the central theme of varied and multiple revolutionary manifestations manipulated by a single driving force: ‘each seems to form part of a common plan, which, like the separate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, convey no meaning, but when fitted together make up a perfectly clear design.’ Not for nothing would Webster become known as the queen of conspiracy theorists, her publications remaining consistently influential with fascists and neo-fascists, as Joe Pearce's account of his NF education in the late 1970s indicates.