The crushing of European fascist regimes during the Second World War and the exposure of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime made Mosley's ambition to revive his political career in the post-war years with his organisation, Union Movement (UM), established in 1948, extremely difficult. The factors that constrained Mosley's political progress in the 1930s have been noted, but fascism then was not regarded as a pariah faith in the way it would be following Second World War, one that carried a distinct stigma for those promoting it. Quite how the political environment had changed has been recorded by Trevor Grundy, a child of UM parents in the 1950s, whose mother warned him: ‘You’re not to tell people what we talk about in this house. It’s all secret. People outside the Mosley movement would never ever understand. Just think that you and Lovene [his sister] live in two worlds, this one and the world outside 40 Blandford Square.’ Nor was it likely that this situation would change for Mosley personally, not least because throughout this period and after he felt compelled to defend all aspects of his past political activities and beliefs in speeches and print. Accordingly, he made his own contribution to undoing his major project of this period, ‘Europe-a-Nation’. Nevertheless, given his self-belief as a man of destiny whose hour would surely come, the political struggle continued.

In this context, an issue such as anti-partitionism, which had retained its ‘integrity’ in political discourse on Anglo-Irish relations since the inter-war period, attracted his direct personal engagement. Unlike the 1930s when his references to the subject had been pitched at a general level, with direct attacks on the Stormont regime the preserve of his lieutenants, Mosley would now unambiguously put his personal imprimatur on his movement's anti-partitionist campaign. This chapter will focus on how partition and the immigrant Irish/Catholic community in Britain were addressed as Mosley attempted to advance his political objectives.

Cultivating the Post-War Catholic Interest

Wartime experience had enhanced that community's attraction. Portugal, a State the BUF had considered as a model for its own idea of a fascist entity before the war, had remained neutral during it, as had Europe's other two prominent Catholic countries, Spain and Eire.