The mid-to-late 1960s registered a number of significant political developments. Oswald Mosley officially retired from politics in favour of developing a role as an influential commentator on national affairs, though his Union Movement (UM) would continue to exist in a diminished form for a number of years, functioning chiefly to propagate Mosley's views through the movement print Action; the development of the Ulster troubles naturally attracted his attention. But, just as Mosley was attempting to carve out his new public role, Enoch Powell emerged dramatically in 1968 as a leading figure on the Right with his apocalyptic ‘rivers of blood’ speech on the national dangers of ‘coloured’ immigration. As such, he could be seen as usurping Mosley's role in this respect, a figure more relevant to a new era of extreme-Right politics. And, for our purposes, Powell would engage more personally with the Ulster problem than Mosley. This chapter assesses the degree of similarity and difference in their approaches to the subject.

Mosley and Powell: Political Departures

Oswald Mosley's retirement from active politics had the effect of modifying his public perception. It occurred in the context of a largely favourable reception for his autobiography, My Life, in both Ireland and Britain, with several leading public figures testifying to his abilities. In this context Mosley sought to reshape his past so as better to exploit this situation. His close associate at this time, Cecil King – whom the security services recorded as having attended one of Mosley's meetings advocating peace with Nazi Germany during the phoney war period of 1940 – remarked: ‘He is at pains now in interviews to convince everybody that he was never anti-Jewish, never pro-German, and never favoured violence at his meetings. Surely he protests too much.’ Mosley had already put in a robust, if not always accurate, defence of his political career during the London Weekend Television broadcast The Frost Programme, hosted by David Frost, in November 1967, while at the same time proposed legal action against the BBC for denying him the opportunity to respond to his critics succeeded in its ban on Mosley, in place since 1936, being removed in 1968. Thereafter Mosley had recurrent, if not uncritical, television coverage. These were welcome developments facilitating Mosley's political repositioning, though he never dismissed entirely the prospect of a great national crisis that would result in a call for his services to meet it.

As an academic subject the Northern Ireland problem has been exhaustively researched, and continues to be so. Nevertheless, there exist some areas that remain relatively unexplored. This work addresses one of these: namely, the relationship between the British extreme-Right and Ulster/Northern Ireland in the twentieth century. Studies of British fascism have not entirely ignored the subject, especially with reference to the recent troubles, and anyone entering the field of British fascist studies will find themselves indebted to the specialists who have made it their own: specialists such as Richard Griffiths, Roger Griffin, Roger Eatwell, Stuart Rawnsley, Colin Holmes, Thomas Linehan, Nigel Copsey, Richard Thurlow, Matthew Goodwin, Graham Macklin and Paul Jackson, among others; not least Tom Villis whose work on British Catholics and facism in the inter-war period has illuminated an important under-researched area. However, their perspective, for understandable reasons, has been primarily focused on Britain. Irish independence in 1921 removed the large Irish presence from the House of Commons and thus the Irish question from the heart of British politics, while regional autonomy in Northern Ireland under its own administration was allowed to proceed with little oversight from Westminster for 50 years, a period in which a host of grievances developed that ultimately led to the Northern Ireland conflict from the late 1960s. But Northern Ireland had been a constitutionally problematic entity from the beginning, and it is in this context that the case for examining the region in the context of fascism should be seen.

Central to British fascist ambitions was belief in the emergence of a great national crisis that would discredit the established political parties and thus create the space for a fascist takeover, but the envisaged crisis never occurred. The only part of the United Kingdom that could be said to have approximated those conditions was Ulster/Northern Ireland. In the years from 1912 to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 the Ulster crisis came close to pulling the United Kingdom as a whole into a state of civil war, while from 1921 the region was under attack from both constitutional nationalism and republican paramilitarism until the IRA ceasefire of 1994 and the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

On his re-election as leader of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) in 1966, Revd Albert McElroy described ‘Ulster Toryism’ as ‘a state of mind which, psychologically, bears a close resemblance to the obscurantism and the essential unreason of Fascism.’ During the civil rights struggle of the late 1960s the perception of the Stormont Government as ‘fascist’ was widespread among nationalists – a perception expressed in Nazi salutes and the derogatory anti-Royal Ulster Constabulary chant ‘SS-RUC’. The historical reference these perceptions embodied, however, was less than comprehensive. In particular, they obscured the attraction that fascism and movements inspired by fascism had for many people in Britain and Ireland in the inter-war years, though not enough to achieve political success.

The reasons for fascism's failure in the British context have been firmly established. An academic consensus exists on four main themes, if not the degree of significance accruing to each: fascist misunderstanding of the crisis facing British society; fascism’s incompatibility with British culture; the weakness of the British Union of Fascists (BUF); State management of fascism and the opposition of the Left. The specificity of the reasons for fascism’s failure, however, contrasts with the difficulty of coming to terms with the phenomenon itself.

The term is conceptually ambiguous: ‘there still exists no definition [of fascism] … acceptable to all, or recognised as universally valid’, though in the British context a highly influential definition has been provided by Roger Griffin, who claims that an essential characteristic of an authentic fascist movement is the presence of a ‘palingenetic’ myth of national rebirth. At the same time, a distinction must be made between the academic preoccupation with defining what was and was not authentically fascist in a discrete phase of history now past and the attitude of contemporary political actors, lacking the benefit of hindsight and believing themselves to be working with a fascist grain of history, or zeitgeist. Academic and contemporary attitudes to Salazar's Portugal illustrate the difference. The consensus among the former that Portugal was authoritarian rather than fascist contrasts with contemporary British fascist – and anti-fascist – commentaries that regarded Salazar's dictatorship as indicative of developments suggesting future international fascist hegemony. Different States might be travelling at different speeds, but in contrast to the academic verdict on fascist eligibility was a more fluid contemporary outlook which recognised no rigid barriers to the deliverance of a fascist future.

A comparison of Rotha Lintorn-Orman's British Fascists (BF) with Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) offers both similarities and contrasts. Both movements were concerned with the same fundamental issues – the preservation of the British Empire and thwarting the advance of international communism – in the furtherance of which they sought to provide an alternative to a weak parliamentary system incapable of recognising and defeating the forces of subversion facing the State. Also, both movements were founded by individuals with a record of courageous war service, and for whom the conflict had a profound influence on their political outlooks. Both were inspired by Mussolini and created movements which privileged ‘will’ and local/regional initiative in furthering their causes. Both developed an increasingly antisemitic and racist outlook. The differences between them, however, were more significant.

Most obviously, at leadership level, Mosley had the personal qualities to provide the masculine leadership that Lintorn-Orman clearly could not (Figure 5). He also had financial resources much superior to those of Lintorn-Orman, and while the BF only gradually came to accept the need for dictatorship, Mosley's BUF more readily advocated it and had a much clearer idea of the corporatist political system that would replace parliamentary democracy; though it might be noted that when the BF was formed it was on the basis of an Italian template whose fascist characteristics developed only gradually, whereas Mosley's BUF, founded a decade later, had the fully formed Italian and German templates as a basis for construction. Furthermore, Mosley's more developed conception of an alternative fascist political order was informed by a ‘palingenetic’ vision completely lacking in the BF – that of a new era emerging out of the wreckage of the Great War and the discrediting of the old parties and institutions whose betrayal of the war generation had rendered them morally unfit and politically redundant. In this conception fascism was the historically inevitable vehicle to deliver on the promise of the new era. But of particular significance for our purposes, while the outlooks of both Lintorn-Orman and Mosley were influenced by recent Irish developments, they were influenced by different developments.

The British National Party (BNP)'s prominence in the 1990s was not an overnight phenomenon. From its beginnings in the early 1980s as John Tyndall's response to his failed attempt at an authoritarian reconstruction of the National Front (NF) its organisational structure accorded with his ideas, but its ideology and political objectives, as Nigel Copsey points out, merely followed generally in the NF Flag vein, needing no change. For the rest of the decade, the party focused on long-term organisational development – attempts to forge an alliance with the NF Flag faction in 1987 failed on Tyndall's authoritarian insistence on being leader of the merged organisation – rather than electoral conflict. Its poor performance in the 1983 general election when its 53 candidates averaged only 1.3 per cent of the vote demonstrated that fighting elections only highlighted party weakness. As it entered the 1990s, therefore, the BNP had failed to make a decisive political breakthrough; nevertheless, with the collapse of the NF it was now the major vehicle of extreme-Right opinion, while the problem of moving from the British political margins would gradually be solved mainly through the efforts of Nick Griffin.

Griffin found his way back into the extreme-Right centre initially through engaging in controversial debate on the Holocaust; and having begun the 1990s arguing against engaging in electoral contests, by mid-decade had changed tack and was now enthusiastically promoting it. Griffin's political rise was aided by Tyndall’s mistakes. As the BNP became more prominent it attracted the aggressive attention of anti-Nazi activists. In response, Combat 18 (C18), led by one Charlie Sargent, emerged from BNP ranks in 1992 as a party protection force. Openly neo-Nazi, and promoting a race war, it rapidly became a problem as it turned on party activists who favoured contesting elections. Encouraged by a BNP council by-election victory (by seven votes) in the Tower Hamlets ward of Millwall, London, in September 1993, Tyndall declared C18 a proscribed organisation. But little was done to enforce proscription and C18 continued to have a debilitating effect on the party, even creating its own political wing, the National Socialist Alliance. At this time, BNP membership, as estimated by party activist (and Searchlight mole) Tim Hepple, who accessed its membership cards, was over 3,000.

The sense of crisis that engulfed Ulster loyalism and Unionism in November 1985 was more intense than that of 1974. Then, the Council of Ireland was the bugbear that effectively brought the Sunningdale Agreement down, through fear of southern influence in Northern Ireland affairs; now, the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) formalised southern influence on northern governance, and unlike 1974 there were no established institutions in Northern Ireland at which loyalists could vent their anger and opposition, the meetings of the Agreement being a moveable feast that could be held at any designated location in northern or southern Ireland, or Britain. Signed by Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald, the Irish Taoiseach, on 15 November 1985, at Hillsborough Castle, county Down, it was an international treaty between the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic, and a multidimensional response to the Ulster problem premised on the understanding that the involvement of both States was an essential basis for any solution, their mutual engagement covering political, legal, economic, social, cultural, constitutional and security cooperation. As such, the Agreement was not intended as a solution to the Ulster problem but, with Unionist anxieties in mind, an instrument for addressing nationalist grievances and by doing so compel Unionists to negotiate one, the preferred solution being centred on a form of restored powersharing Government at Stormont. Until such a Government emerged, however, the Irish Government represented the interests of the Catholic community, its role in the governance of the north facilitated by a secretariat of Irish civil servants at Maryfield, outside Belfast. Most worrying for Unionists, not only did the absence of settled institutions in Northern Ireland make the Agreement difficult to oppose, but the element of Irish Republic ‘influence’ in the governance of Northern Ireland was ambiguous – at what point would it be instrumental or marginal in any given situation? Accordingly, both Unionism and loyalist paramilitarism united in the wake of its announcement. David Kerr, a leading Ulster NF member reflected loyalist paranoia when he claimed that even ‘the isolated Whites in Black inner cities have … more security than border loyalists’. Westminster had betrayed Ulster and the Queen had not lifted a hand to help Ulster loyalists. The AIA would provide the context of Northern Ireland politics until the Belfast/ Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

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.

The historical trajectory of the British extreme-Right over the period covered by this study has been from the centre of British politics with the Ulster crisis of 1912–14 to its extremes. Ulster 1912–14 was serious, not only in itself, but because it was the focal point of a fundamental crisis of the British State, as popular democracy and a rising labour movement aligned with Irish nationalism in support of self-Government for Ireland. For the elite Right – a historical formation that had ruled the State for centuries – the crisis appeared to threaten the destruction of the United Kingdom and its empire. Only the outbreak of the Great War defused a crisis that had the potential of developing into civil war.

Tory encouragement of loyalist rebellion against the Liberal Government in 1912–14 may have seemed indicative of a brief extremist phase of the party's history that was unrepeatable, which is how British historians have generally treated it. But, as we have seen, this is not how George Lansbury and other Labour leaders of the time regarded it. ‘Ulster’ remained in Labour calculations in the inter-war period as an indicator of what the Tories were capable of with reference to fascist possibilities in a period of mass unemployment and economic distress with capitalism appearing to be in crisis. Against an academic perception of fascism as a political option destined to fail in Britain, the Left was much less sure. Then, as in the later historiography, there was no consensus on a definition of fascism. A variety of possibilities were under consideration; Mosley's movement did not by any means exhaust fascist potentiality in the British context.

Certainly for later pro-loyalist extreme-Right organisations the threatened Ulster rebellion of 1912–14 seemed freighted with a fascist potential that contemporary problems – especially those provoked by the grievances of the region's disaffected Catholic minority and the constitutional and paramilitary campaigns to free Northern Ireland from British control they led to from 1969 – provided a likely basis for delivering on. At the same time, the British fascist presence in Northern Ireland over the last century was also to a large extent a function of political developments in Britain.

The extension of Blackshirt fascism to Northern Ireland under the title, Ulster Fascists (UF) occurred just as the BF in the region was going into decline, which could be seen as a happy coincidence: a competitor for popular support was leaving the political stage. That the BF had not prospered in the region, however, was a portent the UF failed to recognise, certainly did not acknowledge. That it did not do so reflects the very different conception of fascism – informed by a Griffinesque palingenetic myth of inevitable national rebirth – the UF, like its parent body in Britain, subscribed to during the period of rapid growth the Rothermere–Mosley compact produced, and the political confidence it facilitated. This chapter assesses its relative progress during the compact and the problems it encountered as it struggled to survive thereafter.

The UF: The Regional Context

To assist the formation of the UF, in August 1933, Dr Robert Forgan, Deputy Leader to Sir Oswald Mosley, wrote to a former member of the Ulster Command of the BF in Belfast requesting his assistance in establishing the UF Belfast centre. This initiative – basing Blackshirt branches on the organisation and personnel of BF converts – clearly reflected British practice where the BUF attracted many former BF members. Forgan, however, received an angry rebuff, undoubtedly informed by knowledge of the BUF's attitude to northern Unionists and their regime. The Belfast Centre was subsequently established at 35 High Street. This, however, was a very minor irritant compared with the difficulties that Northern Ireland presented as an arena for political recruitment.

In this context, the appeal to a ‘betrayed’ war generation that was central to BUF propaganda in Britain could not register effectively, because the motives for war service in 1914–18 – informed by the need to validate the cases for and against Home Rule – were significantly different from those that obtained in the rest of the United Kingdom. For Unionists, war service had done much to safeguard their place within the British State, effected, respectively, by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and the conclusions of the Boundary Commission in 1926. Thus, for Ulster Unionists, the question of what the war had been fought for could be given a more satisfactory answer than was the case in Britain.

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.

This chapter explores the ideological and practical interrelationships between the National Front (NF) – the dominant organisation on the British extreme-Right in the 1970s and 1980s – and Ulster loyalism as the Northern Ireland problem developed from the late 1960s to the eve of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 (AIA). The context is provided by the coincidence, from 1966–68, of the emergence of the NF from a coming together of a number of extreme-Right groups in 1967; the stimulus provided by Enoch Powell's ‘rivers of blood’ speech in April 1968; Northern Ireland’s slide into crisis from October 1968; and, initially, Oswald Mosley’s retirement from active politics in 1966.

Thereafter, the extreme-Right groups that would be politically active on the Ulster problem would be mainly of a younger generation who took pains to distinguish themselves from him – regarded as merely a ‘Common Fascist’ – and align themselves with the Ulster loyalist community, rather than the Catholic and nationalist minority. This development represented a reconnection with Sir Edward Carson's threatened rebellion against the implementation of Home Rule on Ulster in the pre-Great War period, the stimulus it provided for the emergence of British fascism with the establishment of Rotha Lintorn-Orman's British Fascists in the 1920s, and the continuation of the pro-loyalist strand with Arnold Leese's Imperial Fascist League in the 1930s. But, although Leese would live into the post-war years and his widow continue to promote his ideas, Leese’s protégé, Colin Jordan, would take little notice of Northern Ireland.

A graduate of the University of Cambridge, before joining the war effort, Jordan was an English and mathematics teacher at a Coventry Secondary Modern School when he founded the White Defence League, a virulently anti-black organisation, in 1958, thereby initiating a career –initially with John Tyndall – in neo-Nazi, antisemitic politics complete with brown shirts, riding breeches, leather belts and Nazi armlets, punctuated by spells in prison for incitement to race hatred. Jordan's obsession with race, however, was pitched at such a level of generality that conflicts between different sections of the white race, as would occur in Northern Ireland, did not register on his radar, while his overt neo-Nazism and mutual antagonism with other extremists such as John Tyndall – the latter concerned that neo-fascism have a distinctly British persona and mass appeal – made impossible his alignment with the emergent NF.