ABSTRACT
The human and material cost of the Second World War alongside revelations of the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, ensured that in the post-war world, fascism was universally regarded as an evil obscenity, a doctrine of brutality, destruction and genocide. With animosity towards Nazi Germany and the heroic struggle against Hitler functioning as major sources of national loyalty and patriotic pride, anti-fascist attitudes now became central to constructions of British national identity.1 Significantly, the fusion of anti-fascism with national identity reinforced perceptions dating from the inter-war period that fascism was essentially an alien creed inimical to British culture and traditions. Whereas the British were ‘liberal’, ‘tolerant’ and ‘decent’, fascists were ‘foreign’ and ‘intolerant’, ‘fanatics’ who were intent on the physical extermination of Jewry. From this angle fascism was viewed as an abhorrent foreign ideology, wholly incapable of ever taking root in British society. The failure of Mosley in the 1930s offered further confirmation that fascism was indeed antithetical to British cultural values. It was therefore widely assumed that given these conditions, fascist activity in post-war Britain could be safely ignored. In short, fascism was a thoroughly shameful ‘foreign import’ – a futile effort destined for political failure. Not everyone, however, subscribed to the popular notion that the threat of
fascism in Britain ceased to exist. One contemporary challenge came from the antifascist Fleet Street journalist Frederic Mullally, author of Fascism Inside England (1946).2 Although admitting that popular hostility to fascism made a resurgence of a movement operating under a distinct fascist label improbable, Mullally warned against complacency. The residual appeal of fascism, he contended, lay with various aspects of fascist doctrine, particularly with anti-Semitism and anti-socialism. Moreover, because an ‘important minority’ within British society was receptive to
these ideological concerns and thus sympathetic to fascism ‘without knowing it’, the danger was ‘in the emergence of a new political force preaching an out-andout fascist doctrine with a new label’.3 Mullally pointed to the existence of groups like the British League of Ex-Servicemen as examples of fascist or ‘crypto-fascist’ activity, but his real concern was the possible re-emergence of the British Union of Fascists under a new name, attracting a middle-class clientele disillusioned by the 1945 electoral defeat of the Conservative Party and uniting around militant nationalism. His underlying message, repeated by anti-fascists ever since, was that Britain did not possess intrinsic immunity to fascism. Therefore anti-fascists should be continually ‘on guard’ against the fascist menace and not bury their heads, to borrow Mullally’s words, ‘deep in the sands of complacency’.4
