ABSTRACT
Fascism is a cockroach ideology, unloved by most yet seemingly un-killable. The end of World War II and the revelation of the Holocaust ensured that fascism in its classic interwar form had had its day. In Britain, a country whose national myth became indelibly entwined with the struggle against Nazism, fascism faced insurmountable hurdles. Some historians and journalists refer to postwar fascism as ‘neo-fascism’, often without really explaining what was ‘new’ about it. However, in the case of British fascism, continuity far outweighed discontinuity, making the use of the term ‘neo-fascism’ inappropriate. Though the postwar world was no doubt different in many ways, 1945 was not a year zero. That is not to say that the fascist movement of the late 1940s and 1950s was identical to that of its interwar iteration. It certainly operated in a fundamentally different and more hostile world, which affected its ambitions and optimism.
