ABSTRACT
Any adequate explanation of the National Front between its launch in 1967 and its late 1970s high point must start with the history of Britain since the Second World War. The reason that Britain agreed to concede her empire was that a generation of British politicians were well aware that the UK had neither the military capability nor the economic resources to fight colonial wars on multiple fronts. In the context of British geopolitical decline, the Second World War took on retrospective importance as a symbol of the greatness the country had once enjoyed. The entitlement of all British subjects, both black and white, to travel at will remained the position in law until the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. The demand that black British people, many of whom were ‘only’ first- or second-generation immigrants, should have equal status with white people struck millions of whites as the most grotesque infringement of their rights.
