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Fascism failed in Britain in the 1930s - Europe's decade of the 'Brown plague'. Unlike in many European countries, fascists in Britain were never a serious threat to the democratic order. This was not for want of trying, especially on the part of Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists (BUF), which he founded in October 1932. The BUF was a vibrant fascist movement, at the centre of political unrest throughout the 1930s, so much so that the National Government passed the Public Order Act of 1936 in order to check both the spread of the BUF, and the violence and disorder that was associated with its activities. And it was fear of possible fascist Fifth Column activity that led the wartime coalition government to ban the BUF, and intern over 800 of its leaders, in the desperate spring of 1940. Why did such an active, and apparently threatening, movement fail, when many similar movements across Europe helped cast the political fates of their respective nations?
There were a variety of factors that ensured that the BUF struggled to make a great impact on the British political scene. Foremost among these was the lack of political space on the British political landscape. National politics throughout the 1930s was dominated by the 'safety first' administrations of the National Government, local politics remained firmly in the hands of established political parties, and the wider Labour movement retained the loyalty of the industrial working classes. In addition the political violence associated with the BUFs meetings and activities, often caused by anti-fascist opponents, did the movement no good. Neither did a media boycott, once Mosley broke with Lord Rothermere, who, with his Daily Mail newspaper, had been an early supporter of the BUF. Yet one aspect of the BUF which helped undermine the movement's campaigns, and finally led to its enforced demise, has received little historical attention. That was the tension between the BUFs patriotism and its fascism, a tension whose source was the BUF's participation in a loose fascist 'international'.
The BUF was a highly programmatic political grouping. In Mosley's own writings, most notably in The Greater Britain (1932), and Tomorrow We Live (1938), and in those of his lieutenants and followers, the BUF set out...