The long life of British fascism

Abstract

Historian Joe Mulhall’s British Fascism after the Holocaust: From the Birth of Denial to the Notting Hill Riots, 1939–1958 begins with a celebration. The relief and jubilation are almost palpable in the British newspapers that marked the end of the Second World War. Headlines described Britain as the nation that ‘stood alone’ against fascism and confidently proclaimed ‘fascism had had its day in England. There could be no “come back”’ (1). But, just as quickly as Mulhall introduces the celebratory articles, he dispels such mythology. British Fascism after the Holocaust traces British fascists’ political activities during and after the war. Linking interwar and war-time fascist ideology with post-war groups challenges the cherished national discourse about Britain as a beacon of anti-fascist activism. Mulhall demonstrates that fascists were not only present in the post-war political landscape, they were relentlessly active. The individuals and organizations that re-articulated fascist ideology in post-war Britain became the genesis of both Holocaust denial and anti-immigrant sentiment in the country. Indeed, he argues, it is impossible to understand the later electoral gains of fascist parties like the 1970s-era National Front without charting the ideological continuities between interwar fascism and post-war fascist ideology. Mulhall’s book joins an extensive body of scholarship on British fascism and its place in the nation’s political landscape. His intervention is particularly salient for fascist ‘origins studies’ where scholars have rightly questioned whether similarities in fascist ideology across historical periods ‘necessarily amount to the same thing’. British Fascism after the Holocaust suggests that a high degree of transference between ‘periods’ of fascism means it is impossible to wholly separate one iteration of fascism from another. Instead, he charts ‘an unbroken thread’ that persists through wildly different interwar and post-war political climates (2). Divided into seven chapters, British Fascism after the Holocaust provides readers with a number of important interventions. Its early chapters chart