Now the word Fascist is often bandied around and will sometimes be used as a lazy insult to a political enemy, and that I think diminishes the real nature and danger of Fascism.
It is a set of ideas and a movement which threaten our freedoms and the simple belief that no matter what our ethnic and cultural backgrounds we all contribute so much to our society, and it seeks to exploit and divide what we have in common.
So I shall be listening on the wireless today to historian Camilla Schofield exploring a century of British fascism, which the BBC sleeve notes explain has “From the formation of the British Fascisti in 1923, through the BUF, the National Front and the BNP, the history of fascism in Britain is, in a sense, an unbroken thread.
But if the politics – or anti-politics – has remained more-or-less consistent, with a lineage of hatreds, pseudo-science, failed leaders and tactics, the means by which fascism is calibrated and communicated in the 21st century has fundamentally changed.
Membership groups intermittently attempting conventional electoral acceptance have given way to more atomised networks of ‘post-organisational’ activists.
Fascism is not an alien import but a central and on-going part of the British story.
At a time of debates around the character and memory of our national past, this series tries to bring the deep rooted and persistent vein of British fascism into focus. It might be that a less unreal sense of ourselves could be gained by shifting fascism out of the blind spot created by war stories which begin and end with this country standing alone against Nazism.
The first programme takes the rally staged by the British Union of Fascists at Olympia in June 1934 as a keyhole through which to look in order to understand fascism in the years before WWII. The second programme focuses on the so-called Battle of Lewisham in 1977 as a way of grasping the character of post-war fascism. The third programmes traces the thread to the present day".
Picture Anti Nazi badge, circa 1970s, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and John Hacking
*Britain's Fascist Thread, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sbdx
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