Alan Sykes analyzes the ideas and programs of the major parties on the extreme right in Britain from the early twentieth century to the present day and traces the most significant continuities between them. He shows that Radical Right parties have been a thorn in the side of the major parties for more than a century and suggests that they are likely to remain so for years to come given their concern with issues that continue to preoccupy Britons, such as immigration, the role of international finance in the domestic economy, and the degeneration of British culture.

One of the difficulties of writing a survey of a field as vast as this is giving the right amount of space to each topic. Sykes is up to the challenge; he devotes ample space to the most significant parties, such as Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF), the National Front (NF), and British National Party, but he does not ignore minor ones like Arnold Leese's Imperial Fascist League and William Joyce's National Socialist League. His chief goal is to analyze the political and economic programs of the most significant parties. Many readers will be surprised to learn how comprehensive and prescient some of these programs have been. He makes many keen observations, particularly on economic issues, and demonstrates an impressive knowledge of his sources. For instance, he observes that the Greenshirts, followers of Major C. H. Douglas’ Social Credit theories, sought to establish a society of small landowners but lacked the means to put their ideas into effect without massive assistance from the state it hoped to eliminate, such as low-interest loans and ending primogeniture (76). He shows that nearly all of these parties have been concerned with some of the same issues: financiers’ control of the economy, the degeneration of the British “race,” and the destruction of the rural way of life. Quite rightly, he shows that the early organizations have often had a major influence on the later ones. The NF's economic program, for example, borrowed extensively from the Distributists, a group led by the writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, which flourished in the 1920s, and the BUF.

He is much less concerned with investigating some of the notorious incidents that these organizations have become associated with in the public mind, such as the clash between the BUF and antifascists at London's Olympia Hall (1934) or the riots in Notting Hill (1958). This approach differs from the one many scholars have taken. In their studies, such as Robert Benewick's The Fascist Movement in Britain (1972), the issue of political violence occupies center stage while the ideas of the parties do not always receive the attention that they deserve. Nor is Sykes much concerned with exploring the Radical Right's impact on culture, although in the case of at least a few of the parties it has not been insignificant. For instance, Social Credit appealed to some important literary figures, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, such as T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence; Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Roy Campbell all wrote for Mosleyite journals. Radical Right parties have never succeeded in winning more than a fraction of the poll in general elections, although their record in local contests has often been more impressive, especially in some of the nation's poorest communities, such as the East End of London. Quite rightly, Sykes argues that this can be explained by the “resilience” of the traditional political system and Britons’ belief that democracy can lead to a better social order than anything the Radical Right parties can offer (143).

He shows that these groups have also often hurt their causes by pursuing unproductive issues. Several salient examples are the BUF's campaign attacking Jews in the mid-1930s, the effort by some NF members to deny the Holocaust, and Combat 18's decision to foment violence at soccer matches in the mid-1990s. He shows that dissension at the top, chronic financial problems, and unstable membership have often been hallmarks of these organizations as well. The career of John Beckett, a former Independent Labour Party MP who became BUF director of publications, is a case in point. In less than five years in the late 1930s and early 1940s he belonged to three different fascist parties and helped found several far right-wing umbrella organizations. Sykes is less convincing when he argues that these parties’ “salient attitudes” have sometimes been “virtually indistinguishable from mainstream Conservatism” (2). Much of what he says about the radicalism and modernism of the BUF and NF contradict this. He relies mostly on secondary studies, which sometimes leads him to some dubious conclusions. G. C. Webber's figures on BUF membership “takes the membership question about as far as possible,” although they are only estimates, and scholars have still not obtained access to some Blackshirt and Security Service records (177). The BUF, he asserts, “clung” to static “feudal values” (72). Actually, Mosley's party sought to establish a modern, technocratic state, which can be seen in seminal works like Mosley's The Greater Britain (1932) and BUF Director of Policy Alexander Raven Thomson's The Coming Corporate State (1937). The principle of rewarding people for their achievements, not their class, was enunciated in “The Ten Points of Fascism,” one of the British Union's major policy statements. Twelve of its eighty prospective parliamentary candidates were women. Its goal was to establish a Brave New World based on science and reason, not a society that looked to the past.

Readers hoping to learn much about the personalities of the leaders of these parties are likely to be disappointed. Although some of the most interesting figures in modern British politics belonged to these groups, such as the cousins G. K. and A. K. Chesterton, Mosley, and William Joyce, Sykes's focus is with their ideas not their background or motivations. This volume will be quite useful to university students and ordinary readers, especially those having a familiarity with twentieth-century British politics. Its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses, and it should soon be seen as one of the best short surveys of the subject available.