Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism: the title is enticing, and this reviewer was eager to explore the book. Unfortunately, it turned out to be somewhat frustrating. Maybe, as someone who has taught music journalism, was involved in antifascist activities, and has researched and written about British fascism, I had unreasonable expectations or imposed my view of what the book might be about. Even so, this was a difficult book to read.

Ryan Shaffer's structure first follows the tradition of a literature review, but this is largely irrelevant and adds little fresh insight. It then follows a chronological form with distinct chapters that run from 1967 to 2016. Individual chapters work well, but overall they do not cohere into a compelling or linked narrative.

A clue to the problem appears in the title, which suggests five different topics being covered—too extensive a range to manage within the book's scope. Moreover, the title is somewhat misleading with its “post-war” timeline. The book's narrative really starts with the late sixties and seventies, reflecting on the career of maverick Tory MP Enoch Powell, though not in any great depth. Shaffer also mentions the League of St. George, which, by his account, liked to sit together listening to popular music, though in fact its members, which included many National Front recruits, actually preferred Wagner. Including this group feels like a slight thematic stretch.

Despite the book's aim to highlight music culture, it has surprising omissions and topics and episodes underplayed. For instance, it barely mentions ska and reggae at the end of the sixties and early seventies, when I recall skin and suede heads at school in the Midlands being involved in football hooliganism and combining enthusiasm for this music with support for Enoch Powell and the National Front.

Similarly, Shaffer has little to say on early punk. I saw at firsthand how helpless the lead singer of punk band Sham 69, Jimmy Pursey—a genuinely nice person and strong antifascist—was at trying to stop his gigs from being taken over by violence driven by camp followers of the National Front and the British Movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Contrary to Shaffer's argument, it was the British Movement that found some supporters among the Mod revival.

Shaffer is clearly a strong researcher. He has found new sources in a variety of forms and interviewed relevant people. He has mined the sources as well as anyone could want, and he has pulled many strands together well. Indeed, the work is rather dense, packed with names, organizations, acronyms, and detailed referencing. In a paragraph chosen at random, there might be twenty references and twenty-five names, figures, statistics. If anything, the documentation is overdone. To be sure, there is value in gathering information on these extremist groups, but I am not sure that project is best served in this form.

There is a temptation to attribute to organizations such as the National Front (which was effectively finished in the mid-seventies with the election of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative Party) and the British National Party (which did, indeed, elect a number of local councilors and receive half a million votes in 2010) greater political significance than they actually had or could achieve. As a biographer of Sir Oswald Mosley, I recognize the problem. The British electoral system and the still-dominant two-party system make it almost impossible for a third or fourth party to make a significant breakthrough.

Shaffer suggests that the real strength of these groups was in the international links forged by the young members, who influenced skinhead and neo-fascist subcultures around the world. He is on much stronger ground here, and his meticulous research is worthy of attention.

However, the true significance of these groups, I would suggest, is that they were and are part of the 20 percent of the British electorate on the right of politics, which has been there since the days of Enoch Powell and which switches its vote between the neo-fascist parties and the Conservative Party when the latter elects a strong, authoritarian leader. Currently, much of that vote has gone to the UK Independence Party (and the Brexit campaign), which the author only briefly mentions.

I would have liked Shaffer to have occasionally stood back to provide some distance and light in order to contemplate what is going on here. To my mind, the book does not entirely get to grips with the idea of fascist culture, partly because Shaffer is too intent on documenting it. There is a good section on Stuart Donaldson and Skrewdriver, the leading neo-fascist band. But Donaldson and his offspring never produced any music of any great worth and failed to reach a more popular audience—which is surprising, given the form, punk rock, which produced so many great singles.

There is a major difference between the thesis form and a monograph. Unfortunately, too often, the difference goes unrecognized, and a thesis becomes a much less interesting book. This example does not really take off until it reaches its analysis of the 1980s, 1990s, and later. It then gathers pace, and it would be hard to fault the research effort. For anyone with a deep interest and knowledge in British fascism of that period, this will be an essential source, but others may find it a tough read.