Attempts over the last century by British fascist and extreme right parties to gain substantial support in Northern Ireland, and to exploit the politics of the north to advance their objectives in Britain, has been a story of failure. James Loughlin has written an engaging study of the organisations, individuals and ideas behind this failure.
Building upon his established expertise on Ulster political history, Loughlin examines the succession of far-right parties with roots in Britain by utilising security files, fascist literature, the private papers of Oswald Mosley and others, and newspapers (in particular a study of the inter-war Irish News). Theoretical definitions of fascism are not a focus, however. Loughlin's use of Roger Griffin's conception of fascism requiring ‘a palingenetic myth of national rebirth’ (p. 2) frames a key weakness of fascist projects in Northern Ireland, namely the lack of an agreed nation or national myths. When Oswald Mosley thought of the north, the nation to be reborn was Ireland, within a British imperial framework, as he argued in a 1948 pamphlet, Ireland's right to unite when entering European union. Others viewed Northern Ireland similarly to Enoch Powell's racially-charged British nationalism, while factions of the National Front (N.F.) prominent in the 1970s and 1980s saw ‘Ulster’ as the appropriate national lens.
The theme of competing nationalisms, however, becomes obscured as the book's focus moves towards unionism. Loughlin's explanation for fascist failure rests heavily on the constitutional question and sectarian divisions suffocating outside political forces, an argument familiar to labour historians. He paints unionism in particular as occupying some of the space a definitively far right party needs to thrive, whether in the mode of the old Stormont regime or contemporary loyalism.
The reader is taken chronologically from British incarnations of post-First World War fascism through to the British National Party (B.N.P.) of the early twentieth-first century. The opening chapters concern the British Fascisti (B.F.), founded by Rotha Lintorn-Orman in 1923, and highlight the crucial role of women and the upper classes in small fascist parties of this time. The centre of Ulster B.F. support was south Down under the influence of Dorothy Harnett, later a successful novelist. Loyalist and virulently anti-Catholic in its rhetoric, and with some support in orbits close to power, the Ulster command of B.F. was a small and declining force by the late 1920s.
Loughlin then explores the fascinating dynamic between Mosleyite appeals to Catholic communities in Britain and analysis of the north. The use of correspondence between Mosley and his friend Cahir Healy, the northern nationalist M.P., illuminates this dynamic and Mosley's opposition to British state violence in Ireland and Stormont's treatment of the Catholic minority. Loughlin vividly portrays the milieu of Ulster Blackshirts and fellow-travellers led by Job Stott, a Yorkshire-born veteran of the First World War and Catholic convert, a sprinkling of former members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.) who also fitted the European fascist template of disillusioned ex-soldiers, and the enigmatic former unionist M.P. for West Belfast, W. E. D. Allen. The Blackshirt line in Ulster was imperial anti-partitionism, hopeful of cooperation with the Blueshirts, and short-lived — the Ulster fascists disintegrated in 1935.
The book treats that year as a full-stop in this phase of fascism and has surprisingly little to say on the Spanish Civil War or the Second World War. Admittedly the Irish dimensions to these topics have an expansive literature, but more could have been said regarding the impact of Spain on 1930s Belfast politics and Northern Ireland's wartime experiences. Anti-Nazism's centrality to modern British identity is also too quickly dismissed. This war also shaped the northern liberal Albert McElroy, who in an unfortunate error in the introduction is incorrectly identified as a Labour leader.
Loughlin offers insightful comparisons between Mosley and Powell, and the colourful detail that Mosley saw Powell as ‘a middle-class Alf Garnett’ (p. 193). Powell acts as a bridge to discuss N.F. and their interaction with unionism during the Troubles. Despite a vocal presence within both the skinhead youth movement and opposition to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the N.F. remained marginalised. Loughlin details the openness of some figures within the early-1970s U.V.F. to work with the N.F., but the Ulster Defence Association's 1974 decision to proscribe membership of N.F. highlights how a broad spectrum of unionist opinion echoed the Ulster Unionist M.P. Harold McCusker's response to the N.F.'s offers of assistance: ‘with friends like these who needs enemies’ (p. 249).
The book ends with the failure of the B.N.P. in Northern Ireland to repeat their success in some post-industrial Great British towns; a 2009 leak of B.N.P. data showed only forty-seven members in Northern Ireland. Loughlin rightly points to the frequency of racist incidents in the newly-multicultural Northern Ireland as evidence of a continuing prevalence of racist attitudes, but his conclusion that contemporary unionism is inherently ideologically open to such attitudes — proven, it is suggested, by its ‘alignment’ in international disputes such as Israel-Palestine (p. 325) — lacks nuance. Imposing a straight-forward right-left template onto the unionist-nationalist divide sits uncomfortably with earlier cases discussed.
Any attempt to summarise a century of these groups necessarily reflects incoherence, and the book does not quite develop successfully a thesis encompassing all of these divergent stimulating case studies. Loughlin concludes with reference to Brexit and British nationalism. Brexit, I would suggest, has highlighted how the realities of Northern Ireland's place in the United Kingdom, ironically considering the hopes of some unionist Brexiteers, continues to add geographical, cultural and political complexities to conceptions of the nation, and dilutes the simplified, uniform, Britishness attractive to the extreme right.
