Anxiety and British Fascism

In my recent article, ‘“Wake Up—John”: Proto-Fascist Anxieties and the Emotionology of the British Fascists’, I explore the role of anxiety in early British fascist cultures. The article focuses on a little-known group, the British Fascists, and examines their discourses of the 1920s and 1930s through a history of emotions lens. It maps the ways the British Fascists were deeply concerned about the future of Britain and developed an early variant of fascist politics as a proposed solution. Moreover, it argues a common thread running through the group was a profound sense of anxiety, which gave their radicalised politics a sense of relevance.

Several salient points emerge that help us understand the emotionology – or instruction on how to think and feel – developed by early British fascists, and these have some wider relevancies for thinking about fascism more widely. In particular, focusing on assessing the emotive framings of their politics helps to explain how a variety of people attracted to the group could see relevance in their agenda.

The organisation was founded in 1923 by Rotha Linton-Orman, and I examined her deeply anxious feelings about the degeneration of Britain and, specifically, her perception of threats posed by the rise of communism in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Linton-Orman was convinced that British youth was being corrupted by communists both internationally and in the UK and wrote about this in heightened and profoundly anxious ways in several key pamphlets. My analysis of these argued that anxiety in this radicalised form of politics served to create an emotive framing that gave her movement something to focus on and rail against. Anxiety in such politicised contexts helps to generate a sense of a search for alternate solutions to a perceived crisis and also heightens fears towards an other deemed to pose an existential threat.

Others in the organisation offered more overly antisemitic variants of this same anxiety, linking fears of communists to supposed threats posed by alleged Jewish plots to destroy the country and Europe more generally. Brigadier-General Robert Blakeney, for example, focused on the threats to post-First World War Britain from a range of amorphous forces, including European Jews and explained that fascist politics offered a solution to a country in profound crisis.

In publications by the British Fascists, a much wider range of people praised aspects of European fascism and took inspiration from Mussolini’s Italy and later Hitler’s Germany, as guides to developing a new form of British fascism. British fascism would nevertheless be distinct and would defend the global interests of the British empire. What held these wider perspectives together was a shared emotive sense that the world was in crisis and British interests under profound threat. More generalised anxieties were given specific shape when discussing a range of issues, from societal decline to the idea that mainstream politics was failing and in crisis.

The British Fascists developed large-scale protests, especially in the 1920s, and also offered activists a wide range of social contexts to meet, share their political disquiet and develop an alternate sense of camaraderie. Senses of worry, concern and fear were central to this community of activists, and anxious expression offered an emotional language that cut across class and gender identities.

Historians of emotion describe these contexts as ‘emotional communities’ and my article identifies the British Fascists as an example of a small-scale ‘emotional refuge’, a space where an alternate set of values can be expressed, and people can feel empowered. Contributors to the movement’s literature wrote how meeting at mass gatherings was liberating and allowed a sense of pride to be expressed collectively and in public in ways they were not able to do alone. It even ran a fancy dress ball, with celebrity judges including Noël Coward and Ivor Novello.

As the British Fascists came to a close, when it was superseded by a larger and more effective variant of British fascism, the British Union of Fascists, a number of its activists migrated to the new organisation. Here too, the politics of anxiety and a wider palette of positive and negative emotions were politicised in new ways, such as opposing the possibility of a new war with Germany.

Anxiety as one of the central emotions of radicalised right politics remains an important quality in fascism and the wider far right. As in the 1920s, contemporary organisations and online cultures also promote politics framed around extreme anxieties to the nation, to imagined ideals of masculinity and femininity, and to the world as a whole, and use this as a means to legitimise narratives steeped in hatred of others. The emotionologies found in the fascist past echo within political extremism today.

Paul Jackson

Professor Paul Jackson is a Professor in the History of Radicalism and Extremism at the University of Northampton. He specializes in the history and contemporary dynamics of fascism and the extreme right, and his most recent book is Pride in Prejudice: Understanding Britain’s Extreme Right (2022). He has engaged widely with the media, including national and international press, as well as for BBC radio and television, and he has written articles for the Guardian and the Huffington Post. He has worked with policymakers, professionals and activists, including creating bespoke training packages related to risks posed by the extreme right.