From Nazism to Nationalism: Tracing the Foreign and the Native in Fictional Accounts of the British Far Right

abstract:Often connected to collective memories of the Second World War, the popular perception of fascism in Britain is that it is a fundamentally foreign concern, at odds with the values of the British people and unlikely to take root in a country that extols tolerance and democracy. Nevertheless, Far-Right groups have existed on the peripheries of the British political landscape since the 1920s. This article argues that fictional works that depict the British Far Right often function by taking the tension between home and otherness as part of their structural design. Thus do British spaces—including village greens, famous landmarks, and aristocratic mansions—become estranged when they are brought into contact with fascism. Contrastingly, novels of “Broken Britain” seem to suggest that the New Right is to be viewed as a product of Britain’s own decline, particularly in the post-Brexit era. In these cases, populism emerges more as a symptom of social decay and class division than a foreign or strange imposition, and Britain itself is shown to be the setting and cause of an emerging fascist dystopia.