Abstract
For many years, tainted by the horrors of the Second World War, Europe’s right-extremists were political pariahs who occupied the dark, outer reaches of political existence. Since the 1980s, however, Europe has been revisited by the spectre of the extreme right. Over the last two decades millions of votes have been gathered by right-extremists on the continent, above all in France, Italy, Belgium and Austria. Yet Britain always seemed out of step, that is until the turn of the new millennium when the localised emergence of the British National Party (BNP) opened up the possibility that Britain’s right-extremists were set to fall into line with many of their continental counterparts and break through into the national arena of mainstream politics. This prospect, all but unthinkable barely a year or so ago, demands a clear, accessible and thorough study of Britain’s leading far-right party — the British National Party.
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Notes
See N. Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 2000), p. 76.
See J. Bean, Many Shades of Black (London: New Millennium, 1999).
See for example, C.T. Husbands, ‘Following the “Continental Model”?: Implications of the Recent Electoral Performance of the British National Party’, New Community, vol. 20, no. 4 (1994), pp. 563–79.
For discussion of legitimacy as a social-scientific concept, see D. Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1991).
For more recent work on various aspects of the British fascist tradition, see for instance, R. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998);
R. Thurlow, Fascism in Modern Britain (Stroud: Sutton, 2000);
T. Linehan, British Fascism 1918–39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000);
T. Kushner and N. Valman (eds), Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000) and
J.V. Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000).
For earlier work on the BNP by this author, see N. Copsey, ‘Fascism: The Ideology of the British National Party’, Politics, vol. 14, no. 3 (1994), pp. 101–8 and ‘Contemporary Fascism in the Local Arena: The British National Party and “Rights for Whites’“, in M. Cronin (ed.), The Failure of British Fascism: The Far Right and the Fight for Political Recognition (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1996), pp. 118–40. For work by others, see for example C.T. Husbands, ‘Following the “Continental Model”? Implications of the Recent Electoral Performance of the British National Party’;
R. Eatwell, ‘Britain: The BNP and the Problem of Legitimacy’, in H.-G. Betz and S. Immerfall (eds), The New Politics of the Right: Neo-Populist Parties and Movements in Established Democracies (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1998), pp. 143–55; and
D. Renton, ‘Examining the Success of the British National Party, 1999–2003’, Race and Class, vol. 45, no. 2 (2003), pp. 75–85.
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© 2004 Nigel Copsey
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Copsey, N. (2004). Introduction. In: Contemporary British Fascism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230509160_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230509160_1
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