Most of the studies in this collection focus on those countries where fascist movements have made a major impact. This chapter is concerned with the most important British manifestation of fascism, the British Union of Fascists (BUF). I will look at the impact of the BUF, and more importantly the resistance to it, in a single region. Although fascism had a marginal impact in Britain, that is not to say that the anti-fascist struggle here was unimportant. At the least it clearly had an impact at the local level in terms of the maintenance of order, and this was coupled with efforts by certain sections of British society to maintain communal authority, as will be seen in the analysis of Jewish activism below. On a more general level the discussion raises questions about the role and direction of the liberal state in crisis.

Most studies of fascism in Britain understandably emphasise the point that any consideration of the social, economic, political or cultural characteristics of 1930s' Britain shows clearly that it would have been monumentally diffcult for a movement of the extreme right to have made significant headway. This is undoubtedly so. Indeed, in political terms alone, one significant consequence of the birth of the National Government in the summer of 1931 was the marginalising of any solutions to the crisis outside a very narrow mainstream.