TV, FILM & RADIO

Warnings from the past

Britain’s Fascist Thread / BBC Radio 4, scheduled for Friday 19 February

According to powerful British national myths bound up with World War II, fascism is something that happened in other people’s countries. The truth, as a new three-part series presented by historian Camilla Scholfield makes clear, is that fascism has its own distinct history in Britain, which began in earnest in 1923 when Rotha Lintorn-Orman, inspired by Mussolini, founded the British Fascisti.

Fascism had enough adherents by 1934 for Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) to be able to hold a rally at London’s Olympia Exhibition Centre. The level of violence at the event, when stewards of the BUF’s paramilitary wing, the Fascist Defence Force, clashed with anti-fascist protesters, shocked the country. The , whose proprietor Viscount Rothermere