Every twenty years or so, Britain is told that the far right is about to win. It has been told this by broadsheets, by broadcasters and by the parties themselves, who are always very confident and always have a chart.
It has been told it about Oswald Mosley in the thirties, about the National Front in the seventies, about the British National Party in the noughties and about UKIP in the decade after that.
Four times. Four collapses. And here is the part nobody puts on the chart. Not one of them was beaten at the ballot box. Not one was argued out of existence by a better argument, or shamed out of it by a good column or voted out of it by a decent turnout. They all died the same way, and it was not us that killed them.
They killed each other. Every single time, in a room, over money or a title or who was really in charge, with the enemy nowhere in sight. If you are looking for the one consistent fact in a century of British fascism, it is that the fascists have never once managed to hold a meeting without splitting.
This is worth knowing in a year when the chart is out again, because the chart is measuring the wrong thing. It measures the rally. The collapse always happens in the accounts.
Mosley, and the man who paid for it
The British Union of Fascists had everything a movement is supposed to need. Money, from Mussolini, secretly. Uniforms, which people forget were genuinely popular for about a year. A charismatic leader who had been a minister in two parties before starting his own, and a national newspaper, the Daily Mail, whose owner wrote the endorsement personally.
What finished it was not an election. It was a rally at Olympia in June 1934, where the stewards beat hecklers in front of an audience that included MPs and journalists and other people who mattered.
Not because the violence was new. Because it was visible. Lord Rothermere, who had put the Mail behind Mosley six months earlier, withdrew the paper and with it the one thing money cannot easily buy, which is respectability.
Two years later five thousand blackshirts tried to march through the East End and got four streets, and the Public Order Act made the uniform illegal within weeks. But the sponsor had already gone. A movement that needs a sponsor is a business, and businesses close when the backer walks.
The National Front, and the split
The National Front peaked in the middle of the 1970s with real votes in real council wards and a genuine ability to frighten people on a Saturday. It came third in a couple of by-elections. It marched through Lewisham. There was a period of about three years where the serious question in British politics was whether it could break through.
Then it split. Then the pieces split. By the end of the decade the organisation existed mainly as a set of rival groups, each certain the others had betrayed it, all of them using the same name in court and none of them speaking to each other. Nobody outside had to lift a finger. The Front spent the 1980s suing itself.
The pattern here is one that repeats. These parties attract exactly the sort of person who cannot share a stage, and then require them to share a stage. It is a structural flaw, not a moral one. You cannot build a durable organisation out of men whose founding conviction is that everyone else is a traitor.
Fact box
The BNP took more than a million votes in 2009 and ended 2016 with about 300 members.
At its peak it held a London Assembly seat, two seats in the European Parliament and more than fifty councillors. By the end of 2014 the MEPs were gone and the councillors were down to two. Nick Griffin, the leader who built it, was expelled by his own party that same year.
The BNP, and the leader who was thrown out
The BNP is the clearest case, because it got closest. Two members of the European Parliament. A seat on the London Assembly. More than fifty councillors. Over a million votes in the 2009 European elections, which is not a protest, that is a movement. Every commentator in Britain wrote the same worried column, and I read most of them and they were not wrong to worry.
Five years later the MEPs were gone, the councillors were down to two and Nick Griffin, the man who had built the whole thing over a decade, had been expelled from it. Not by the courts, not by voters.
By his own party, over money, after he lost his seat. By the end of 2016 the membership was somewhere around three hundred people, which is roughly the size of a village cricket club with a bad fixtures secretary.
Not defeated by an argument. Hollowed out by a committee. And the thing that made it fast was the same thing that had made it grow. It was one man. When the one man went, there was nothing underneath, because nobody had been allowed to build anything underneath.
Not one of them was beaten at the ballot box. They all died the same way, and it was not us that killed them.
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UKIP, and the man who left
UKIP won the thing it existed to win, which is the most dangerous position a single issue party can be in. On the morning of 24 June 2016 it had achieved its founding purpose and had absolutely no idea what to do next, and it turned out that neither did anybody else.
Nigel Farage left. Then came back. Then left again. The party went through leaders at a rate that became a running joke on Have I Got News For You, one of whom lasted eighteen days and spent the years after the referendum arguing about whether it should exist.
In the 2018 local elections it was effectively wiped out. Not by a surge for anybody else. By its own members not turning up.
Farage, for what it is worth, learned the lesson better than anyone. He did not try to fix UKIP. He started again, twice, with a cleaner name and a shorter list of people who could sack him. That is not a criticism. It is the most honest acknowledgement of this whole pattern that anybody on that side of politics has ever made.
What they all have in common
The pattern is not complicated once you have seen it four times. These parties are held together by one man and one grievance. Remove the man, or resolve the grievance and there is no machine underneath, because the machine was never built.
Nobody joined to do the minutes. Nobody joined to run the branch in Rotherham for fifteen unglamorous years. They joined for the rally, and a rally is not an organisation.
Mainstream parties survive their leaders because they are boring. They have constituency associations and treasurers and a woman called Margaret who has run the raffle since 1987.
Far-right parties never get Margaret. They get men who want to be the leader, all of them, at once.
And so the collapse, when it comes, comes from inside. A resignation. A sting. An expulsion. A row about who owns the name. The rally is still full when it starts. The rally is always still full. That is why the rally is the wrong thing to watch.
What that does and does not mean
It does not mean relax. Every one of these parties did real damage while it lasted, to real people, in real streets and the damage did not dissolve when the party did. The National Front is gone. The people it emboldened had another forty years, and some of them had children. The collapse of the organisation is not the end of the thing the organisation was for.
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What it means is that the panic is usually wrong about the mechanism. The question is never whether they can be argued out of existence, because they cannot, and a century of good columns has proved it. The question is how long they hold together, and the historical answer is not very long and never twice.
So watch the resignations, not the rallies. A rally tells you how many people turned up on a Saturday. A resignation tells you the accounts are being looked at.
And when two senior officials walk in the same week over a film about foreign money, as they did this month, you are not watching a movement at its peak. You are watching the bit of the pattern that always comes next.
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