Martin Pugh's publication of 2005, Hurrah for the
Blackshirts, suggested that fascist ideas permeated right-of-centre politics far more extensively than previously thought.
Eighty years to the day, the Home Secretary Amber Rudd stood up in Birmingham to deliver a policy the
Blackshirts would have been proud of: Companies would be "named and shamed" for employing too many foreign workers.
One of the best things out of that was that I discovered, among his books, a novel called
Blackshirt which transported me into clouds of delight.
To punish the Interior Ministry police for past slights, he reassigned many of their enlisted personnel to the Carabinieri, but then dismayed the Carabinieri by inventing a semi-police organisation for his riotous
blackshirts. Called the Milizia Volontaria Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN), the
Blackshirt Militia could not decide whether they were soldiers or police.
Chesterton returned to Britain in the spring of 1937 and published a series of articles in the
Blackshirt describing his impressions of the new Germany, which earned him appointment as editor of the
Blackshirt.
He is all bustle and attendance, while they look like the international freeloaders and
blackshirt fellow-travelers they always were.
Raikes wants supporters of his far-right group, based on notorious
Blackshirt Mosley's mob, to put candidates up for community council seats in Scotland.
Is that spectre of the
Blackshirt to be allowed to walk our streets again?
Party members are encouraged to dress in paramilitary
blackshirt style uniforms, like the type worn by fascist Mussolini's private army during his authoritarian rule.
Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism is published as a hardback by Penguin, costs pounds 30 and is 650 pages long.
Now I hear that Hetty Bower (left), a tireless campaigner who fought against the
Blackshirt fascists on Cable Street and marched at the age of 107 to keep her hospital open, has also died.
They, not the worshippers of a discredited, posturing
Blackshirt or a Georgian butcher, who must excite our imagination and capture our support.