On his re-election as leader of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) in 1966, Revd Albert McElroy described ‘Ulster Toryism’ as ‘a state of mind which, psychologically, bears a close resemblance to the obscurantism and the essential unreason of Fascism.’ During the civil rights struggle of the late 1960s the perception of the Stormont Government as ‘fascist’ was widespread among nationalists – a perception expressed in Nazi salutes and the derogatory anti-Royal Ulster Constabulary chant ‘SS-RUC’. The historical reference these perceptions embodied, however, was less than comprehensive. In particular, they obscured the attraction that fascism and movements inspired by fascism had for many people in Britain and Ireland in the inter-war years, though not enough to achieve political success.

The reasons for fascism's failure in the British context have been firmly established. An academic consensus exists on four main themes, if not the degree of significance accruing to each: fascist misunderstanding of the crisis facing British society; fascism’s incompatibility with British culture; the weakness of the British Union of Fascists (BUF); State management of fascism and the opposition of the Left. The specificity of the reasons for fascism’s failure, however, contrasts with the difficulty of coming to terms with the phenomenon itself.

The term is conceptually ambiguous: ‘there still exists no definition [of fascism] … acceptable to all, or recognised as universally valid’, though in the British context a highly influential definition has been provided by Roger Griffin, who claims that an essential characteristic of an authentic fascist movement is the presence of a ‘palingenetic’ myth of national rebirth. At the same time, a distinction must be made between the academic preoccupation with defining what was and was not authentically fascist in a discrete phase of history now past and the attitude of contemporary political actors, lacking the benefit of hindsight and believing themselves to be working with a fascist grain of history, or zeitgeist. Academic and contemporary attitudes to Salazar's Portugal illustrate the difference. The consensus among the former that Portugal was authoritarian rather than fascist contrasts with contemporary British fascist – and anti-fascist – commentaries that regarded Salazar's dictatorship as indicative of developments suggesting future international fascist hegemony. Different States might be travelling at different speeds, but in contrast to the academic verdict on fascist eligibility was a more fluid contemporary outlook which recognised no rigid barriers to the deliverance of a fascist future.