This chapter explores the ideological and practical interrelationships between the National Front (NF) – the dominant organisation on the British extreme-Right in the 1970s and 1980s – and Ulster loyalism as the Northern Ireland problem developed from the late 1960s to the eve of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 (AIA). The context is provided by the coincidence, from 1966–68, of the emergence of the NF from a coming together of a number of extreme-Right groups in 1967; the stimulus provided by Enoch Powell's ‘rivers of blood’ speech in April 1968; Northern Ireland’s slide into crisis from October 1968; and, initially, Oswald Mosley’s retirement from active politics in 1966.

Thereafter, the extreme-Right groups that would be politically active on the Ulster problem would be mainly of a younger generation who took pains to distinguish themselves from him – regarded as merely a ‘Common Fascist’ – and align themselves with the Ulster loyalist community, rather than the Catholic and nationalist minority. This development represented a reconnection with Sir Edward Carson's threatened rebellion against the implementation of Home Rule on Ulster in the pre-Great War period, the stimulus it provided for the emergence of British fascism with the establishment of Rotha Lintorn-Orman's British Fascists in the 1920s, and the continuation of the pro-loyalist strand with Arnold Leese's Imperial Fascist League in the 1930s. But, although Leese would live into the post-war years and his widow continue to promote his ideas, Leese’s protégé, Colin Jordan, would take little notice of Northern Ireland.

A graduate of the University of Cambridge, before joining the war effort, Jordan was an English and mathematics teacher at a Coventry Secondary Modern School when he founded the White Defence League, a virulently anti-black organisation, in 1958, thereby initiating a career –initially with John Tyndall – in neo-Nazi, antisemitic politics complete with brown shirts, riding breeches, leather belts and Nazi armlets, punctuated by spells in prison for incitement to race hatred. Jordan's obsession with race, however, was pitched at such a level of generality that conflicts between different sections of the white race, as would occur in Northern Ireland, did not register on his radar, while his overt neo-Nazism and mutual antagonism with other extremists such as John Tyndall – the latter concerned that neo-fascism have a distinctly British persona and mass appeal – made impossible his alignment with the emergent NF.