The historical trajectory of the British extreme-Right over the period covered by this study has been from the centre of British politics with the Ulster crisis of 1912–14 to its extremes. Ulster 1912–14 was serious, not only in itself, but because it was the focal point of a fundamental crisis of the British State, as popular democracy and a rising labour movement aligned with Irish nationalism in support of self-Government for Ireland. For the elite Right – a historical formation that had ruled the State for centuries – the crisis appeared to threaten the destruction of the United Kingdom and its empire. Only the outbreak of the Great War defused a crisis that had the potential of developing into civil war.

Tory encouragement of loyalist rebellion against the Liberal Government in 1912–14 may have seemed indicative of a brief extremist phase of the party's history that was unrepeatable, which is how British historians have generally treated it. But, as we have seen, this is not how George Lansbury and other Labour leaders of the time regarded it. ‘Ulster’ remained in Labour calculations in the inter-war period as an indicator of what the Tories were capable of with reference to fascist possibilities in a period of mass unemployment and economic distress with capitalism appearing to be in crisis. Against an academic perception of fascism as a political option destined to fail in Britain, the Left was much less sure. Then, as in the later historiography, there was no consensus on a definition of fascism. A variety of possibilities were under consideration; Mosley's movement did not by any means exhaust fascist potentiality in the British context.

Certainly for later pro-loyalist extreme-Right organisations the threatened Ulster rebellion of 1912–14 seemed freighted with a fascist potential that contemporary problems – especially those provoked by the grievances of the region's disaffected Catholic minority and the constitutional and paramilitary campaigns to free Northern Ireland from British control they led to from 1969 – provided a likely basis for delivering on. At the same time, the British fascist presence in Northern Ireland over the last century was also to a large extent a function of political developments in Britain.