Very Deeply Dyed in Black

When Oswald Mosley was interned in 1940, how could his followers keep the 'sacred flame' of British fascism alight? Did his arrest kill the movement stone-dead? This meticulous examination of sources including party records, the press, the National Archive and survivors' accounts shows that the Mosley magic - an almost religious experience to his followers - survived, and he was near-canonised by them.In 1948 Mosley formed a new party - the Union Movement (UM) - and the old British-first fascism of the British Union of Fascists gave way to a European fascist super-state, 'Europe-a-Nation', a pan-European fascist force aligned against Russia and America. This 'nation' was based on spiritual and racial values drawn from Mosley's reading of European history, and nurtured by a vast white-ruled colonial empire. But the sacred flame of the new fascism, defined and explained in Mosley's magnum opus, "The Alternative", did not survive in that form. As Very "Deeply Dyed in Black" reveals, Mosley's organisation served as an essential antechamber to later organisations, including the British National Party, which expounded a reversion to British-first opposition to Commonwealth immigration and the rewriting of history, including holocaust denial.In this study of Mosley as leader and individual, Macklin brilliantly demonstrates how Britain's home-grown fascist icon remained a committed, unrepentant fascist and anti-Semite until his final days.