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Patterns of Membership and Support for the British Union of Fascists

There are two questions about the British Union of Fascists (BUF) which nobody has so far been able to answer with confidence, namely: how many people joined the fascist movement in Britain and what sort of people were they? In answer to the first question, scholars have agreed that the BUF attracted about 40,000 members in 1934 (most of whom were quickly lost), but have then differed about the fate of the movement after 1935. Some have argued that it entered a terminal decline, others that it managed to retain its early strength. In answer to the second, most have accepted the view that from 1935 onwards the BUF increasingly came to rely upon working-class recruits in the north and the East End of London. What is argued in this paper (on the basis of the information contained in the Home Office files recently released at the Public Records Office)1 is that all of these answers are misleading.