Raven Thomson

'The Coming Corporate State' contains the blue-print or master plan for the complete restructuring of the British economy that would have followed the advance to power of the British Union of Fascists led by Oswald Mosley. It would have involved the greatest redistribution of wealth ever to take place in Britain. The author of this book, and architect of the British Corporate State, was Scots-born Alexander Raven Thomson: the Director of Policy and leading intellectual of the British Union. Raven describes how all businesses above a certain size would pass into the common ownership of a corporate body comprising workers, managers and consumers. The profits of each business would go directly to the people who worked in that business - rather than to absentee shareholders (as with capitalism) or to the state (as with orthodox socialism). All major decisions would be determined by a Board comprising the three groups of stakeholders already described. This policy drew on the syndicalist tradition long popular in southern Europe but developed and refined to serve the needs of British working people. The British Corporate State would also have been a key element in British Union's proposed system of electoral reform based on a vocational franchise. As communism, state socialism and capitalism have become increasingly discredited as economic role models for the 21st century, the syndical ideas of Raven, Sorel, Orage and Arthur Penty demand closer examination.

Alexander Raven Thomson outlines the (pre-WW2) British Union of Fascists economic proposals to "Democratise" Britain's economic system. The Coming Corporate State sets out in clear and precise terms the economic infrastructure that would be put in place once the British Union of Fascists came to power. British Union would transfer ownership of all industrial and commercial organisations above a certain size to one of eighteen Corporations covering every aspect of business activity. The Corporate State is a means of equating economic forces to the needs of the Nation. It is designed to end the chaos and disorder of the present economic system, and replace them by an organised economy. It is designed to break the hidden dictatorship of vested interests and alien financiers who exploit present conditions for their own benefit. These powers have driven Labour Governments out of office, they dictate the policies of National Governments, but they will never control a Corporate State. It is interesting to note that many points of the British fascist program have actually been silently realised not only in Britain but also in Europe and America. A must read for everyone.

The life of Jorian Jenks (1899-1963) has great potential to upset settled assumptions. Why did a sensitive and intelligent man from a liberal family become a fascist? How did a Blackshirt go green? The son of an eminent academic, from his childhood onwards Jenks instead longed to farm. Lacking the means to do so, he worked as a farm bailiff and then, in New Zealand, as a government agricultural instructor. Finally, a legacy permitted him to come home and become a tenant farmer. Struggling to survive in the economic depression of the 1930s, he became an author and activist for rural reconstruction. Then, having lost faith in the established parties, he joined the British Union of Fascists. Becoming one of the Blackshirts’ leading figures, he was imprisoned without trial during the war. On his release, Jenks returned to the struggle, this time in the cause of ecology, becoming a pioneer of today’s organic movement and a founder of the Soil Association. This book draws on an extensive range of sources, a large proportion of which were previously unseen by historians. For the first time, it portrays the private and public life of this unusual man, revealing many hitherto un-glimpsed facets of Jenks’ life.

Raven's life turns upside down when she starts receiving strange calls from an unknown number. Her nightmares come to life when her neighbor's daughter, Emma Flynn, is kidnapped. Someone wants to see Raven dead, just because her presence is an obstacle in their path. What has Raven done to provoke them? Why is she surrounded by people who are hungry for her blood? Her new friend, James Carter, seems to know all the answers but his reality is something unforeseen to Raven.

This clear, balanced survey provides an accessible guide to the essential features of British fascism in the inter-war period with a special attention to fascism and culture. The book explores the various definitions of fascism and analyzes the origins of British fascism, fascist parties, groups and membership, and British fascist anti-Semitism.

The history and ideologies of the Far Right in Britain have been well documented, but there has been little understanding of the movement's cultural foundations. This text explores the cultural history of fascism and the Far Right and mines a seam of intense interest for both academics and students, as well as for the general reader. The book demonstrates that British fascism is essentially not just a political movement, but one that has as its goal the establishment of an all-embracing fascist culture in Britain. The contributions cover film, theatre, music, literature, the visual arts and the mass media. Striking examples of the material that they examine include fascist marching songs, "Aryan music", the creation of Mosley as a "matinee idol", even "fascist science", the cult of the "New Fascist Man" and fascist "masculinity" and "feminity". The authors demonstrate the persistence of the Far Right cultural forms from Mosley's British Union of Fascists within the present National Front and British National Party.

This book develops a number of new conceptual tools to tackle some of the most hotly debated issues concerning the nature of fascism, using three profoundly different national contexts in the inter-war years as case studies: Italy, Britain and Norway. It explores how fascist ideology was the result of a sustained struggle between competing internal factions, which created a precarious, but also highly dynamic, balance between revolutionary/totalitarian and conservative/authoritarian tendencies. Such a balance meant that these movements were hybrids with a surprising degree of internal diversity, which cannot be explained away as simple opportunism or lack of ideological substance. The book's focus on fascist ideology's internal variety and aggregative potential leads it to argue that when fascism "succeeded," this was less an effect of its revolutionary ideas, than of the opposite – namely, its power to integrate elements from other pre-existing ideologies. Given the prevailing opinion that fascism is revolutionary by definition, the book ultimately poses a challenge to the dominant view in the field of fascist studies.

The nature of 'fascism' has been hotly contested by scholars since the term was first coined by Mussolini in 1919. However, for the first time since Italian fascism appeared there is now a significant degree of consensus amongst scholars about how to approach the generic term, namely as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism. Seen from this perspective, all forms of fascism have three common features: anticonservatism, a myth of ethnic or national renewal and a conception of a nation in crisis. This collection includes articles that show this new consensus, which is inevitably contested, as well as making available material which relates to aspects of fascism independently of any sort of consensus and also covering fascism of the inter and post-war periods.This is a comprehensive selection of texts, reflecting both the extreme multi-faceted nature of fascism as a phenomenon and the extraordinary divergence of interpretations of fascism.