The internal brakes on violent escalation within the British extreme right in the 1990s

Abstract

It is perhaps counter-intuitive to ponder why the extreme right milieu, which regularly espouses violent apocalyptic jeremiads regarding the impending threat to race and nation, has not generated as much violence as it would appear capable of. This article explores this question, using a case study of the British extreme right in the 1990s, a period in which there was violent street conflict with anti-fascist activists. It focusses in particular upon the British National Party, as that organisation sought to become a legitimate political party whilst simultaneously being entangled in violent street confrontations with anti-fascists, on the one hand, and conflict with militants on its own “radical flank” who baulked at the party’s new direction, on the other. Specifically, this article explores the role internal rather than external “brakes” might have played in limiting violent escalation in a “scene” in which a certain level of violence was endemic. Utilising the typology of “internal brakes” developed by Busher, Macklin and Holbrook, which highlights five distinct, though often overlapping, “logics” that work to restrain violent escalation, the article discusses the processes that worked to restrain rather than escalate violence. It does so in order to demonstrate how this typology can be used as an analytical tool for conceptualising how the internal restrains on violence might function within other political milieu as well.