A comparison of Rotha Lintorn-Orman's British Fascists (BF) with Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) offers both similarities and contrasts. Both movements were concerned with the same fundamental issues – the preservation of the British Empire and thwarting the advance of international communism – in the furtherance of which they sought to provide an alternative to a weak parliamentary system incapable of recognising and defeating the forces of subversion facing the State. Also, both movements were founded by individuals with a record of courageous war service, and for whom the conflict had a profound influence on their political outlooks. Both were inspired by Mussolini and created movements which privileged ‘will’ and local/regional initiative in furthering their causes. Both developed an increasingly antisemitic and racist outlook. The differences between them, however, were more significant.

Most obviously, at leadership level, Mosley had the personal qualities to provide the masculine leadership that Lintorn-Orman clearly could not (Figure 5). He also had financial resources much superior to those of Lintorn-Orman, and while the BF only gradually came to accept the need for dictatorship, Mosley's BUF more readily advocated it and had a much clearer idea of the corporatist political system that would replace parliamentary democracy; though it might be noted that when the BF was formed it was on the basis of an Italian template whose fascist characteristics developed only gradually, whereas Mosley's BUF, founded a decade later, had the fully formed Italian and German templates as a basis for construction. Furthermore, Mosley's more developed conception of an alternative fascist political order was informed by a ‘palingenetic’ vision completely lacking in the BF – that of a new era emerging out of the wreckage of the Great War and the discrediting of the old parties and institutions whose betrayal of the war generation had rendered them morally unfit and politically redundant. In this conception fascism was the historically inevitable vehicle to deliver on the promise of the new era. But of particular significance for our purposes, while the outlooks of both Lintorn-Orman and Mosley were influenced by recent Irish developments, they were influenced by different developments.