Ideology and identity representation in the British Fascist Press of the 1930s

This paper aims to investigate patterns of identity construction and ideological discursive practises of far-right parties that can also be found in populist communication. In particular, I will focus on the British fascist communication of the 1930s, best represented by the British Union of Fascists (BUF), founded by Oswald Mosley, to examine its distinctive features and commonalities with continental fascism (Sinatra, 2015). The underlying assumption of this study is that British Fascism, like other totalitarian nationalist languages, represents a type of populist communication characterised by an antagonistic rhetoric (us versus them) and an exaggerated anti-elitism, i.e. a rejection of the existing system that leads to the exclusion of the out-group (Reinemann et al., 2017).