In the 1970s, Britain’s fascist movement was growing in strength.

Coming together in 1967 under the leadership of AK Chesterton — himself a veteran of Oswald Mosley’s Nazi-aligned British Union of Fascists — disparate factions on the far right had united to form the National Front (NF): a newly coherent electoral force that would rapidly gain momentum in the decade that followed.

Contesting both local and national elections, the NF made alarming gains, capturing more than 16 percent of the vote in a 1973 by-election in the West Midlands constituency of West Bromwich and winning nearly 114,000 votes in the October general election the following year. Its most menacing encroachments, however, came in London. Throughout council elections in 1977, the NF would receive a significant share of the vote in several boroughs, including Bethnal Green (19.2 percent), Hackney South (19 percent), and Stepney (16.4 percent). Its gains were significant enough that Guardian reporter Martin Walker, in a 1977 book on the party and its growth, even speculated that it might “conceivably explode into power.”