The Middle Classes Union was founded in February 1919[1] to safeguard property after the Reform Act 1918 had increased the number of working-class people eligible to vote.
Sir George Ranken Askwith and Conservative MP and Irish landowner J. R. Pretyman Newman were both members.
[2] The group saw the middle classes being squeezed by not only a growing labour movement but also by a government that was taking on an increasing role in economic life and banded together with the aim of protecting middle-class interests against both potential enemies.
[6] Pretyman Newman had spoken of his admiration for the ideology while Charles Rosdew Burn and Robert Burton-Chadwick both maintained dual membership of the Union and the British Fascists (as well as the Conservative Party, for which both men sat as MPs).
[6] In 1927 the group even appointed as its chairman Colonel A. H. Lane, a man well known for his work with the strongly anti-Semitic Britons.