Dave Renton

David (Dave) Renton (born December 1972), is a British barrister, historian and author. He was a long term member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and has written a number of books including Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the 1940s.

Renton was born in London in 1972, into what he has described as "a family which saw history as its canvass." His great aunt was Dona Torr the Communist historian, his grandfather the shoe designer Kurt Geiger. One uncle was an activist in the Equity trade union, another was the Conservative MP Tim Renton, Baron Renton of Mount Harry. He was educated at Eton College where became a member of the Labour Party. He then studied history at St John's College, Oxford under the labour historian Ross McKibbin.

Before becoming a Barrister, Renton was an academic historian and sociologist, teaching at universities including Nottingham Trent, Edge Hill, and Rhodes University in South Africa.

He joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1991 (reluctantly resigning in 2013).

Renton was also a county-standard middle-distance runner. He is a follower of Liverpool football club.

Renton's first short book, based on his undergraduate dissertation, was a pamphlet history of anti-fascism in 1930s Oxford. This was followed by a PhD at the University of Sheffield on fascism and anti-fascism in 1940s Britain. Renton studied there under Professor Colin Holmes and Dr Richard Thurlow.

Renton's book Fascism, theory and practice criticised the "new consensus" theory of fascism associated with Roger Griffin and others, in which fascism is understood as a form of palingenetic ultranationalism. Renton's approach was to analyse fascism as a specific form of reactionary mass politics. In contrast to Griffin, Renton placed greater emphasis on what he portrayed as a key contradiction between the popular support many fascist parties have enjoyed, and their ideology, which he characterised as radically inegalitarian and anti-democratic. Fascism, in Renton's argument, was always a tentative politics, capable of rapid growth but also (if opposed) organisational lethargy or even collapse.

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