League of Empire Loyalists

Last updated
League of Empire Loyalists
AbbreviationLEL
Leader A. K. Chesterton
Founded1954;70 years ago (1954)
Dissolved7 February 1967;57 years ago (7 February 1967)
Split from Conservative Party
Merged into National Front
Membership2,000–3,000 (1960s est.)
Ideology
Political position Far-right
Colours  Red   White   Blue

The League of Empire Loyalists (LEL) was a British pressure group (also called a "ginger group" in Britain and the Commonwealth of Nations), established in 1954. Its ostensible purpose was to stop the British Empire's dissolution. The League was a small group of current or former members of the Conservative Party led by Arthur K. Chesterton, a former leading figure in the British Union of Fascists, who had served under Sir Oswald Mosley. The League found support from some Conservative Party members, although most of the Conservative leadership disliked it. [1]

Contents

Formation

Chesterton established the group in 1954 on the far right of the Conservative Party, effectively as a reaction to the more liberal forms of Toryism in evidence at the time, as typified by the policies of R. A. Butler. [2] Chesterton feared the growth of the Soviet Union and of the United States. He concluded that Bolshevism and American-style capitalism were actually in an alliance as part of a Jewish-led conspiracy against the British Empire, a mindset that informed the LEL from the beginning. [3]

The wide-reaching critiques that this conspiracy theory utilised meant that the LEL won membership from various sectors of right-wing opinion, including former BUF activists like Chesterton himself and Barry Domvile, traditionalist patriots like General Richard Hilton and young radicals like John Tyndall, John Bean, Colin Jordan and Martin Webster. [4] Indeed, in its early years, the LEL succeeded in attracting some leading members of the establishment to its ranks, including Field-Marshal Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside, Lieutenant-General Sir Balfour Oliphant Hutchison and the former British People's Party election candidate Air Commodore G. S. Oddie. [5]

Although the LEL actively supported an independent candidate who was a member at the 1957 Lewisham North by-election, it was not a political party. [6] According to Nigel Fielding, the LEL "was composed of right-wing Conservatives, particularly retired military men, and a few pre-war Fascists". [7]

Stunts

The LEL was well known for various stunts at Conservative Party meetings and conferences (acting as a constant irritant to the party). These stunts included hiding underneath the speaker platform overnight to emerge during the conference in order to put across their points. At the 1958 party Conference in Blackpool, George Irvine Finlay (who became Director of Organisation for the Scottish Conservatives) was involved in forcibly removing members of the League of Empire Loyalists. The widespread media coverage resulted in his being sued for assault; not only was he acquitted, but costs were awarded against the prosecution. [8] That same year the League secured further publicity when members launched an "invasion" of the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion. [6]

In another incident, LEL member Austen Brooks gained access to a lunch for U Thant by impersonating Cypriot Archbishop Makarios III, both men being heavily bearded, before revealing his charade and shouting LEL slogans. [4] Sir Anthony Eden was also a target and when he shook hands with Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin as they arrived at Victoria Station in 1956, LEL members were on hand to yell at Eden that he had just shaken hands with murderers. [9] In November 1961, Leonard Young, a Royal Air Force Wing Commander and author of the 1956 book Deadlier Than the H-Bomb, [10] gained further notoriety for the LEL when he threw a bag of sheep guts at the President of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta. [11] The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was also a target when speakers at its inaugural rally in Central Hall, Westminster, on 17 February 1958 were heckled, in particular Michael Foot. [12] After these antics, the Tory leadership made it clear to their members that the LEL was to be discouraged, leading to a severe downturn in membership. [13]

Policies

As its name suggests, the initial aim of the LEL was to support the British Empire and to campaign for its continuing existence. [6] It was to be its calls for the restoration of the empire and reassertion of the notion of Britons as the world's natural leaders that ultimately saw the group become estranged from the Conservatives, as the League was increasingly divorced from the one nation conservatism that came to dominate the party. [14] This was particularly true following the independence of Sudan and the Suez Crisis in 1956 when the Conservatives formally broke from any notion of being the party of empire. [15]

As time progressed, the group became primarily concerned with opposing non-white immigration into Britain and were instrumental in the founding (with other right-wing and neo-Nazi groups) of the National Front in February 1967. Chesterton's personal anti-Semitism and devotion to conspiracy theories about the Jews and international capitalism also became more prominent in LEL ideology towards the end of the group's life. [16] The League was also strongly anti-communist and had close links with emigre groups such as the Ukrainian National Committee. [17]

Decline and splits

By 1961, the LEL found itself in financial trouble, and Chesterton was funding the group himself. The group had also lost many of its members, falling from a 1958 high of 3000 to only 300 members. Some had left with Hilton to join his Patriotic Party whilst another group of leavers had been the supporters of Colin Jordan. Jordan had left in 1957 after his call to bar Jews, and non-whites from the LEL had been rejected, whilst John Bean had left under acrimonious circumstances the following year. Both men advocated the formation of mass parties, an idea that Chesterton rejected, and over time they won support to their respective groups, the White Defence League and the National Labour Party by advocating these and other more radical ideas. [11]

By the mid-1960s, the LEL was a shadow of its former self as, according to leading member Rodney Legg, it had come to be seen as archaic and anachronistic whilst it was struggling even more with a lack of funds. By 1964, Chesterton was already being heard to say in private that the future of the LEL might be better served by joining up with the younger, more radical members who had departed earlier in the decade. [18] In an attempt to reinvigorate the flagging group Chesterton was persuaded to put up three "Independent Loyalist" candidates in the 1964 General Election, but between them, they managed to secure only 1064 votes [19] According to Michael Billig, the League only contested these seats as a publicity stunt rather than due to having any pretensions to becoming a political party. [20] The League's journal Candour went on to support the National Front while A. K. Chesterton was its leader. Following that, it became independent and is still published to this day.

Creation of the National Front

Despite the poor performances of the three candidates, donations had poured in from all over the country to help them fight the campaign. This made a deep impression on Chesterton, who had largely been obliged to fund the LEL out of his own pocket. [19] Chesterton had been preoccupied with a legal case over the estate of his financial benefactor, the Chile-based millionaire Robert K. Jeffrey, who had seemingly left two contradictory wills, but Chesterton's fervour for politics had been rekindled by his discovery of the relative ease of funding a political party and by the emergence of Edward Martell, a right-wing libertarian who had garnered a reputation as an excellent fund-raiser and whose methods, if not politics, had impressed Chesterton greatly. [21] By the spring of 1966, Chesterton had begun sounding out the likes of Bean, Tyndall and even Jordan about the possibility of building a united front on the far right. [19]

Chesterton's mood was dampened somewhat by the 1966 general election in which the Labour Party won a convincing victory and anti-immigration candidates lost support, as well as by Rhodesia's exit from the Commonwealth following its Unilateral Declaration of Independence. However, it also convinced him that space had opened to the right of the Conservative Party and that the chances were better for a united far-right group. [22] The LEL, however, was under threat from the growth of the Racial Preservation Society and of the Monday Club, making the need for a new party that much more urgent. [23] Around this time, he flirted with Dr David Brown of the Racial Preservation Society and his plans to establish a National Democratic Party, but he backed away when Brown insisted that the LEL would effectively be turned over to RPS control in this arrangement. [24]

Discussions with the British National Party (BNP) began in earnest in September 1966, and by the time of the LEL conference the following month, plans were already at such an advanced stage that the major topic was whether the new party would be called the British Front or the National Independence Party. The conference also saw the establishment of a working party to thrash out details of the new group, consisting of Austen Brooks, Rosine de Bounevialle, Avril Walters and Nettie Bonner from the LEL and Philip Maxwell, Bernard Simmons and Gerald Kemp from the BNP. [25] On 7 February 1967 the LEL was wound up and replaced by the newly merged group, by now known as the National Front. [26]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Tyndall (far-right activist)</span> British neo-Nazi (1934–2005)

John Hutchyns Tyndall was a British neo-fascist political activist. A leading member of various small neo-Nazi groups during the late 1950s and 1960s, he was chairman of the National Front (NF) from 1972 to 1974 and again from 1975 to 1980, and then chairman of the British National Party (BNP) from 1982 to 1999. He unsuccessfully stood for election to the House of Commons and European Parliament on several occasions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Front (UK)</span> British fascist and white supremacist political party

The National Front (NF) is a far-right, fascist political party in the United Kingdom. It is currently led by Tony Martin. A minor party, it has never had its representatives elected to the British or European Parliaments, although it gained a small number of local councillors through defections and it has had a few of its representatives elected to community councils. Founded in 1967, it reached the height of its electoral support during the mid-1970s, when it was briefly England's fourth-largest party in terms of vote share.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. K. Chesterton</span> British journalist and far-right politician (1899–1973)

Arthur Kenneth Chesterton was a British journalist and political activist. From 1933 to 1938, he was a member of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Disillusioned with Oswald Mosley, he left the BUF in 1938. Chesterton established the League of Empire Loyalists in 1954, which merged with a short-lived British National Party in 1967 to become the National Front. He founded and edited the magazine Candour in 1954 as the successor of Truth, of which he had been co-editor.

Column 88 was a neo-Nazi paramilitary organisation based in the United Kingdom. It was formed in the early 1970s, and disbanded in the early 1980s. The members of Column 88 undertook military training under the supervision of a former Royal Marine Commando, and also held regular gatherings attended by neo-Nazis from all over Europe. The name is code: the eighth letter of the alphabet 'HH' represents the Nazi greeting 'Heil Hitler'. Journalist Martin Walker described Column 88 as a "shadow paramilitary Nazi group".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Labour Party (UK, 1957)</span> British far right political party

The National Labour Party (NLP) was a British neo-Nazi political party founded in 1957 by John Bean. The party campaigned on a platform of white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and opposition to non-white immigration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">White Defence League</span> British far-right political organisation

The White Defence League (WDL) was a British neo-Nazi political party. Using the provocative marching techniques popularised by Oswald Mosley, its members included John Tyndall.

John Edward Bean was a British political activist and writer, who was a long-standing participant in far-right politics in the United Kingdom, and a number of its movements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Fountaine</span> British political activist

Andrew Fountaine was an activist involved in the British far right. After military service in a number of conflicts, Fountaine joined the Conservative Party and was selected as a parliamentary candidate until his outspoken views resulted in his being disowned by the party.

The National Party of the United Kingdom (NP) was a short-lived splinter party from the British National Front (NF). It was formed on 6 January 1976, and was dissolved in 1984.

The Greater Britain Movement was a British far right political group formed by John Tyndall in 1964 after he split from Colin Jordan's National Socialist Movement. The name of the group was derived from The Greater Britain, a 1932 book by Oswald Mosley.

The British National Party (BNP) was a neo-Nazi political party in the United Kingdom. It was led by John Bean. The group, which was subject to internal divisions during its brief history, established some areas of local support before helping to form the National Front in 1967. Scholar Nigel Fielding described the BNP as having a "firmly Nazi" ideology.

The National Democratic Party (NDP) was a right wing political party that operated in the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s. The NDP sought to position itself as an early rival to the National Front although ultimately it failed to challenge the position of this group.

The National Socialist Movement (NSM) was a British neo-Nazi group formed on 20 April, Adolf Hitler's birthday, in 1962, by Colin Jordan, with John Tyndall as his deputy as a splinter group from the original British National Party of the 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Far-right politics in the United Kingdom</span>

Far-right politics are a recurring phenomenon in the United Kingdom since the early 20th century, with the formation of Nazi, fascist and antisemitic movements. One of the earliest examples of fascism in the UK can be found as early as 1923 with the formation of British Fascisti by Rotha Lintorn-Orman. It went on to acquire more explicitly racial connotations, being dominated in the 1960s and 1970s by self-proclaimed white nationalist organisations that opposed non-white and Asian immigration. The idea stems from belief of white supremacy, the belief that white people are superior to all other races and should therefore dominate society. Examples of such groups in the UK are the National Front (NF), the British Movement (BM) and British National Party (BNP), or the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Since the 1980s, the term has mainly been used to describe those groups, such as the English Defence League, who express the wish to preserve what they perceive to be British culture, and those who campaign against the presence of non-indigenous ethnic minorities.

The British People's Party (BPP) was a British far-right political party founded in 1939 and led by ex-British Union of Fascists (BUF) member and Labour Party Member of Parliament John Beckett.

Roy Painter was a former leading figure on the British far right.

<i>Candour</i> (magazine) British far-right-wing magazine

Candour is a British far-right political magazine founded by journalist and political activist A. K. Chesterton, appearing weekly from 1953 to 1960, and in to eight to ten issues per year by 1999, and irregularly published as of 2022.

The Racial Preservation Society was a far-right pressure group opposed to immigration and in favour of white nationalism, national preservation and protection in the United Kingdom in the 1960s.

The history of the National Front, a far-right political party in the United Kingdom, began in 1967, when it was founded by A. K. Chesterton.

References

  1. S. Taylor, The National Front in English Politics, London: Macmillan, 1982, p. 12
  2. Walker 1977, pp. 28–29.
  3. Walker 1977, p. 29.
  4. 1 2 Walker 1977, p. 30.
  5. John Bean (1999). Many Shades of Black: Inside Britain's Far Right. London: New Millennium. p. 99.
  6. 1 2 3 David Boothroyd, The Politico's Guide to the History of British Political Parties, London: Politico's, 2001, p. 143
  7. Fielding, Nigel (1981). The National Front. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. 20. ISBN   978-0710005595.
  8. George Irvine Finlay Obituary, The Herald . Glasgow. 5 January 1999.
  9. Thurlow 1987, p. 250.
  10. "Leonard Young Profile".
  11. 1 2 Walker 1977, p. 31.
  12. Chris Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe, I.B.Tauris, 2006, p. 276
  13. Taylor, The National Front in English Politics, p. 13
  14. Martin Barker, The New Racism, London: Junction Books, 1982, p. 33-34
  15. Ray Hill & Andrew Bell, The Other Face of Terror - Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network, London: Collins, 1988, p. 81
  16. Kenneth Lunn, Richard C. Thurlow, British fascism: essays on the radical right in inter-war Britain, Taylor & Francis, 1980, p. 213
  17. Bean, Many Shades of Black, p. 101
  18. Walker 1977, p. 47.
  19. 1 2 3 Walker 1977, p. 48.
  20. Michael Billig, A Social Psychological View of the National Front, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 113
  21. Walker 1977, pp. 48–49.
  22. Walker 1977, p. 50.
  23. Walker 1977, p. 61.
  24. Walker 1977, p. 64.
  25. Walker 1977, p. 65.
  26. Walker 1977, p. 67.
Bibliography
Thurlow, Richard C. (1987). Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918–1985. Blackwell. ISBN   978-0-631-13618-7.
Walker, Martin (1977). The National Front. London: Fontana. ISBN   978-0-00-634824-5.