Imperial Fascist League
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Imperial Fascist League
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Emblem of the Imperial Fascist League
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| Director-General | Arnold Leese |
| Founder | Arnold Leese |
| Founded | 1929 |
| Dissolved | 1939 |
| Ideology |
Nazism Anti-Semitism Fascism (Initially) |
| Political position | Far-right |
| International affiliation | Nazi Germany |
| Slogan | St George Our Guide! |
| Party flag | |
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The Imperial Fascist League (IFL) was a British Fascist political movement founded by Arnold Leese in 1929.
Leese had originally been a member of the British Fascists and indeed had been one of only two members ever to hold elected office for them (as a councillor in Stamford). However he split from the BF around 1927 and decamped to London where in 1929 he established both the IFL and its organ The Fascist. The Fascists Legions, a blackshirted paramilitary arm, was soon added under the command of Leslie H. Sherrard. The group initially advocated such policies as corporatism, monetary reform and the removal of citizenship from Jews. It had no more than 500 members and may have had as few as 150. The group was initially led by Brigadier-General Erskine Tulloch although real power lay with Leese, who was confirmed as Director-General in 1932.Henry Hamilton Beamish, head of The Britons, served as vice-president of the IFL and was a regular speaker at the movement's events.
The IFL soon shifted away from Italian fascism (it originally used the fasces as its emblem) after Leese met Nazi Party propagandist Julius Streicher in Germany. Soon anti-Semitism became the central theme of IFL policy and its new programme, the 'Racial Fascist Corporate State', stressed the supremacy of the 'Aryan race'. The IFL altered its flag so that it featured the Union Flag superimposed with the swastika. As a result of this conversion the IFL enjoyed a higher profile than its membership might suggest, in large part due to the funding it received from Nazi Germany paid through the English correspondent of the Völkischer Beobachter Dr. Hans Wilhelm Thost. Indeed, by the mid-1930s the IFL had turned against the Italian model so much that it denounced Benito Mussolini as a "pro-Semite", claiming that the Second Italo-Ethiopian War had been organised by Jews.
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