National Socialist League
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National Socialist League
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| Founder |
William Joyce John Beckett John Angus MacNab |
| Founded | 1937 |
| Dissolved | August 1939 |
| Split from | British Union of Fascists |
| Newspaper | The Helmsman |
| Ideology | British Nazism |
| Political position | Far-right |
| Slogan | Steer Straight |
The National Socialist League was a short-lived Nazi political movement in the United Kingdom immediately before the Second World War.
The NSL was formed in 1937 by William Joyce, John Beckett and John Angus MacNab as a splinter group from the British Union of Fascists. The leaders claimed that the League had been formed because BUF leader Oswald Mosley was too in thrall to continental fascism, although Mosley contended that the three had simply been sacked from their paid posts in the BUF as part of a cost-cutting exercise. Beckett and Joyce attacked Mosley as being more interested in personal glory than fascism with Beckett claiming he and Joyce wanted no cult of personality but rather were there only as "instruments of a great policy". The formation of the group was announced at 109 Vauxhall Bridge Road in south-west London.
Whatever the truth the NSL began fairly healthily as Joyce secured the financial backing of Alex Scrimgeour, a stockbroker, and soon the NSL was able to publish its own newspaper, The Helmsman, adopting 'Steer Straight' as the party motto. The party's ideology was based on a document published by Joyce entitled National Socialism Now in which he declared his strong admiration for Adolf Hitler but added that what was needed was a specifically British Nazism. The Carlyle Club, a political and social discussion club modelled after the January Club and named for one of Joyce's favourite philosophers Thomas Carlyle, was also established as an arm of the NSL.
Connections were quickly established with the Nordic League, an influential secret society chaired by Archibald Maule Ramsay. Rising far right figure A. K. Chesterton would go on to speak at a number of NSL functions and write for their publications, after leaving the BUF in 1938.Anglo-German Fellowship member and Conservative MP Jocelyn Lucas also developed clandestine links with the NSL. However the NSL also attracted Vincent Collier as a founder member, a propaganda officer in the BUF who also functioned as an agent for the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
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