My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleyMacDonald on our return to London was bewailing that the discredit of the GeneralStrike would mean a terrible set-back for Labour. We young men from Birminghamwere convinced of the contrary, and went out to prove it. We threw ourselves withpassion into the political fight, and at the first essay with a vigorous intervention in aHammersmith by-election assisted in a big increase in the Labour majority.Smethwick soon followed and the victory of our view was complete. All this by nomeans endeared me to the middle-class leadership of the Labour Party. Despite everyeffort of the Press to turn the workers against me, it was from them and from some ofthe trade union leaders that my support came in the effort to get things done. Theywanted action.My ideas of the future were forming rapidly and I must have appeared more and moreof a menace to the middle-class leaders of the Labour Party. It was their complacency,rooted in the ideas of the nineteenth century, and not the urge of the mass of thepeople toward the change they then found necessary, which moved Bernard Shaw towrite: 'You will hear something more of Sir Oswald before you are through with him.I know you dislike him, because he looks like a man who has some physical courageand is going to do something; and that is a terrible thing. You instinctively hate him,because you do not know where he will land you.'162 of 424