My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleyThere were few police about. For some time, demonstrators surrounded our hotelshouting, but eventually they went home. No harm was done, except to thepsychology of John Strachey. I do not mean that he was frightened, for he was not.John Strachey was a man of courage. He quite suddenly formed the view after thisoccasion that the mass of the workers were against us, and that we were on the wrongside. From this opinion he never turned back, until his collaboration with theCommunist Party. It then took him some time to evolve once more into a pillar ofLabour orthodoxy. The reasons for his little tour of mind and spirit were not difficultto discern.Intellectuals drawn to the Left, partly by mental and partly by emotional processes,are apt to form an entirely mythical image of the working class. I suspected then andknew later that such scenes of violence are nothing to do with the mass of the Britishworkers, the people who had been to my meetings all over Britain when I toured thecountry speaking every evening and staying every night with a different manualworker. The whole thing was a put-up show by sophisticated communists playing onthe emotions of a not very large number of Labour workers in a moment ofdisappointment and frustration. Most of the crowd, as usual, were just there to watch,and the row as usual only came from one or two front rows of agitators. If the wholecrowd had really been so hostile, we must indeed have been lynched, for we werequite powerless.The view that the mass of the British workers rise in their wrath against men andopinions they disapprove and will do violent and brutal things is simply inventednonsense. Such events are bogus from start to finish, for they are manufactured by theCommunist Party. If a man is alone, a score of these roughs will make him appear apublic enemy by surrounding him and kicking him, or a public hero by encircling himand cheering him. If police protect him, the communists say that he cannot comeamong the people without protection; this impression is the object of the wholeexercise. We were soon to prove through the blackshirt movement that once you hadseen off the bitter professionals on the other side, you would again find not onlyorderly but happy and jovial audiences among our friendly and good-natured Britishpeople. John Strachey and others like him were taken in by a front of plasterconcealing an ugly visage, which happily is not yet in charge of England and certainlydoes not represent the mass of the British people. I believe it never will, unless allresolution deserts us and the character of the British is entirely changed.The days of the New Party were now numbered. We had to develop a differentcharacter to meet an entirely new situation. New men came to us, who were ready tofight for their beliefs, in type the dedicated blackshirt. John Strachey left after puttingin his strange memorandum contradicting directly the whole basis of the policy wehad long agreed together, and he was accompanied by Allan Young and thephilosopher, C. E. M. Joad, who was an intimate friend of Strachey's and afterwardswell known as a broadcaster. Harold Nicolson held on longer, more in loyalty than outof conviction. He simply could not grasp that I had the stark choice of facing violenceor of closing down. He did not approve the new men now necessary to our cause, andthey did not appreciate his delicate thought in choosing a pretty little wayside floweras our party emblem, nor his literary artistry in writing an article entitled: 'Lift highthe Marigold'.237 of 424