My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosley18 - Jewish OppositionFinance and AdministrationLibel ActionsANTI-SEMITISM was not our policy, for I never attacked the Jews as a people. Inever attacked any man on account of race or religion, and I never shall. A movementwhich believed in a great future for Britain's world-wide Empire with its large varietyof races and creeds could never be 'racialist'. Nevertheless, it is said sometimes thatour success, so remarkable in the absence of economic crisis, was due in part to antisemiticfeeling. On the contrary, it can be shown in hard fact that the Jewish questionhad nothing to do with our progress. It is suggested that antipathy to the Jewsaccounted at least in some degree for our average vote of nearly 19 per cent in EastLondon in March 1937, three months after the passing of the Public Order Act. Yetthe density of the Jewish population was more pronounced in parts of Leeds orManchester where we polled no more than our average throughout the country. Ourrelatively quicker progress at this time in East London was due to our physicalproximity, which enabled me and other speakers there to make an intensive andconsiderable effort; to the execrable housing conditions and high unemployment; andto the lively and vital character of the people of East London.That population of East London has now been dispersed over a wide area, for afterour electoral success a real effort was made at last to rehouse these people; ourmembers naturally claim that this would never have happened if our vote had notrocked the old parties to the foundations of their complacency. The fact that it washousing conditions which primarily stirred the people of East London and swungthem to our side was proved by our most sensational vote of all, after the war in 1955at a by-election in the small Moorfields Ward of East London. The ruling LabourParty polled 49 per cent; we polled 33 per cent and beat the Conservatives, who had16 per cent, by over two to one; the odd 2 per cent went to an Independent. Thehousing conditions of the people of Moorfields at that time were almost the worst Iever saw in England, but after this vote they were quickly remedied. During theelection neither we, the electors nor anyone else ever mentioned the Jewish question,which was of no interest to anyone. The coloured immigration question had not yetarisen, and still does not exist in that area because few coloured people live there. Itwas housing alone which roused the people and converted them to our cause; astriking symptom of how quickly typical English people can change their politicswhen living conditions become really bad, whether they are caused by housing,unemployment or any other reason. Moorfields was a microcosm of a nationalpossibility.Anti-semites in East London or elsewhere in England at any time are in a smallminority. What happened in the thirties was altogether different; a quarrel arose abouta definite subject for clearly discernible reasons. There is not the slightest doubt thatsome Jews began it in Britain, and I do not blame them in the prevailingcircumstances. I understand their reasons for attacking us, while believing they wereprofoundly mistaken and strongly condemning some of the methods employed. Theirfellow Jews were being persecuted in Germany because the National Socialist Partyunder Hitler's leadership was anti-semitic, and gave violent expression to this feeling,not only in word but to some extent also in deed even before the war. Jews naturallyknew what was happening there, and observed the points of similarity between our281 of 424