My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleymovement and the National Socialist and Fascist parties on the Continent withoutnoting the far more numerous points of difference in policy and attitude. It iscomprehensible that they were in a state of considerable alarm and liable to jump tounjustified conclusions.This is no doubt the reason that Jews from East London and elsewhere were soprominent in the attack on us at Olympia, before I had ever dealt with the subject ofthe Jews, a topic which had no place whatever in our party policy. Even a witness soimpartial as the ex-editor of the Daily Herald, Hamilton Fyfe, described hisobservation of Olympia as follows: 'I am not likely to be suspected of any sympathywith fascism... . Therefore I feel free to say how unwise—and even unfair—it was toorganise interruption at the Olympia meeting. It was organised; that is certain. I sawin Oxford Street, in the early evening, bands of young men, mostly Jews, on their wayto the meeting. Every few minutes they shouted in unison some slogan I could notcatch. They were clearly in a fighting mood—and they got what they wanted. . . .'I would ask the reader particularly to note that the Olympia meeting was on June8,1934, and that I attacked certain Jewish interests for the first time four months laterat a meeting in the Albert Hall on October 28,1934; exactly two years after ourmovement was founded. Not only had I rarely before even mentioned Jews, but anymember attacking the Jews—or indulging in any crack-pot utterance, as we regardedsuch speeches, on subjects with which we were in no way concerned—had beenexpelled from our disciplined movement, which had clear proposals for political andeconomic reform. We had Jewish members, and a celebrated Jewish athlete had beena New Party candidate in Whitechapel in the 1931 election. There was no shadow ofsuspicion that we were an anti-semitic movement when Jews attacked our Olympiameeting; and when others were responsible for many similar assaults upon ourmembers their reasons could only have been the groundless fear that we would go inthe same direction as the National Socialist Party in Germany.This created a serious situation, to which I referred for the first time at the Albert Hallmeeting in October 1934 in the following terms: 'I have been asked to enumerate theways in which the Jews have assailed fascism and I will. In the first place, they havephysically assaulted us. And that can be proved. It is not a matter merely of our ownobservations. It is a matter of proof. Sixty-four people have been convicted in thecourts of this country of attacks on fascists or fascist meetings since June last, andthirty-two—exactly 50%—are Jews. Now, the Jews make up 0.6% of the wholepopulation, yet they are guilty of 50% of the attacks upon fascists. And that we canprove from the law courts of this country. Now the second point is this: we can prove,and we have publicly stated, case after case of victimisation of fascists by Jewishemployers—men and women dismissed for no better reason than that they wereblackshirts.'I made it absolutely clear in this same speech that we were not an anti-semiticmovement in the following terms: 'From the very outset we have preserved theprinciple of no racial or religious persecution. And we will never have persecution onracial or religious grounds in the British Empire, because our Empire is composed ofnumerous races, a great conglomeration of the races of the earth bound together in amighty unity; and any suggestion of racial or religious discrimination strikes a blow atthe conception of the British Empire. For this reason we have always rigorously282 of 424