My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleySouth Kensington, said: 'It is absolutely certain that there will be more trouble in thearea if Sir Oswald Mosley persists in the views he expressed in his recent speech inKensington'; which, of course, advocated the end of immigration. He was provedwrong, and I admit it required some effort to keep things in the control of reason. Themeetings were the largest open-air gatherings I have ever addressed since the war, andthe development of the campaign produced an extraordinary mass enthusiasm. I hadone indoor meeting to launch the campaign in the large hall of the local municipalbaths, which was packed. An outside questioner asked me why I had come to NorthKensington, and the whole audience shouted: 'Because we asked him'.The wider issues involved will be considered later in discussing the African questionand the complex of black and white interests, but the main principles on which wefought this election can be briefly stated. I stood on the general policy of the partycovering British, European and world issues which was summarised in more detailthan is usual in an election address, but our attitude on the question of colouredimmigration was made clear beyond a shadow of doubt. This was not a racialistpolicy, for I held to my principles already described of opposing any form ofracialism in a multi-racial Empire. Our Empire was gone before 1959, and it wasalready clear to me that much of the new Commonwealth would not last long and thatthe future of Britain now lay in Europe. Nevertheless, hostility to other peoples or thedomination for any purpose of one people by another—in my reiterated definition thesole reason on which a charge of 'racialism' can rest—remained as alien as ever to mybeliefs and policy.The principles of racialism had nothing whatever to do with the issue in NorthKensington. The injury to our people in suddenly importing to already disgracefullyovercrowded areas a large population with an altogether different standard and way oflife would have been just as grave if it had been Eskimos or angels instead of Negroes.For nearly two generations the repeated pledge to rebuild the slums and to house ourpeople properly had been broken. Without lifting a finger to fulfil the forty-year-oldpromise the Government piled a new population on top of people already sufferingfrom an acute housing shortage and widespread slum conditions. The state of housingin much of North Kensington was already monstrous before the new influx.British people and Jamaican immigrants were equally the victims of these conditions.The Jamaicans had already been hard hit by British government policy in their owncountry through the breach of binding undertakings to buy their sugar, which hadresulted in widespread unemployment and mass hunger. These poor people weredriven to Britain by the lash of starvation, and their arrival created inevitably a stillmore acute housing shortage, coupled with the threat of unemployment to Britishpeople if the competition for jobs became more acute in industrial crisis. A situationwhich was bound to make trouble was created by the deliberate policy of Britishgovernment, and has resulted in a series of new laws ineffectively attempting toremedy or mitigate the error.Much damage had already been done, but not nearly so much as was to follow fromcontinuing and increasing immigration. My proposal was simply to repatriateimmigrants to their homeland with fares paid and to fulfil the Government's pledge tobuy sugar from Jamaica by long-term and large-scale contracts, which together withother measures, such as bauxite production, would have restored that island to376 of 424