My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyprosperity. It was always made clear that no coloured people with roots in thecountry—e.g., who had been here before the Second World War—would be in anyway concerned; also that students would be welcome as they always had been. Theproblem was a sudden, large influx of recent immigrants as a result of such errors asreducing sugar purchases from Jamaica and buying from Cuba.The overwhelming majority of these people would have been only too glad to gohome in these conditions. I held a Press conference after the election, sitting betweenan Indian and a Negro who had won the D.F.C. in the war and had wide contacts andexperience in the coloured community. He stated that most of the people he knewwould be delighted to return home for as little as two-thirds of the wages they weregetting in Britain, if they could find employment in their own country. This problemwas economic and social, not racial.It is true that it was complicated and aggravated by a different way and standard oflife. If you are living in badly over-crowded conditions, it irritates you to have a lotmore people dumped on top of you, and it annoys you still more in thesecircumstances of compulsory intimacy if they live in an altogether different way. Addto this the inevitable arrival under cover of a mass immigration of gangsters and vicepeddlars seeking a larger and more affluent market than they had in their own islandand finding it in a confined area of Britain; you then have every ingredient of troublegratuitously imported. North Kensington quickly became alive with rackets, white andblack, touching chiefly accommodation and what some regard as amusement. TheGovernment appeared either entirely impotent or quite unwilling to deal with theresultant situation. They apparently feared that any attempt to cope with the problemof immigration might have adverse reactions on their general Commonwealth policy,a policy I considered equally mistaken.It appeared to me right in my election fight to give the British people as a whole someidea of what was happening in this area—even half a mile away up the hill in thesame constituency, they had no idea—as well as giving its inhabitants the chance tovote for another policy. If the policy of the old parties were followed further it seemedto me that in Britain would be all the ingredients of a tragedy. Coming events inAmerica were already casting their shadow. The Americans had inherited theirproblem, but British government deliberately created our problem. This seemed to mein long-term policy to be raving insanity. The situation was aggravated in Britain bythe low payment of skilled people like doctors and nurses which drove them abroad orout of the profession, while still lower paid substitutes were provided by immigrantswhose services were urgently required in their own countries. The brain drain derivedfrom the anarchic economic policy of the old parties, who for years had rejectedGovernment intervention in favour of the highly skilled, so long advocated in mypost-war policy of using the wage-price mechanism. The main parties were almostequally responsible for this whole complex of muddle and weakness, and once againit rested on me to oppose what I felt to be a vast error.It needed both skill and resolution to get through an election fight in these conditionsjust after serious rioting in the neighbourhood, and to do it with the fixeddetermination to prevent any form of disorder or violence. I was, of course, extremelycareful to treat both black and white with equal fairness, going even beyond my usualpractice in courtesy to a black questioner. I entered their houses and talked to their377 of 424