My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyhim any embarrassment. He had at least the fairness to say in answering questions:'The full reports I have received and studied make it clear that . . . the disorder did notresult from any words uttered at the meetings by those who organised them, but fromthe determination of others to prevent the meetings from being held'. (The Times,August 3, 1962.)A meeting of our movement I was to have addressed in Trafalgar Square during thisperiod is worth recording because it had a most remarkable result. The Guardian onJuly 23 and 24, 1962 wrote: 'Violence was in the air even before the meeting hadbegun. . . . Those who had come intent to break up the meeting arrived early andpacked the front of the Square. ... Sir Oswald Mosley had addressed seven meetings inTrafalgar Square since 1959 without provoking a serious incident.' The DailyTelegraph reported the same meeting as follows: 'Most of the fifteen thousand peopleestimated to be in the Square were onlookers, and police believe that not more thanone thousand people, both men and women, took part in the attack'. A notable figurewas reported in the Wolverhampton Express and Star of July 24, 1962, as giving anaccount to the Home Secretary in the following terms: 'Mr. Henry Brooke has had aneye-witness account of Sunday's Mosley riots from Mr. George Wigg, Socialist M.P.for Dudley and Stourbridge, who was in Trafalgar Square throughout the trouble.Yesterday Mr. Wigg met Mr. Brooke to tell him his three conclusions: the behaviourof the police was magnificent; there was no incitement by members of the UnionMovement; the trouble was caused by about three hundred—out of a crowd of severalthousands—mostly young people obviously determined to break the meeting up.'The evidence is conclusive that the trouble was caused by a small minority in a largecrowd which had come to listen in the usual fair, British fashion. I had addressedmeetings in Trafalgar Square ever since the war without trouble of any kind. Theresult of this incident was indeed strange, for the Government then banned allmeetings by Union Movement in Trafalgar Square. Thus the recipe for closing downfree speech in Britain is quite simple, although personally I do not propose to use it:take along a few well-organised roughs to make a row in the middle of a large andorderly meeting; the Government will then close down not the roughs but the speaker.Having passed a special Act of Parliament, curiously known as the Public Order Act,to remove our right to defend ourselves, the Government then also removed our freespeech by closing meetings at the behest of any small but highly organised bunch ofred hooligans.At this point we could not speak in the open-air, and we were at the same momentdenied the use of halls for indoor meetings throughout the country. The reason givenwas that damage might be caused to the halls by the new wave of violence which nowmight happen anywhere. Yet even in the heavy fighting of the thirties no damagewhatever had been done in these halls, which are solid structures; even after thePublic Order Act we still had the right to maintain order with our own stewards atindoor meetings and had proved ourselves just as capable of doing it after the war.The real reason was that in the interval the control of municipalities which owned thehalls had changed from Conservative to Labour, and in these matters the Left is muchless fair than the Right and far more disposed to use any means to deprive effectiveopponents of free speech. They fastened with avidity on the excuse that disorder hadagain been caused at our meetings by their own supporters in order to deny us the useof all halls under their control. At this stage only a single hall in the whole country383 of 424