MOSLEY’S OPINIONS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3842, 4 December 1936, Page 8

MOSLEY’S OPINIONS

SHIRTS AND MEETINGS. FASCIST WEAPONS. Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, visited Manchester recently to meet at luncheon in a hotel an audience described as “ a number of Lancashire business men,” says the Manchester Guardian. Sir Oswald spoke of recent events in the East End of London, and replied to what has been said by Sir John Simon and others and by some newspapers about these incidents. “The first thing I ask you to believe,” Sir Oswald said, “is that disorder of any kind only takes place at a very small percentage of our meetings”; and later he added, “I say without fear of contradiction, in view of the proof, there has never been disorder at a public meeting of ours in Great Britain unless that disorder is deliberately organised.” It was not the public who made the disorder, but in Leeds and London on recent Sundays “men were brought from all over Great Britain by train and by motor-coaches for the express purpose of attacking our meetings. It is now becoming a commonplace to have stone-throwing, and beyond that to have the use of catapults, which, at short range, are as dangerous as bulbody was known to have been near forbidden to use anything but their bare fists in their defence." “Bore Foreign Names.” The men imported to do this work, the speaker declared, bore names utterly foreign and alien to Great Britain. He alleged, also, that printed incitements to violence were circulated as a preliminary to such attacks. “Suppose the Fascists acted like that in regard to a meeting of Mr. Neville Chamberlain. How long should we be out of gaol? Not for twenty-four hours! Yet the Socialist and Communist forces of this country have a free charter to do any of these things, and deliberately, like a military operation, with maps published in their newspapers, show how to attack the meetings by organised violence on British citizens.” The thing that did amaze him was that so much of this violence was condoned by Conservative M.P.’s and by the Government. From being an object for ridicule the Black Shirt had become “a wicked and provocative thing.” But were we really to have it laid down in Great Britain that a man might not wear the clothes he wished to wear? If that was the view of Parliament, then let Parliament have the courage to translate its opinion into law. Meantime a'Socialist had no more right to throw a brick at a Fascist whose clothes he disliked than he (Sir Oswald) had to throw one at Aiderman Joseph Toole because he found his appearance unpleasant and provocative, or to deliver a heavy blow on the jaw of Mr. Baldwin for wearing in Downing Street the detestable top-hat and frock coat that symbolised a Victorian mugwumpery that was an offence to any decent-thinking Englishman. “Blame on The Clothes.” “Why, then, should Sir John Simon or Mr. Joseph Toole simply, though they do not say it directly, that because we wear clothes the Socialists do not like they are entitled to assault

us and that the blame is on us for wearing those clothes?” In answering questions, one on the cotton trade’s difficulties led him to picture India as the main problem, and that because Britain was being jockeyed out of India by a political agitation behind which was the great mill-owner financed from a “City of London” monopolised by a few Jewish financiers. Asked about Black Shirt stewards carrying rubber tubes at a Free Trade Hall meetings and about imported Black Shirts at his Leeds meeting, and whether Sir Oswald suggested that the anti-Fascists imported 150,000 anti-Fascists into London on a recent Sunday, Sir Oswald, in reply, adm'tted that strips of hollow rubber tube were used at Manchester three years ago, but was the only occasion, he said, on which Fascists used any weapons, and it followed meetings at which some had to contend with bare hands against

razors. At the Leeds open-air rally no ban was put on people coming from surrounding districts. And if it were true that the Fascists allowed people from distant places to attend meetings and support their cause, did that justify the running of trains and buses from the North of England to London so that razors and iron bars should be used in the streets not against the Fascists but against the police? To suppose that 150,000 people were there mobilised against Fascism was just an illusion. After further questions and answers, direct appeal was made for the support of the party, and Sir Oswald followed it and ended a somewhat unusual luncheon party with the assurance that any who joined them would have “a great welcome to a great brotherhood.”

Bill had been a pugnacious individual. A few days after his funeral his widow was hanging pensively over her front gate when a neighbour stopped to console her. “Poor Bill,” she remarked, “ ’e’H be ’itting the ’arp with the hangels now.” “Not ’e!” said the widow. “More likely ’e’ll be ’itting the hangels with the ’arp.” A man who was in court because he had knocked down and injured a man with his car, said in defence that he was driving at only four miles an hour. Whereupon the lawyer for the motor accident victim countered with: Gentlemen of the jury, the driver of the car stated he was going only four miles an hour. Think of it! The long agony of my poor unfortunate client, the victim, as the car drove slowly .over the body.