If Fascism comes into power it will not hurt the Jew who is loyal to Great Britain but it will not tolerate organization of anti-British interests within the State, Sir Oswald Mosley, Black Shirt leader, told a large audience at Manchester Free Trade Hall.
His statement was in reply to a member of the audience, who said he was a Jew and asked what guarantee he would have that he would not be sent to a concentration camp if Fascism were to gain the upper hand, the Manchester Guardian reports.
In his speech he dealt in detail with the effects of the present trade depression on Lancashire and with the report of the Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform.
HECKLERS BUSY
According to The Guardian, most of the audience was in sympathy with him, although he was frequently interrupted by hecklers and a woman and several men were ejected from the hall.
“In the guise of international finance,” he said, “we are witnessing the tragedy by which Lancashire skill and talent are forging the weapons by which Lancashire industry is being destroyed.
“It is not the small man with a little capital who is developing industry and giving employment. It is not the Lancashire mill owner who is doing this thing to ruin himself. No. It is the force which is served by the Conservative party, the Liberal party and the Socialist party alike the force which has dominated Britain ever since the War, and which ruins Lancashire—the force of international Jewish finance.”
CHEERS, HOOTS MINGLED
Cheers and hooting interrupted Mosley at this point.
“Ah,” he exclaimed, “I thought they would not like to hear their master’s name! The Labor party squeals about capital doing it. It is those who have accumulated great holdings in financial houses who sit in London, not developing British industry but exploiting foreign industry, not lending money to assist British industry and to re-equip our mills and factories, but going where they can get quicker returns and profits, going into the Orient, where there is a great virgin field of labor unexploited, where women work in the foul slums of Bombay and Madras for one purpose and one purpose alone — that Lancashire may be destroyed in order that the city of London may wax fatter and fatter.”
He will have to “put the interests of Britain before the interests of Jewry” if he ever takes the government helm, Mosley said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
