By Robin Jamieson, Norfolk North West Labour Party member
Max Mosley, the son of the infamous fascist Oswald Mosley, died in May this year. A few years ago I found a note in my letter box from a journalist called Ross Francis writing a story about ‘a day in 1962 when Oswald Mosley’s fascists were confronted in the East End of London by anti-fascists’. He understood I was one of those who took on the fascists and said he would love the chance to talk to me, especially about any memories I had, why I was there, etc.
Since that day in Ridley Road I had gone to University in Leeds, had a career as a clinical Psychologist, then after retiring, travelled for years in Asia and driven round Australia. My name is not unique and I wondered how I could be identified after 51 years as the Robin Jamieson who had been fined £5 for kicking Sir Oswald Mosley in the head after a taxi driver, Lionel Marks, had wrestled him to the ground. My fine was paid by the Hackney branch of the ETU and by Hackney borough councillors.
The journalist was freelance, working on a piece for the Daily Mail and it seemed odd to me that the Mail would be interested in my point of view, being the most right wing of the British tabloid newspapers. There were clues as to their true motivation in the question about what I remembered about Mosley’s son Max, who was there that day with his father, and later, in a phone conversation, when the journalist made a link between fascism and the ‘hacked off’ campaign which has promoted press regulation.
A lifelong socialist with a contempt for fascism
The idea of compulsory regulation of the press came originally, he claimed, from Oswald Mosley and was being pursued by Max with his friend, the actor, Hugh Grant and others.
At this stage I feel obliged to reveal my personal bias. I am a lifelong socialist with a total contempt for fascism, and also for the miserable system of capitalist production which periodically wrecks the global economy and leads to slumps, wars, grinding poverty for billions throughout the world and destruction of all natural resources.
I have seen no reason to change my opinions since 1962. I must also admit that I do not like Max Mosley and Hugh Grant is one of my least favourite actors. I was born in Manchester and for the first six months of my life had, I was told, lived in a rat-infested wreck of a house belonging to the Mosley family.
Oswald Mosley was the missing link between Hitler and the modern racists such as the National Front, the BNP and the English Defence League. He divorced his first wife, who was Jewish, and married a suitable aristocrat to produce Max, a eugenically ideal candidate for future Fuehrer of England, if Germany had won the war.
Hugh Grant reminded me of Michael Caine, in that he seemed always to be playing the same character, acting as himself, but the Michel Caine persona was at least more interesting, possibly Jewish/Gypsy and East End, with an odd dissonance between culture and criminality. There were hints that perhaps his best work is ahead of him, and he really was an actor after all. Hugh Grant, on the other hand, seems to be just a product of a public school education, slightly amusing and not too bright, despite his advantages in life; perhaps a man who would fit in well as a junior minster in a UK coalition cabinet.
Daily Mail notorious for supporting Oswald Mosley
I look down on such people, and my inverted snobbery could tempt me to dish the dirt on them, given an opportunity, but why would I co-operate with the Daily Mail? The Mail was notorious for supporting Sir Oswald when he admitted to being a fascist in the 1930s, and more recently came out in support of the French fascist leader Marine Le Pen.
It was engaged in a campaign to stop compulsory regulation of the press as recommended by Lord Justice Leveson and so it wishes to discredit ‘hacked off’ campaigners, like Max Mosley and Hugh Grant, who objected to having their private sex lives widely reported.
As it happens, I did remember something about Max Mosley. After my arrest in 1962, I refused to speak to the police, even to give my name. In the confusion, I was locked up in the same cell as Max and we quickly established that we were on opposite sides in the street fight going on in Ridley Road, not far from Dalston Police station.
The fascists had been beaten and there seemed no point in fighting in the cell. I was always better at running away than fighting and I still run 50 years later. Max seemed to not want a fight and at one point curled up in a ball on the floor in case I hit him.
He was much bigger and probably stronger that me, and would have won a fair fight one-to-one, although I was more motivated and potentially vicious at that stage. The real truth is that we were probably both cowards when it came to physical violence. My mother and stepfather came looking for me so I was identified and released on bail.
Max was in court with his father who had a well bruised face and who retired to France, never returning to politics. My family had been at Cable Street in 1936 when Mosley was prevented from marching through Stepney in a copy of Mussolini’s march on Rome, (when he took power in Italy with very little popular support). One of my uncles had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and another died in the Normandy landings.
The biggest Young Socialist branch in the country
Mosley had wealthy backers in 1962, including Billy Butlin, owner of Butlins holiday camps, and had plastered the East End with advertising hoarding saying ‘He is coming’, with pictures of a man in a grey raincoat presented as a quasi-Messiah. Hackney at the time had the biggest branch of the Labour Party Young Socialists in the country, with a parallel branch of Youth CND which sent busloads to Ban the Bomb marches at Aldermaston and Wethersfield.
Regular street meetings, with soap boxes, mainly in Ridley Road, were increasingly threatened by fascist thugs and a socialist was murdered on the platform of Bethnal Green underground station. Counter-demonstrations built up, with support from ex-servicemen and mainly Jewish taxi drivers based at Kings Cross.
The Young Socialists occupied a platform in Ridley Road, and talked all night, to stop the fascists from meeting, followed by an all-night filibuster, at which I spoke for two hours on the subject of left handedness. Later the fascists used the same tactic and the conflict came to a head.
At the moment when the fascists appeared in the form of a demonstration, initially with police protection, I was thinking of the quote from William Joyce, aka Lord Haw Haw: “The day will come when the heads of the Jews will roll in their own blood in the gutter”. Being Jewish and part Gypsy I took that remark personally. I had also heard Mosley shouting in Trafalgar Square “we were never against the Jews”, which he claimed was a Jewish lie, then launch into a nauseating racist tirade against the recent black immigrants from the Caribbean.
Max was never a serious politician
Yes, for me it was personal, and I would do the same again today, even though young political activists who neglect to cultivate their CV and acquire a criminal record now risks being put on a database which can deprive them of higher education and an interesting job. I am against racism and fascism but will not be drawn into a ludicrous and hypocritical campaign to portray the supporters of press regulation as part of a fascist conspiracy.
Three years later, I met a student in Leeds who had been at school with Max Mosley. I was surprised to hear that he quite liked Max, who was not really a fascist but was too weak to stand up to his father. There is nothing in the public domain then or now to realistically suggest that he is other than a rather boring mainstream conservative who might have considered standing for Parliament but never became seriously political.
Passionate believers in reaction usually make their views more obvious. I could add that being tall and blond, and the son of a fascist, does not automatically make him guilty of crimes against humanity. It matters to me as a socialist that there is clarity concerning the task ahead and we are able to follow the splits and divisions within the ruling class, to distinguish Conservatism from Fascism, with its hysterical demagogic and essentially counter-revolutionary character shared by Mussolini Hitler and Oswald Mosley.
There is even less of a connection between Hugh Grant and fascism, and as for Lord Justice Leveson, obviously Jewish in name, appearance and manner of expression, it would be hard to imagine anyone less likely to be part of a fascist conspiracy. One racist website describes him as a fanatical, orthodox Jew, but in the absence of a hat, beard and prayer shawl in his TV appearances, this too might seem unlikely.
A case for press regulation
The sex scandals involving Max Mosley and Hugh Grant were interesting to me as a psychologist. I have come across more lurid examples which would liven up the columns of the Daily Mail with its appetite for extreme sexual violence and harmful perversions, but most of what I know remains confidential. Given Max Mosley’s aristocratic family background, his public school education and the affluence and opportunity afforded by his lifestyle as head of Formula 1 racing, it would not surprise me that he like to indulge sexual fantasies with various women with some masochistic content. He might well like to be hit, whipped and shouted at.
There is one stereotype, of white South African men who are sexually aroused only by plump black women, and another stereotype, seen in the art of Ernst Munch, which contrasts two women, one of whom is dressed in white who is good and pure and the sort of women you can marry, the other dressed in black who is in some way evil, tempting and very sexy.
Hugh Grant, given his background and the time money and opportunity to indulge his fantasies could well be a man who likes to marry one and fuck the other. As he is not a politician or a minister of religion who tries to occupy a position of moral superiority and condemn others, it remains a mystery that the tabloid press in the UK can pretend it has a duty to fill its pages with the details, the prevailing motive of the paper and its readers can only be envy, with so many wishing they could indulge comparable fantasies.
Privileged lifestyle
These fantasies are not so unusual, just more likely to be acted out by those who lead a more privileged lifestyle. English culture is after all bland, puritanical, repressed and full of hypocrisy, having changed less than we think since Victorian times and we could learn from France or Greece on the way public figures are expected to behave.
I have to overcome my prejudice against Hugh Grant and Max Mosley and admit that there might be a case for regulation of the press. If papers and TV channels are owned by a few billionaires who can bribe the police, buy politicians, hack phones and determine the outcome of elections, we might as well hand the state over to Berlusconi and the Mafia.
But regulation is not enough. I want a socialist press which is fun to read, with the satire of Jonathan Swift, the keen insight and observation of George Orwell, the passion and reason of Karl Marx, and much more, with art, poetry agitation and theory. I am looking now for a qualitative change, towards a revolutionary global counterculture which gives my grandchildren hope for the future. I expect it to arise from nowhere and take the world by surprise.
As for the TV programme on Ridley Road, am I confused, or drifting into dementia? Or is there a parallel universe with a Shul conveniently sited on Ridley Road where Colin Jordan’s sad thugs suffered a setback in the hands of Rabbis and shopkeepers from a congregation of observant respectable Jews after the heroine moved to London and mysteriously found lodgings in a block of red brick back-to-back terraced houses, architecture unknown South of Salford?
Ridley Road programme seems to have its facts wrong
I was there, I think, with evidence above. And in my mind, it was not Jordan but Sir Oswald Mosley, Fuhrer of the British Union of Fascists, who had just dropped the F word and returned to the East End, hoping to rebuild his support base by persecuting the Windrush generation. Solidarity with the recent immigrants came from the hordes of Godless Jews, including taxi drivers and from many other socialists, communists Labour and trade union activists.
As for the so called ‘Jewish Community”, the same official bodies which more recently have falsely accused Corbyn and Jewish socialists of antisemitism, as it had been in Cable Street 26 years before: then, as now, they were quite reactionary and useless in the fight against Fascism.
The same can be said about the Ghetto uprisings in Warsaw and Vilnius, see Ghetto in Flames by Yitzak Arad. No authentic history or even a drama based on real events should ignore the Yellow Star movements, or Gerry Ross and the ex-servicemen’s movement for peace, but without Hackney Young Socialists there can be no narrative about Ridley Road in 1962.
Did we really occupy Ridley Road speaker’s platform week after week to stop Mosley? Did I just imagine kicking him, being locked up with Max Mosley and having my £5 fine paid twice, by Hackney Councillors and my ETU branch? I enjoyed the programme Ridley Road, but I hated the sanitised propagandist portrayal of “the right kind of Jew” not scum like us.
We have been robbed of our history, of our proud tradition as Jewish revolutionary thinkers in the tradition of Marx and Trotsky and the story must be retold.
The BBC series on Ridley Road is available on i-player here.
