A Spectator's Notebook
Anti-Semitic
MI' Jewish taxi-driver was very cross with me, and reminded me of some things I had said in a television programme on the day after the election. I had been taking part in a discussion representing different political points of view, and had said that whatever any of those present might feel about the result. t here would be general satisfaction that Sir Ow ald Mosley had lost his deposit in North Kensington. I added that this seemed to me to be evidence that the electors would have no truck with racialism; if the constituency that contains Notting Hill would not vote in significant numbers for the candidate of a Fascist organisa- tion, all was clearly well on that front. Now, the taxi-driver wanted to know, how did I feel about the swastika-daubings in Britain?
Not too bad, I told him. As I was saying last week, it is important to keep separate the prob- lems of anti-Semitic outbreaks in Germany and in Britain. The slogans and swastikas on shop windows and doorways in this country (I have noted before that swastika-daubers in this country rarely seem to know which way round the thing goes) are not of any significance, though they are disgusting in themselves and a bitter reminder of past dread to those Jews who settled in this country from Nazi Germany. Many of them are the work of the deranged, as are many of the telephone calls and letters some MPs have been getting (I liked particularly the one which informed Mr. Brockway that his election had been pronounced void by the British Nazi Party, and G. Selby declared elected in his place), but every MP, and indeed every journalist, is used to getting communications from psychotics; I have three regular correspondents myself (the correspon- dence is rather one-sided, I fear) who are beyond all question raving mad. It is true, as a (sane) correspondent has pointed out to me, that to dismiss the action of lunatics as being of no account because it is the action of lunatics is dangerous, because the next lunatic may turn out to be John Reginald Christie, and he too is harm- lessly eccentric until he murders six women. But we cannot have a complete guarantee of safety against the Christies of this world; we can only be vigilant. In any case the laws in this country are sufficiently strong and, more important, there exists sufficient determination that they shall be enforced---to stop Fascist rill'-raft' getting out of hand.
But there are two further matters to be Con- sidered, both of them rather more'important than a few chalkings on walls or a few smashed win- dows. The first is the existence in this country of Fascist or semi-Fascist groups, of which there are something like half a dozen. I have the journal of one of them by me as I write; it is the most scurrilous of such broadsheets I have seen—very much on the lines of Mosley's pre- war Action—including a gross anti-Semitic car- toon, attacks on Jews and Negroes, and (in a comment on the Grunwald affair) a ,major con- tempt of court. Some of the people who write this are obviously mad, too (in a sense, of course, they all are, but some are madder than others); there is a delicious chart showing 'The upward curve of Jewish infiltration,' which purports to show the numbers of Jewish candidates at Par- liamentary elections in this country, and comes to the conclusion that 'British politics were at their healthiest when Jew influence was at its lowest' —a conclusion slightly damaged by the fact that 'Jew influence,' according to the chart, was very much down in that healthy year, 1931!
It also includes, whether as a paid advertisement or because there is some connection between the two organisations I do not know, a list of books published by a Fascist publishing house, includ- ing some names I thought we really had seen the last of—Captain Ramsay, Sir Barry Domvile, Arnold Leese (he broke with Mosley before the war because Mosley was insufficiently anti- Semitic for him; he used to refer to The Leader as 'the kosher fascist'), and that hoary old forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The sheet also contains some rather more unpleasant undertones of violence ('good, healthy British fists, whose owners have not lost the spirit of their race'), and a good deal of mystic-racialist rubbish of one kind or another.
Does it matter, though? I think not. Fascist movements in this country today need two things if they are to make any kind of advance; they need conditions, particularly economic conditions, of a suitable kind, and they need leaders of some ability and stature. The loons who run them at the moment are obviously incapable of any kind of serious political work, and conditions at the moment in Britain are not such as to make remotely possible the kind of despair that could very well lead men into supporting Fascism. There is always a scum which boils to the top of any society, especially a society going through the kind of changes that are occurring in Britain today, and provided we remain vigilant there is no reason to suppose that these people will ever do anything but chalk on doorways and get a hundred or two votes at elections. If they take to hitting people, after all, they can always be put in prison.
Though I have a nasty feeling that this would be no solution. We ought to be revising our opinions of what causes racialist feeling and action; but we ought to have been doing that at the time of the Notting Hill race-riots (and if we had done it a little earlier there wouldn't have been any Notting Hill race-riots). Nigger-baiters and Jew-baiters can be imprisoned; but has any- body stopped to think what a condemnation of our society is implied by the fact that even a tiny minority turn to such behaviour without the stimulus of economic depression—hitherto re- garded as the invariable and only cause? The one thing the layabouts of Notting Hill who are at Present in prison have never lacked is money; but the fuller their pockets the emptier their minds. What are we doing to fill those vacant heads? (There is one complicating factor in Notting Hill; the unspeakable housing conditions in that area are of the sort normally found in conditions of the most appalling poverty, approaching starva- tion, Yet no such conditions in fact exist there. The disparity between income-level and housing- level in parts of Notting Hill is probably wider than anywhere else in the country, and at any time in our history; I suspect that the only solu- tion is to raze the whole area to the ground and start again.) Which brings me. finally, to the most important aspect of all. Anti-Semitism in this country is a very great deal more widespread. and more deeply rooted, than Most people will admit. The fact that it rarely (except in the lunatic-fringe activities of which I have been speaking) takes an Overt form should not blind us to its existence. But the silent, horrible prejudice exists to an alarming extent. The casually 'snide' remark at a Party, the instinctive assumptions, the terrifying irrational concept of Jews and Jewishness- these are things which not only infect an enormous number of otherwise perfectly reason- able people, but which do not seem to diminish with the passing years. Whenever I hear a Politician (even so sensible a man as Sir Edward Boyle was doing it the other day) beginning a sentence on this subject. 'We all condemn and deplore . .', my instinctive reaction is to pull the bedclothes up over my head and scream. We 10 not all condemn and deplore; I would like to now exactly what proportion of golf and tennis Clubs in this country either bar Jews from mem- bership entirely, or actively discourage them from joining. What is more, I think the figure Would astonish a lot of well-meaning folk, in a salutary manner.
11 is, nowadays, largely a middle-class disease. The upper crust are too heavily infiltrated, and the working classes are no longer economically insecure; but since we seem to be moving rapidly in the direction of an entirely middle-class society, this is little comfort. What we do about it I am far from sure; education, despite the apparent ease with which some of the most highly educated men will believe the most arrant nonsense, is the long-term solution. But what sort of education? Keeping children at school for longer and longer periods, while the school building programme and the Burnham Scale between them ensure that they are taught less and less in worse and worse conditions, does not seem to me to be particularly helpful in itself. But I confess I am unable to think of anything that would be.
Meanwhile, I may as well report the conclu- sion of the curious affair of the Cambridge University Appointments Board. Some months ago the Spectator printed a number of varyingly anti-Semitic remarks penned by three of the Secretaries of the Board about students or firms who had sought their advice and help. ('Short and Jewy and wet palms'; The partners are Jewish, but the firm is not of the sharp or slick variety which is sometimes brought to mind when Jewish solicitors are mentioned'; 'Jewish but the refined kind'; '1 fear an unattractive chap—if only because one is instinctively drawn to feel this about the chosen race which he must surely stem from.') Some feeling was created in Cam- bridge and elsewhere about this, and a number of tutors asked the Vice-Chancellor to investigate the affair. What form, if any, his investigation took 1 cannot say, but I understand that nothing is in fact to be done,and that remarks such as those I have quoted are not taken to be evidence of any instinctive feeling against. a student on account of his racial origin. The three Secretaries con- cerned are to remain in their posts (1 have heard of only one Jewish student who has refused to go to the Appointments Board), and the infinite patience of the Establishment, the slow drip of official opinion, the casual buttonholings in corridors, have had their desired effect. Still. I suppose the three will be more circumspect in future, at any rate about committing their malodorous thoughts to paper. War hath her victories no less than peace.
BERNARD LEVIN
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