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The Alien Menace: a Statement of the Case

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The Alien Menace: a Statement of the Case THE ALIEN MENACE A STATEMENT OF THE CASE By LIEUT.-COL. A. H. LANE. FIFTH (Revised and Enlarged) EDITION 3/6 net LONDON: BOSWELL PUBLISHING CO. LTD. 10, Essex Street, Strand, London, W.C.1. 1934. THE LEEDS CONFERENCE, 1917 The following is a copy of the Manifesto issued by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and other "Labour" leaders during the Great War. Great Labour, Socialist and Democratic Convention to hail the Russian Revolution and to Organise the British Democracy To follow Russia May 23rd. 1917. To Trades Councils, Trade Unions, Local Labour Parties, Socialist Parties, Women's Organisations, and Democratic Bodies. DEAR COMRADES, The Conference to which we recently invited you is already assured of a great success. It will be one of the greatest Democratic Gatherings ever held in this country. It will be historic. It will begin a new era of democratic power in Great Britain. It will begin to do for this country what the Russian Revolution has accomplished in Russia. There is little time for preparation. Action must be taken immediately by every Branch and Society desiring to be represented. It seems not unlikely, owing to the rush of applications for delegates' tickets, that the Committee may be unable to give facilities for those who delay till the last moment. The Conference will be held in the ALBERT HALL, LEEDS, on SUNDAY, JUNE 3rd, commencing at 10.30 a.m. We now send you the Resolutions which are to be discussed. Owing to the shortness of time for the preparation for the Conference the proceedings will not be subject to the rigid rules which usually govern Labour and Socialist Congresses. It will be a Democratic Conference to establish Democracy in Great Britain. Russia has called to us to follow her. You must not refuse to answer that appeal. Send in your application for Delegates' Cards at once. You are entitled to send one delegate however small your membership may be, but an additional delegate for each 5,000 of your membership above the first 5,000, or part of 5,000. Applications, accompanied by a fee of 2s. 6d. for each delegate, must be sent to one of the Secretaries as under: ALBERT INKPIN, Chandos Hall, 21a Maiden Lane, Strand, London, W.C.2. FRANCIS JOHNSON, St. Bride's House, Salisbury Square, London, E.C.4. In the confident hope that your Society will join in this great event, On behalf of the United Socialist Council, We remain, Yours fraternally H. ALEXANDER GEO. LANSBURY CHAS. G. AMMON J. RAMSAY MACDONALD W. C. ANDERSON TOM QUELCH C. DESPARD ROBERT. SM1LLIE E. C. FAIRCHILD PHILIP SNOWDEN J F1NEBERG ROBERT WILLIAMS F. W. JOWETT "I want to examine the laws and regulations as to the entry of Aliens into this country, for in these days no Alien should be substituted for one of our own people when we have not enough work at home to go round." —Mr, Baldwin's Election Speech, broadcast on 16 October, 1924. TREBICH LINCOLN (centre) in 1916. SIR E. CORNWALL asked the Prime Minister whether his attention has been drawn to the statements made by an ex-Member of the House [Trebich Lincoln] to the effect that he had been acting as a German spy in this country; and whether ... he will introduce legislation making it impossible in future for a person of such alien antecedents to become a candidate for Parliament? THE PRIME MINISTER [Mr. Asquith]: This is a matter which must be left to the discrimination of the electors. MR. BUTCHER: Will the right hon. Gentleman consider the advisability of preventing recently naturalised aliens, especially alien enemies, from becoming Members of this House? MR. HOGGE: Can the right hon. Gentleman say why this gentleman was allowed to escape after the Govern­ ment had been warned that he was a spy? THE PRIME MINISTER: How can I answer that? (Hansard: House of Commons, 1915, Vol. LXXII, col. 784.) Preface to Fourth Edition "I want to examine the laws and regulations as to the entry of Aliens into this country, for in these days no Alien should be substituted for one of our own people when we have not enough work at home to go round." Mr. Baldwin in Election Speech broadcast on 16 October, 1924. OWING to the events which have occurred since May, 1929, when, under the leadership of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, a gang of International Socialists took over the government of our unhappy country, I have decided to publish a fourth and much enlarged edition of my Alien Menace. In the Foreword to the second edition I wrote: The difficulties through which our country has been and is passing are due not to one cause but to many causes... And one of the greatest of these is the Alien trouble... which not only seriously retards our moral and material progress, but even threatens our very existence. After the crash of the £ in 1931; after the formation of a so-called National Government and after the General Election which resulted in the return of an overwhelming Conservative majority, patriotic Conservatives hoped that foreigners and Aliens would cease to orient our Cabinet's policy and that the innumerable evils produced by un­ desirable and enemy Aliens in our midst would be removed. What has happened in the months following the General Election convinces me that, if I was right in calling the public's attention to the Alien Problem in 1928, I have still greater justification in doing so to-day. Apart from its Tariff Reform legislation and some belated anti-subversive vi THE ALIEN MENACE measures in India, little has been done by the "National" Government which a truly National Government would have done. To begin with: Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, whose private secretary since 1924 has been Miss Rosa Rosenberg, and who in Forward of 14 October, 1922, said "we can now take the Moscow Soviet Communist Revolutionary Government under our wing, and clothe it in the furs of apology to shield it from the blasts of criticism," has not expelled the Bolsheviks from their "embassy" at Harington House or closed down Arcos. So far from that, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir John Simon, has been recently accepting hospitality from the Bolsheviks lurking there. Nor has The Daily Worker, a Bolshevik organ printed in this country, been suppressed. Nor has the Communist Party of Great Britain been judicially declared—as the Communist Party of Canada has lately been by a Court of Justice—to be an illegal association. Mr. MacDonald, Mr. Baldwin, Sir Herbert Samuel, Sir John Simon and their colleagues, despite the Bolshevik-incited mutiny in the fleet at Invergordon and the Bolshevik-engineered outbreak at Dartmoor, have decided still to tolerate the presence in London of emis­ saries, with diplomatic privileges, from the Moscow Soviet Communist Revolutionary Government! From things which the "National" Government has not done I turn to things which it has, and ought not to have done. With a haste which can be mildly qualified as indecent, it has passed the Statute of Westminster Bill, a measure conceding to the Irish Free State, Newfoundland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa the right of declaring themselves virtually independent States. Further, instead of rejecting once and for all the insane idea of creating a democratic federation for the caste- ridden provinces and principalities of India (325,000,000 of whose 350,000,000 inhabitants are wholly illiterate), our "National" Government continued for a time to negotiate Photographic reproduction of the page in Engels' letter of 4 May, 1887, containing (last paragraph) sentence "Aveling macht ein famose Agitation im East End von London", quoted on pp. x and xi. PREFACE vii with openly declared enemies, like the political impostor Gandhi, and it has proceeded to make preparations for bringing into existence paper constitutions for India and Burma calculated to produce civil war and chaos and, incidentally, to ruin our trade with both Indians and Burmese. Lastly, our "National" Government has forced through Parliament the Socialist London Passenger Trans­ port Bill, a Bill, on the face of it, bound to lead to the nationalisation of our railways and all other means of transporting goods and passengers, but more probably, like the Electricity Act, designed to put greater power into the hands of financial magnates. In these circumstances, I make no apology for issuing a fourth edition of my Alien Menace. The facts to which I have referred demonstrate that, notwithstanding the presence in both Houses of Parliament of huge Conserva­ tive majorities, the policy of our Government is being dictated or inspired by foreigners bent on wrecking the British Empire and working in conjunction with Aliens and traitors living in it. Among those foreigners are not only our avowed enemies the International bandits who, having enslaved the Russians, are working to expel the British from Asia and to stir up revolutions in every part of our Empire, but, also, Communists at all points of the globe; Germans thirsting to revenge the defeats inflicted by us and our allies on the Vaterland; certain International financiers; and the Brahmans. All of them are working for the subjugation and even the destruction of the British Empire. To defeat the machinations of these persons and their agents in the British Empire, we need, in my humble opinion, a real National Government, immune from all Alien influence. That for decades we have not possessed one has been apparent to every observant patriot. Personally, I first became aware that hidden hands were steering—or en­ deavouring to steer—the British Empire to its destruction, a year or so before the second South African War.
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