Churchill, Sir Winston.

Mr. Winston Churchill on the Aliens Bill. A Letter Addressed to a Manchester Correspondent. Liberal Publication Department, [1904]

Woods A7

A scarce early Churchill pamphlet, the text of a letter to the Jewish leaders in North-West Manchester criticising the government's proposed Aliens Bill which was designed to curb Jewish immigration from Russia to Britain. In announcing that he will actively oppose the bill Churchill vows not to support any departure "from the old tolerant and generous practice of free entry and asylum to which this country has so long adhered and from which it has so greatly gained". He warns of the danger of the legislation in the hands of "an intolerant or anti-Semitic" Home Secretary and condemns its appeal to "insular prejudice against foreigners, to racial prejudice against Jews, and to labour prejudice against competition" (see Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, p.165). The attack on the government was an attack on his own leaders, and the day after first publication in the Manchester Guardian on 31 May the young Member of Parliament made concrete his defection from the Conservatives to the Liberals in the first Parliamentary day after the Whitsun recess.