SIR OSWALD MOSLEY
by Robert Row
Richard Crossman wrote in 1961 that "Mosley was spurned by
Dazzled by Mosley's "brightly shining star," as Michael Foot
observed in 1968, the men of the Establishment decided they preferred, after
all, "mediocrity and safety first which consigned political genius to the
wilderness and the nation to the valley of the shadow of death" and to
much suffering in large parts of Britain during the unemployment of the
thirties.
Mosley, in the opinion of Lord Boothby and others, could have been
"a very great Prime Minister" leading either a Labour or a
Conservative government. That
was not to be. Mediocrity ruled in
Who was this man Mosley? The noted historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote in 1965 that
"his proposals were more creative than those of Lloyd George and offered a
blueprint for most of the constructive advances in economic policy to the
present day... evidence of a superlative talent." David Lloyd George
himself saw Mosley as a man of "remarkable lucidity and force." John
Wheatley, M.P. of "Red" Clydeside, said in 1926 that he was "one
of the greatest and most hopeful figures the socialist movement has thrown
up."
Colonel Joseph Wedgwood of the Labour Party, later a Father of the
House, said after Mosley's speech of resignation from government in 1930:
"I watched the Liberal Party. I watched the Conservative Party. Man after man was saying
to himself: 'That is our leader.' "
Such were the views of leading historians and parliamentarians. Great audiences thought likewise,
when they heard his policies. During the stormy General Election of 1931, as
New Party meetings up and down the country were being wrecked by organized
mobs, Mosley held one remarkable meeting in Manchester' s Free Trade Hall about
which the Manchester Guardian was to say: "In his thirty-fifth year Oswald
Mosley is already encrusted with legend... Who could doubt when he sat down
after his speech on Saturday, and the audience, stirred as an audience rarely
is, rose and swept a storm of applause towards the platform -- who could doubt
that here was one of those root-and-branch men who have been thrown up from
time to time in the religious, political and business story of England? His
ideas swept a great audience off its feet and the scene at the end was matter
for thought to any 'elder statesman.' "
In the world of letters Beverley Nichols was later to write in his News
of England in 1938, the time of the British Union of Fascists (BUF): "For
Mosley, whether you regard him as a limb of Satan or a potential saviour of
this nation, is one of the three most dynamic
personalities in the Empire today. And the men he has inspired are animated by something akin
to a religious faith."
How did the man regard himself? He wished to be known to posterity as "the man of
synthesis," and in a recent criticism in the Times Higher Education
Supplement, Richard Thurlow conceded he had "a brilliant synthesising
mind... He synthesised many of the best ideas of his time: Keynes's critique of
the Establishment's deflationary policies, Lloyd George's great public works to
soak up unemployment, Joseph Chamberlain's demand for an insulated home market
and protection for the British Empire, and C.H. Douglas's proposals of consumer
credits to raise the purchasing power of the poorer sections of the
community."
There was also guild socialism. Mosley wrote in his auto biography, My Life: "My
inclination in British politics was always towards the guild socialists -- then
represented by such thinkers and writers as [G.D.H.] Cole, [J.A.] Hobson and
[A.R.] Orage -- rather than to state socialism, whose exponents were the Webbs
and the Fabians. The tradition of the mediaeval guilds in England, of the
Hanseatic League and the syndicalism of the Latin countries was much nearer to
my thinking." At the same time he could appreciate the power of the
Federal Reserve System and what he saw of American mass production methods
during his visit to the United States in the twenties, reaching yet another
synthesis for Britain by combining what he learned in America, the most
advanced capitalist state, and the thinking of British guild socialists and
European syndicalists.
Yet he was more. He
achieved his own personal ideal of the "complete man" of politics,
economic thinking, war service in 1914-18, a man of culture with a deep
interest in philosophy, the true aristocrat who was "the friend of the
people." And there was his sport. Descended from a family long connected
with the land of England, including a grandfather famous for his pedigree
cattle and the very model for England's "John Bull," Mosley's early
interest in sport turned to boxing, "The Fancy" of his ancestors in a
more robust age. He also represented his country in international fencing
contests in his thirties.
"He is very English," wrote James Drennan of the Mosley of
that time, "as it were, a composite ghost of English history, yet his
enemies complain he is so 'un-English.' Perhaps they mean that he lacks that
bourgeois stamp which has moulded to its flaccid type the generations of
English politicians who have grown up since the Industrial Revolution. There is something of the
Elizabethan in his gallant, rather arrogant air. He is the Englishman of the
Carolean tennis court, of the duelling ground rather than of the Pall Mall
club. Then again, with his boxing and fencing, he has walked in the tradition
of the Regency 'buck' in a time when people have got into the habit of
expecting younger politicians to have horn-rimmed spectacles and soft white
hands. He is a big man of blood and bone, of strong tones, no feeble creature
of grey shadings. He is a personality, with all his individual qualities and
faults, no self-complacent bladder of conventions."
A certain hard seriousness and a natural chivalry were indeed his
hallmarks. Several
times in later life he was in a position to destroy an opponent by exposing
personal scandal. "We must confine our attacks on these people to their
public lapses and not to their private lives, however disgusting" was his
invariable response.
The Mosley story began in the waterlogged trenches of Flanders, red with
poppies and the life blood of a slaughtered British generation, and in the
Royal Flying Corps where he learned to respect his opponents, the young German
airmen of 1914-18, feeling a kinship with them higher than his regard for
"the old politicians who sent both of us there, to fight." Many years later he saw a film of
the Verdun battles when he experienced an immediate spiritual comradeship with
one French soldier silent and stark amid that enormous suffering.
Out of these deep impressions of what G.K. Chesterton described as
"that awful depopulation" of
And so, with the limp which was his own personal legacy from the
trenches, he went into Parliament with a hatred of world wars to raise his
great voice for "the missing generation," his mission that never
again should there be another such bloodbath. Winning Harrow for the Conservatives in the
"Khaki Election" of 1918, he was asked to explain his policies. His
reply, in the tradition of Joseph Chamberlain, was "socialist imperialism";
he had fought on a platform of high wages and shorter hours, housing schemes
carried out by the nation, the abolition of slums, and health and child welfare
policies.
But when he reached Parliament, as he later said, "the first shock
was the sight of my colleagues. The young men were in a minority and the 'hardfaced men'
were in a great majority. The profiteer outnumbered the fighter." Thus
when those "hard-faced men" who then led the Conservatives betrayed
the war-time pledge that a land for heroes would be built after so much
sacrifice, while disgracing themselves during the Black and Tan period in
Ireland, he left that party.
For a time he sat in Parliament as an Independent, holding Harrow
against the attacks of Conservative press and party machine in two further
elections, and there he was spotted as a coming man by the bright eye of the
Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, to be invited to join that "peoples'
party" which MacDonald in turn was to betray, in 1931. In 1924, when Mosley joined Labour,
Britain was in the grip of a merciless deflation. Other hard-faced men in high
places, the Cunliffe Committee of City bankers and Treasury officials, had met
in conclave before the killing was over in 1918 and there decreed that
deflation was the essential road "back to normality" after the war. This
was accepted widely. By 1925 Stanley Baldwin, Tory leader, was stating bluntly
that "all the workers in this country have got to face a reduction in
wages." The Liberals were split on the question, but they were the
declining party. Even Labour, the rising party, no matter how much it denounced
deflation in opposition, was led by men who tugged their forelocks to the
bankers in office. Prominent among them was the mercantilist Philip Snowden. He
announced shortly after becoming Chancellor in the first Labour government of
1924 that he was "much guided" by the findings of the Cunliffe
Committee. As Chancellor again in the second Labour government he was to say in
1931 that "the City would not stand for" Mosley's proposals for
solving unemployment.
The latter did not join a party widely proclaiming its
"socialist" goal in order to grovel in this way before the power of
high finance. All his
sympathies lay with the guild socialist tradition in that party, all his ideas
were opposed to the deflation demanded by the Establishment of the day. His
years of synthesizing then began, seeing much of Keynes -- at that time the
leading rebel against the Cunliffe Committee's dictates -- and inevitably
coming into growing conflict with the Snowdenites; for such leaders, cast in an
older mould, Mosley had far too many ideas and most of them dangerous.
By 1925 he had written Revolution by Reason, a book revolutionary in the
sense that it cut across the current orthodoxy and proposed the deliberate
raising of living standards through consumer credits, injecting purchasing
power wherever it was needed most in order to match the greater power of
industry to produce. And
in these proposals lay the origins of that later breach with Labour leaders.
For, while Mosley campaigned for higher living standards at public
meetings where he was increasingly in demand, a Conservative government took
measures to depress those standards through a more rigorous deflation than Mrs.
Thatcher recently has attempted -- and there on the Labour front bench in
Parliament the Snowdenites bowed in deepest reverence to the financial gods
sacred to Stanley Baldwin, Tory leader. The men of like minds occupied both front benches. The men
who wanted change sat behind, with Mosley.
Incredible though it may seem to much opinion
in the 1980s, Mosley did not turn to Fascism because of "arrogance"
or "ambition" but simply because he soon came to realize that
socialism would not be built under the old leadership; the logic of his ideas
drew him ever more towards a form of proto-fascism but for the word itself. For him this arose from the memory
of comradeship in the trenches, uniting all classes in face of the machine-guns
which struck down all irrespective of social class. It arose from his
"socialist imperialism"; its dynamic thrust came from his synthesis
of economic ideas; its method of government was inspired by Lloyd George's
inner cabinet, a government of action which had won the war of 1914-18 and
which Mosley would transform into "a machinery of government" to
solve the problems left by that war.
First among those problems was unemployment. This continued to rise rapidly
despite the election of a Labour government in 1929 to solve it. Seeing that
MacDonald's speeches on the subject were having no effect, Mosley compiled his
own policies of action in the famous "Mosley Memorandum" of early
1930; a government determined to solve unemployment, equipped with the
machinery to do it, was the vital part of his proposals.
Yet when placed before the men of the Cabinet, these proposals aroused
their pious horror, for the men were paragons of inaction, dedicated to
muddling through. Close
contact with their woolly minds had no doubt made a parting of the ways likely
in any event: this was made inevitable by their limp response to the
approaching crisis and the inertia with which they answered Mosley's dynamism. When
they rejected the Memorandum, while refusing to produce something better
themselves, he resigned from the Labour government in May 1930.
Father Brocard Sewell of the Carmellites, replying to an obituary in
Mosley's old school magazine, The Wykehamist, wrote that "when the dust
has settled" Mosley may be remembered most for his rejected Memorandum,
which would have solved unemployment, and for his advocacy of a united
Much has been written about the failure of Mosley's New Party, hastily
formed under the storm cloud of crisis, lacking a press but attacked by the
national press, accused of the blackest treachery by former allies, its
meetings smashed by the Labour mobs and the communists. Its electoral organization was
rudimentary and in the panic conditions of the General Election of 1931 it was
swept away.
Those panic conditions, with the workless queues lengthening ominously,
set the scene for one of the great confidence tricks of British history. Assisted by some Liberals, the
Labour and Conservative leaders united to stampede the country into giving them
office again -- although they were the men most responsible for the crisis! They
had the support of a servile press which both whipped up the crisis and
bamboozled the public. The first step in the charade was taken by MacDonald
when his coalition was arranged. "All my friends are with me
tonight," declared the erstwhile revolutionary as he faced the House of
Commons, proudly surveying his former class enemies, the leading Tories sitting
poker-faced at his side. The men of like minds were together at last.
A further step was that trick derided by Shaw before the dumbfounded
Fabians, the trick of panicking the country into defence of the gold standard
to be duly followed by the abandoning of the gold standard, yet still to the
applause of the servile press.
Hence the bitterness of Mosley, who had striven to arouse a Labour
government to action long before the crisis arose, at
the one-time visionaries of "socialism" joining in the trickery which
thus resuscitated the economic system they had spent their lives in denouncing.
The defeated New Party
had offered a real alternative to that system and had been at least an attempt
to save Britain from the mass unemployment that followed in the thirties, and
in the last issue of its paper, Action, Mosley flung his defiance at his
triumphant opponents: "Better far the great adventure, better the great
attempt for England's sake, better defeat, disaster, better far the end of that
trivial thing called a political career than stifling in a uniform of Blue and
Gold, strutting and posturing on the stage of Little England, amid the scenery
of decadence ..."
And for those who stood fast, unlike those who had broken at the sight
of the mobs or had chosen "safety first" in the ranks of the old
parties after all, he reaffirmed the original faith which had taken him into
politics: "Before we go we will do something great for
Oswald Mosley was bitterly condemned when he took the road to Fascism. Critics were as outraged then as
they have been since. Suddenly they began to notice certain flaws of character
which had not been apparent when they praised his abilities.
Yet this recoil from men who dare to cross Rubicons and defy the fates
has occurred again and again in history. History also shows that all new ideas, as Fascism was new
in Britain in 1932, have met with strong opposition in that country from their
inception. Parliament itself was not a British invention but was imported from
France by Simon de Montfort in the very teeth of opposition from the mediaeval
crown. Democracy in classical times originated in Athens, and in modern times
again in France: great thunderings greeted it from the great landed interests
when its early crude form emerged during the French Revolution. England went to
war with democracy then, a conflict intensified when Napoleon Bonaparte, its
military champion, reached power in France. And England and Prussia, defenders
of the older order, defeated Napoleon and democracy at Waterloo in 1815. Nevertheless
democracy was to triumph in the end in England, through a series of political
changes beginning with the first Reform Act of 1832, eleven years after the
great Napoleon died, and to such an extent that in the more spacious Victorian
age English statesmen came to pride themselves as the very paladins of
democracy: Read their speeches.
Thus just a hundred years after the passing of the Reform Act, when
What was Fascism? Serious
critics now agree that it took several very different forms between the two
world wars. Fascism was an intensely national idea and differing national
characters and conditions produced different forms of it. Certainly this was
true of Mosley's BUF. As he patiently explained to his raging critics, all the
political ideas of history had come to Britain from abroad, but it was the true
genius of the British people which created the finest examples of those ideas
here in this country. So it was with Fascism.
Mosley's Fascism was unique, above all, because of the fact that its
main policies rested upon the concept of a united
Yet patient explanation and the sheer logic of his standpoint only drew
uproar from the critics, chief of whom were in the
Labour Party. How
ironic it was, therefore, that many of the ideas in The Greater Britain,
Mosley's book which launched the BUF, had won him huge support while he was in
that party. So popular were these that his vote at the Labour annual conference
at Llandudno in 1930 came near to dethroning MacDonald, that grand old man of
straw. A few weeks later the same proposals formed a manifesto signed by 17
Labour M.P.s, from Oswald and Cynthia Mosley to Aneurin Bevan and John McGovern,
and the famous miners' leader A.J. Cook.
Was there, perhaps, a deep guilt complex at work in the tirades of
Labour leaders when the BUF arose? What, however, of the "political uniform" which
most enraged them? As far as Mosley himself was concerned the black shirt was
adopted for reasons of a hard necessity. It was the means of keeping order at
the early meetings when Red violence was mobilized again in a fresh bid to
drive him right out of political life. His New Party meetings had been wrecked
when the stewards wore no uniform (for instance at the Rag Market in
Birmingham), but BUF meetings were not wrecked because the stewards wore the
distinctive black shirt; that was the acid test.
Let it be stated clearly that it was the violence of the Left which
created the black shirt uniform. Of all the political forces of the time, the violence was
mainly responsible for the black shirt's appearance on British streets.
However, what Mosley called "the great negation" of the Left
brought forth in reply the great positivism of the BUF through the clash of
ideas, a nation-wide movement which wore its political symbol with pride and
with heroism in many hard battles to secure freedom of speech for a new idea,
uniting all classes in a creed "akin to a religious faith," as
Beverley Nichols wrote. Until
the old parties, alarmed at this phenomenon which had arisen out of the streets
scarred with poverty and depression in the thirties to challenge the corruption
of their failure and misrule, used the pretext of yet another wave of Red
violence to ban all political uniforms under the grotesquely mis-styled Public
Order Act.
Yet the whole question of political ideas has been distorted to an hilarious extent. Almost all political ideas went into uniform during the thirties.
Some Social Crediters wore a green shirt uniform. The communists sported the
red shirt, seen in London and Red Madrid alike during the decade. Even the
democratic parties affected an easily recognized uniform of sorts, the top hat
and morning suit of Mr. Baldwin, at least on ceremonial occasions. This became
the accepted garb of plump veterans or aspiring younger politicians. From the
assembled top hats who had signed the Versailles Treaty down to the British
Chancellor on Budget Day they invariably appeared in their own political
uniform. It was to be seen in its greatest glory when the League of Nations
assembled at Geneva, all dressed like Baldwin no matter what their nationality.
The fact of the matter between the two world wars was that it was the
age of political uniforms. Mosley's black shirt was one of many. He had a political uniform, and
so had the others. Yet still the myths persist, and one of the most ludicrous
is that the BUF, after a promising start, began to fail in the mid-thirties.
A critic like R.C Thurlow, for example, traces this to "the
relative success of the national government in partially reconstructing the
economy" after the crisis of 1931. Here a comparison with the National Socialists in Germany
can be drawn. They came to power, it is widely agreed, because unemployment in
that country more than doubled between 1930 and 1933. Would Hitler have become
the Chancellor of Germany but for economic catastrophe? In Britain, on the
other hand, unemployment was halved between 1932 and 1939, and yet in those
seven years the BUF advanced in strength from fifty members at the beginning to
the 30,000 enthusiastic people who packed the Earls Court exhibition hall for
Mosley's greatest meeting, just six weeks before war began in 1939.
This was the largest indoor political rally then held anywhere in the
world. Nor did any
rival organization in Britain attempt such a meeting. And Mosley had been
speaking to capacity meetings elsewhere in Britain during the previous two
years, notably in Manchester's Free Trade Hall. The ban on the black shirt made
no difference, except that his meetings were bigger.
Social collapse brought the National Socialists to power in
But in September 1939 the iron door of war clanged down again
monstrously and the second world conflict Mosley had striven to avert tore
This time there would be fifty million corpses piled across the earth,
to stare at the "peace makers" of twenty years before at
For three years before the war, and again at
The official De La Warr Report of early 1939 stated that there were then
100 million people in the Empire suffering from "malnutrition" (i.e.,
semi-starvation), quite apart from the same problem among hundreds of thousands
of the long-term unemployed in Britain. A world slump created this problem. Mosley's policies would
have solved it. Britain went to war instead.
Further, the ideas in The World Alternative would have led to a very
different union of
Was it thus so strange that, after a disastrous war -- that great clash
between Fascism and a democracy allied with communism -- he declared in 1948
for the future "Europe a Nation" to achieve a European universalism
at a higher level and (ever "the man of synthesis," rising above that
clash) turned to "the idea which is beyond both fascism and
democracy"?
Meanwhile, during the thirties, his policy was "mind
While Mosley stood for rearmament to mind
Churchill was full of the doctrine of the balance of power, which had
ruled British attitudes for centuries. His ancestor Marlborough had fought the French over the
balance of power, and Churchill fought Germans for the same reason. Though a
prolific writer of history, he failed to appreciate that the world had changed
since the days of Queen Anne. Certainly Marlborough understood his own age: his
battles restored the balance of power in Europe and his genius had made Britain
a first-rate power of the day. Churchill's war policy, on the other hand,
reduced Britain to a second-rate power and replaced the former European balance
of power with a more ominous balance of nuclear terror in the world. This he
did by pursuing his demand for the unconditional surrender of Germany, ignoring
the postwar consequences of that defeat. Further, he prolonged and enlarged the
war to the stage where two extra-European superpowers, the U.S.A. and the USSR,
began to dominate the whole course of the war and indeed changed the very shape
of the postwar world. Once Roosevelt and Stalin, in command of bigger resources
of manpower and material than Churchill, assumed the direction of the war for
their own objectives, which were not Britain's, Churchill's voice in their
higher councils counted for less and less.
The fact is that Churchill destroyed
It was quite true that Churchill realized in later years what his years
of war-time vigour had wrought; nevertheless it was then far too late. The war had brought Russian power
half-way across Europe, in the hands of those Bolsheviks whom Churchill had
spent much of his life denouncing as the most detestable tyrants. Poland, for
whose freedom Britain had declared war, had been swept by Red armies into the
sphere of the USSR -- that new version of the monolithic Eurasian empire first
set up in the Middle Ages under the Mongol conqueror Genghiz Khan. It seems to
be lost on most war historians that Stalin's "iron curtain" of 1945
corresponded roughly with the furthest conquests of the old Mongol centuries
before: his horde from Eurasia also watered its horses in the river Oder. Lenin,
and more particularly Stalin, simply restored that empire and called it the
USSR, and Churchill helped to establish it on formal lines at Yalta. While the
original empire broke up when Genghiz Khan died and his sons quarrelled over
the booty, the sons of Lenin remained united. Today, as Stalin's successors,
they possess the most formidable military machine on earth.
It is grimly ironic that the Churchill of the twenties who likened the
Bolsheviks to "the heirs of Genghis Khan" was the same Churchill of
the forties whose war policies brought the Red armies to the river
Against such madness Mosley had stood out from September 1939, urging
strongly the negotiation of peace in
It is claimed that
Lady Mosley described in the Times of November 1981 what happened under
Regulation 18B which gave the government power of arrest without charge or
trial, and denied to those arrested any recourse to the Habeas Corpus Act,
supposedly one of the historic pillars of British freedom. "My husband and I were
arrested in the summer of 1940 at a moment of general panic. All our
possessions were searched, safes broken open and so forth. I welcomed this at
the time, as I thought it would ensure our early release... Months and then
years went by and we remained in prison. As we had not been charged with an
offence we were denied the luxury of a trial."
Instead of a trial, Lady Mosley continued, "there was an advisory
committee, whose chairman was Norman Birkett, K.C. It was held in camera. He questioned Mosley for sixteen
hours, and at the end Mosley asked if he might put a question. It was: 'Is it
suggested that if the Germans invaded we should help them in some way?,' to
which Birkett replied, 'Sir Oswald, you can put any such idea right out of your
head.' In other words I am in prison for having advocated a negotiated peace
while Britain and the Empire are intact?' 'Yes' was the reply."
That was the entire point of war-time detention without charge or trial.
How indeed could
Mosley be accused of conspiring to help German invaders when he had fought the
Germans in the first war, he had called for adequate air defences in his maiden
speech in Parliament in 1919 (at a time when government was cutting Britain's
air defences), he had demanded a well-armed Britain in 1932 on founding the
BUF, he had called on BUF members in September 1939 to do their duty if called
up for military service, and on 9 May 1940, just fourteen days before his
arrest, he had stated in his paper Action: "Stories concerning the
invasion of Britain are being circulated. In such an event every member of
British Union would be at the disposal of the nation. Every one of us would
resist the foreign invader with all that is in us. In such a situation no doubt
exists concerning the attitude of British Union."
Considering such a long and patriotic record -- a record better than
that of some Labour Ministers in the government which arrested him -- clearly
Mosley could not be charged with any treasonable intention to help any
invaders, German or otherwise.
The sole reason for his arrest and detention was his political
opposition to the war, as Birkett admitted. Yet political opposition to wars had long been an honorable
British tradition. Lord Chatham opposed war with the Americans in the
eighteenth century. Lloyd George opposed war with the Boers in the nineteenth
century. Labour leaders like MacDonald, George Lansbury, Herbert Morrison and
Bernard Shaw opposed the first world war, all on political grounds. None of
these was imprisoned without charge or trial, but Mosley was.
And such was the malice in high places that he and Lady Mosley might
have stayed in prison to the end of the war, but for the rapid deterioration in
his health. Deprived
of vigorous exercise by confinement, the injured leg which had invalided him
out of the Army in the First World War now developed a dangerous phlebitis. Under
pressure from an uneasy Churchill, Mr. Home Secretary Morrison (a conscientious
objector of 1914-18, the jailer of British ex-soldiers in 1939-45) released him
and Lady Mosley towards the end of 1943.
Oswald Mosley came out of prison to a very different
Unemployment had vanished.
Huge armies in the field had replaced the queues of the workless, and with the
rising tempo of American war production (some of which had gone to Russia to
aid its turn-around after the Stalingrad battle) these armies spelled the end
of Nazi Germany.
Another end could be foreseen. The days of the British Empire were numbered. The old
imperial spirit had been submerged beneath a wave of propaganda for worldwide
democracy. Something called "trusteeship" for the overseas
territories was in high fashion, the preliminary to pushing even the cannibal
islands into Westminster-style democracies in that brave, bright post-war world
when Hitler and imperialism were dead. Facing the spread of this doctrine,
growing ever more luxurious in the war pro-paganda hot-house, it is true that
the old imperialist Churchill was to growl out his defiance at the Mansion
House in November 1942: "I did not become the King's First Minister in
order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." Yet he had
already sold the pass.
Had he not signed in 1941 President Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter, which
in real terms meant the break-up of the Empire? Had not the President told his son Elliot that he
"meant to make Winston live up to it"? Had not Sir Stafford Cripps
been sent to India by Churchill eight months before the Mansion House speech
with an offer of independence after the war? In the event the offer was
rejected. Indian Congress leaders preferred to wait and see if they could get
better terms when the war was over. They got what they wanted from a Labour
government in 1947 and the liquidation of the British Empire began.
Thus the war left a world in flux and dissolution. Every nationalist leader in the
Empire was to demand the same independence. And peace brought a Britain divided
again under strident party banners: the unity of the nation was the first
casualty of peace. Two main facts stood out clearly then. First was the fact of
Britain's new second-rate status. It showed in many signs of weakness. Britain
went to war as a creditor nation and came out a debtor. Huge assets were sold
to pay for the war, yet Britain owed billions to the world at the end of it,
mainly as the "sterling balances." American Lend-Lease was cut off
abruptly with the defeat of Japan. A big dollar loan was advanced instead,
under humiliating conditions despite all the efforts of Keynes. The money was
spent by a Labour government in about two years, and the loan's repayment was
added to the general indebtedness which has bedevilled Britain's position to
this day. Further, inflation gained its first real grip on the nation during
the war: the cost of living index doubled between 1939 and 1945. Rationing of
essential foodstuffs like sugar lasted as long after the war as during it. And
in 1945 the electorate's revulsion against Churchill's war-time rule swept a
Labour government into power, ushering in the age of rampant bureaucracy and
industrial nationalization. Look at the plight of British Railways today.
The same dismal story was told by A.J.P. Taylor in his English History
1914-1945: "The legacy of the war seemed almost beyond bearing. Great Britain had drawn on the rest
of the world to the extent of 4198 million pounds... The British mercantile
marine was 30 per cent smaller in June 1945 than it had been at the beginning
of the war. Exports were little more than 40 per cent of the pre-war figure. On
top of this government expenditure abroad... remained five times as great as
pre-war. In 1946, it was calculated, Great Britain would spend abroad 750
million pounds more than she earned... Something like 10 per cent of our pre-
war national wealth at home had been destroyed, some by physical destruction,
the rest by running down capital assets."
Was it really worth fighting the war which Mosley opposed to produce
these lamentable results at home and turn
And this second-rate
In the event
He pointed to
The second main fact for Britain in the post-war world was the heavily
armed Soviet power less than 500 miles east of London, which space modern tank
armies could cover in a matter of days, and the existence of large communist
parties in Western Europe led by men like Pollitt, Thorez and Togliatti, who
openly stated that their loyalty to Russia came first in any clash.
American military strength offset the first danger, and the Marshall
Plan revived the economic life of
Mosley paid a warm tribute to the Americans for their aid, but asserted
that
Yet he went further than those urgent questions. While others looked no further than
the Council of Europe (little more than a debating club), Mosley launched the
Union Movement early in 1948, to be inspired by the "idea which is beyond
both fascism and democracy." He called for "the extension of
patriotism" to achieve union in the fullest sense, imbued with an idea
higher than fascism and democracy, both of which had become obsolete as the
result of the war.
In those years he reached new heights as "the man of
synthesis." To
the challenge of the ruin of old ideas he returned the answer of a new one. And
he saw it as part of an organic process which was part of British history. In
Britain, England had been the first to unite under the Saxon heptarchy of the
eighth century. Wales was then joined to England, and the United Kingdom rose
to a brilliant peak under the half-Welsh House of Tudor. Scotland then joined,
to make Great Britain. Now it was time to go further, under the pressure of
great dangers, and extend patriotism to the whole of Europe in a continuing
organic union.
In October 1948 -- the dangerous year of Stalin's blockade of Berlin --
Mosley spoke to an enthusiastic meeting of East London workers and called for
"the making of Europe a Nation." Yet, as he said in later years, making Europe into a nation
with its own common government did not make him feel any less an Englishman,
and an Englishman of Staffordshire where he was born. All other Europeans, Normans
and Bretons, Bavarians and Prussians, Neapolitans and Milanese, would through
his idea remain Frenchmen, Germans and Italians, as would Britons remain
Britons, yet they would all think and act together as Europeans.
In those later years he also proposed a three-tier order of governments
in
Mosley's concept of
The turbulent year 1950 advanced Mosley's thinking again. The communist threat to Europe had
lessened as the Marshall Plan put industry on its feet, Stalin's blockade of
Berlin had failed and, in 1949, the NATO alliance had been formed. Yet if
communism had been checked in the West it was sweeping everything before it in
the East. China fell to Mao Tse-tung in 1949; events in Vietnam were moving
towards the fateful battle of Dien Bien Phu; by 1950 the Korean war had
erupted. And the military struggle in Korea had two momentous economic effects.
However, the other effect was a crisis for
None of this surprised Mosley. He had shown where Labour's Achilles heel lay twenty years
before in his speech of resignation from the MacDonald government.
His reaction to such events was always to give a constructive solution,
and this time the solution was so far-reaching that all contemporary figures
have utterly rejected it; in any case it challenged the whole structure of
their international system of trade and finance established five years before
at Bretton Woods under such glittering edifices as GATT, the IMF, and the World
Bank. (They are not
quite so splendid today, as their international system groans beneath
world-wide recession and immense debts.)
What Mosley proposed, at another great
Each of these economic blocs, he explained in later speeches and
writing, would have a big population as its market, adequate raw materials for
its industry, and sufficient food. By insulating itself against the shocks of sudden movements
in prices (what he called "the world cost system") its internal
economy would be impervious to such shocks. Each economic bloc should
concentrate on solving its own problems; it would be freed from the need to
export, or import, since it would have all it needed within its own
"borders." Within those borders a high standard of life could be
built for its own people.
Mosley proposed that one such area, or bloc, should be formed from a
fully united
The danger today is indeed trade war and for the obvious reason: nothing
effectively had been done to avert it. Mosley's proposal would have ruled out trade wars; since
governments failed to adopt it we can expect the consequences of this failure
to act. More importantly, however, the same proposal of creating several large
blocs in the world would make more unlikely a shooting war with either of the
two communist powers, Russia and China, for Mosley emphasized from the start
that no such bloc should interfere with any other, non-communist or communist.
What, though, of the men in the Kremlin who are still possessed by the
messianic dream of communizing
What is needed to contain the relentless Soviet expansion are Mosley's
continental blocs, adequately armed to prevent Red Army incursions, with truly
reinvigorated economies and social systems in which the appeal of communism
withers, and above all imbued with a political idea far superior to communism.
The existence of just three such strong blocs in the world --
Mosley's was not a policy for war against
He would take the same line today over Soviet proposals for cutting
East-West missile strengths: hard and continual negotiations to reduce the
danger of a nuclear holocaust. In his last, short, speech before he died in 1980 he called for such
action to "stop the world being blown up."
He was thus following an old road in the fifties, but now going further.
He had seen the high
ideals of 1918 dashed as the war camps arose in the thirties, and in The World
Alternative of 1936 proposed their reconciliation through a new settlement in
Europe. Now, from 1950 onwards, he urged another and greater settlement of
world problems, by the creation of several self-contained blocs, the purpose of
which was both to abolish trade war and reduce the dangers of a nuclear
conflagration.
It was in those years that Mosley took on his final historic roles as
the man of world peace and as the forward-thinking economic European. If his ideals of 1918 carried him
through to the end of his life on the quest for peace, a similar straight line
can be traced through his economic ideas. His main goal here was so to organize
society that the people would be enabled to consume what their industry
produced.
Power of industry to produce had always been greater than the power of
the people to consume, and Mosley thus advanced policies to redress the
balance.
Thus, shortly after joining the Labour Party, he wrote Revolution by
Reason, which propounded the idea of raising the living standard of poorer
sections of the community by means of consumer credits, injecting purchasing
power where it was needed most. Extra ability to consume in the hands of millions would
raise demand until production was equated with consumption. Naturally, the
government issuing the credits would take care not to inflate.
Again, in his Fascist period from 1932, he sought the same end by
building up the home market through a higher wage policy within the corporate
state. His basic
reasoning remained that of his Labour days. "In organizing production we
have to think, not so much of maximum output, as of maximum consumption,"
he wrote in The Greater Britain. British industry would not suffer from
undercutting by cheaper imports when it paid higher wages, because each
industry would be protected on the home market, on condition that the industry
modernized itself. This he called "scientific protection."
After 1945, however, the problem became more complex. In winning the war many scientific
advances were made, and when applied to industry after the war these advanced
greatly the power to produce. Yet there was no advance towards a new-style
consumption policy. On the contrary, weak governments turned to an old-style
inflation. This brought its own evils: a decline in the power of the pound, a
rising cost of living, and strong sectional power in the hands of trade unions.
The devaluation trick only made matters worse. All imports then cost more, the
cost of living rose again and wage-inflation duly followed, with the result
that any export advantages from a depreciated pound were wiped out. For a Britain
living by exporting this was a deadly drug.
Yet long before the opposite policies of deflation and the strong pound
were tried, the march of science and technology was preparing an entirely new
phenomenon in the power of industry to produce. It was known as "automation."
Mosley had long been familiar with the mass production methods he had
seen on his visit to
The danger to the whole of industrial society was that "under the
old economics these few specialists would draw enormous wages and the rest
would be unemployed. No
market would then exist for the ever-increasing products of the machines, which
would pile up in the midst of a surrounding waste of poverty." This was
"the logical reduction to absurdity of a system which had never devised
any effective means of distributing the wealth which modern science can
produce." It was precisely the same problem which had led him to write Revolution
by Reason -- but now much graver.
Thus in his 1955 essay, and in greater detail in
This was a policy for the deliberate raising of wages and salaries in
the primary industries and the multiplying services in order to create an
adequate market for manufacturing industry as it turned to automation. Two other things would be required:
a new type of government in charge of the policy, working with the unions and
the managers throughout, and "the insulated self-contained area freed from
the world cost system." The large self-contained area was needed to
provide a really big market for the immense potential of the automation age.
Half-measures under the old economics could not cope. If government at present attempted
to raise railwaymen's wages, for instance, this would "throw the whole
system out of gear because additional transport charges would be added to the
price of export goods." On the other hand, under new economics of the
self- contained continental system which did not need to export, "it would
be quite possible to raise wages far above the present level in all primary
industry and services -- in agriculture, mining, power, building, banking,
insurance and the Civil Service -- provided that automation in manufacturing
industry had suddenly increased the power to produce; naturally, only on that
condition."
As a variation of this great increase in wages there could be a planned
shortening of hours, a three- or four-day week in work-sharing schemes,
creating many jobs for the unemployed. Or there could be both higher wages and shorter hours.
Once automation spread to all manufacturing, with greater volume of
output balanced by higher wages and shorter hours, the whole expansion taking
place within an insulated continental system, Mosley foresaw greater
possibilities still. Governments
operating his wage-price mechanism could then draw workers to any industry or
service short of manpower. If more miners were needed, raise their pay. If more
food was required, raise the farmer's reward, to take on more labor or to buy
better agricultural machines. If education was short of teachers, then increase
their salaries. And if some branch of science or technology needed extra
personnel to advance it, once proved to be beneficial after thorough tests,
rewards should be raised. Indeed, he continually stressed that science and
technology should always come high in the scale of rewards; skilled workers
should come before the unskilled in industry.
"We will not direct men to do what is necessary in the common
interest, but we will pay them to do it so effectively that, in fact, they will
do it, and the increased productive power of automation will give us the means
to pay them," wrote Mosley in 1958.
Yet could the wage-price mechanism be introduced in a small island like
If the present work force in manufacturing worked half the working week,
another work force of about the same size could be recruited from the
unemployed to operate the same machines for the other half of the week. That is the way to get unemployment
right down and raise output. The market to consume the bigger output would be
provided by raising wages generally throughout the whole economy. That could be
done in Britain alone, with government, unions and managers acting as a team to
organize the policy; yet how much more effective it would be if the same policy
was in operation throughout Europe, as Mosley emphasized.
This was his wage-price policy long before Mr. Heath tried a "pay
freeze" in the early seventies and Mr. Wilson experimented with his
"social contract" a few years later. Mosley's policy was positive; theirs were negative.
His wage-price mechanism was to be a permanent instrument of economic
management while theirs were merely short-term expedients, soon abandoned. There
could be no comparison whatever.
Thus it is nonsense for Mrs. Thatcher to say that "all" wages
policies have failed. Certainly
all negative policies have been tried, and they failed. What has never been
attempted is the wage-price mechanism of Oswald Mosley.
Above all other questions, however, is that of the type of government
needed to make these changes. Mosley was deeply concerned with this question in his Labour days,
being much impressed with Lloyd George's inner cabinet of five men with wide
powers which had won the First World War, and in his Memorandum proposed a
"machinery of government" to modernize industry and solve
unemployment. Lloyd George had overcome huge wartime problems in 1917, but a
Labour government collapsed in 1931 when faced with lesser problems of peace.
When founding the British Union of Fascists, Mosley addressed himself to
the paradox of a British democracy which could fight world wars with
governments of action yet failed before the test of economic crisis in
peacetime. He pointed
out in The Greater Britain that the system of government was a century out of
date in 1932 while the country had changed beyond recognition during those
hundred years.
Nevertheless, no attempt was made by the ruling politicians of the
thirties to remedy the situation, and the paradox was seen again in another world
war when Churchill copied, to some extent, the methods of Lloyd George. And again, with 1945, the habits of
peacetime returned. Party rivalries reasserted themselves; the time-wasting
procedure of Parliament was treasured once more like some precious national
heirloom. Britain's problems were worse than ever, yet Parliament, far from
becoming an efficient workshop to face a more serious age, resembled on some
days a slumbering museum and on others a beer-garden. And all the world stood
amazed at that ancient ritual of M.P.s dragging a new Speaker to his seat!
Little wonder that
By 1966, Mosley could say without any fear of contradiction that the old
party system was, to all intents, bankrupt. In Action he wrote: "Labour and the Tories have failed
equally; the Liberals have no answer at all. No matter which is in office they
cannot cope. The only way is to go above and beyond the parties to a national
union of the best of our people" and to form "a government of true
national union drawn from the most vigorous parts of the whole nation." A
government drawn from "the professions, from science, from the unions and
the managers, from businessmen, the housewives, from the services, from the
universities, and even from the best of the politicians."
It would be a new-style government of action with "hard
centre" ideas and not an old-style coalition of soft centre politics,
elected for one term of office with the specific task of putting
Parliament would always retain the power to dismiss it by vote of
censure if its policies failed or if it attempted to override basic British
freedoms.
This would make for the utmost action within the constitution, and it
was precisely how British governments functioned during the emergencies of two
world wars, except that such a government would be drawn from the whole nation
instead of merely from the parties. In Mosley's phrase, this was "using the methods of
wartime to solve the problems of peace," bringing to an end that paradox
of government of well over a century in Britain.
It is said that Oswald Mosley was a man before his time, and there is
some truth in this. His
life was spent in a Britain where big parties occupied the arena and held the
devotion of millions, no matter how many their failures. Those parties had
become the political armies of the class system, and the Mosley who placed
nation before party and valued the individual for his abilities, not his class
background, was in that sense a man before his time, the time when the parties
would decline through their own shortcomings and corruptions.
To turn his back on the party system when the faith of millions in it
was still unshaken, to go "out into the political wilderness," was
therefore regarded as effective suicide. For the millions who took their opinions from the party
leaders, those politicians represented public opinion, whether Stanley Baldwin
with his pipe and his pigs and his limpet-like philosophy of "safety
first"; or Harold Macmillan, who was also trusted because Britain had
"never had it so good" and could have it better with the Tories; or
Harold Wilson, who was trusted less but knew how to "keep his options
open."
Mosley was of another world to these. He stood for action (that word so uncomfortable when
things looked good and would get better). He advanced policies which would be
needed when the spell of the parties had been broken in a nemesis brought by
their failure to change. When Britain faced reality at last, that second great
crisis he had long predicted came with a vengeance. Now it remains, but much
has broken down in Britain since 1930, from the loss of faith in politicians to
the ominous decline in law and order.
The dangers in such a long decline were seen more than fifty years ago
by Mosley himself. "What
I fear," he warned in his Resignation Speech of 1930, "what I fear
much more than a sudden crisis is a long, slow crumbling over the years, a
gradual paralysis beneath which all the vigour and energy of this country will
succumb. That is a far more dangerous thing, and far more likely to happen
unless some effort is made. If the effort is made, how relatively easily can
disaster be averted..."
That call for effort made him less a man before his time than a man of
the moment, devising policies to meet an immediate situation, which he did
again at several moments in his life.
To get Mosley into true perspective: he was both a man of the present
and of the future. But
Britain has lived in the past increasingly, lured by those siren songs from the
Palace of Westminster, those delusions of grandeur which alone remained after
the sun of Empire set, those voices of the media constantly invoking the name
of Churchill while silent over the destruction brought about by Britain's most
disastrous leader. Hence the gap between Mosley and his countrymen. The latter
are left with the crumbling and paralysis against which he warned.
Yet there was more to it than that. There was the deep-seated hostility of those in authority
collectively known as the Establishment and who, as Richard Crossman wrote,
spurned Mosley because he was right. What was there about him which so much
alarmed them? Was it, as the caustic Bernard Shaw remarked, that he
"looked like a man who has some physical courage and is going to do
something, and that is a terrible thing"? Did he have too much driving
force for the men of lethargy in high place -- -had he too much of the air of
Sir Walter Raleigh for the smooth prototypes of late- 20th century British authority,
the mandarin and the pundit?
Was he altogether too disturbing a personality for those who preferred a
"safe" career and easy weekends in the Indian summer of national
greatness, crowned by a place in the Honours List? Was it, as Drennan noticed, that he
was a man "of strong tones, no self-complacent bladder of
conventions," whereas conventional politicians were easier meat, posturing
amid growing decadence according to long-established rules?
And what of his policies?
It has become
fashionable to praise them. For instance, A.J.P. Taylor acclaimed the
Memorandum as offering "a blueprint for most of the constructive advances
in economic thinking to the present day." High praise; why was that
thinking not carried into effect? If Mosley himself was too unorthodox to be
entrusted with accomplishing his own ideas, why was not some other figure
entrusted with them, one of those "safe" politicians whom the
Establishment trusted?
The fact was, as Michael Foot observed, that "mediocrity and safety
first" stood in the way not only of the man but also of the policies. Yet failure to act never solves
problems. Avoiding early effort only makes the effort more strenuous if the
problems, now grown huge, are not to overwhelm society. A long run of good luck
and the peculiar delusion that the Almighty is really an Englishman have
encouraged the national vice of "muddling through." The luck is
running out now, and the problems stand there in gigantic proportions.
What next? How soon will
there be a murmur rising higher for a man like Mosley, his dynamic approach to
life at last forgiven? But men like Mosley are rare. Will one emerge, as the
great voice still echoes down the years, calling "