My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleywho aspires to first-rate performance with mass audiences; but that, of course, is fareasier. Mr. Asquith used to regard speeches without notes as a rather show-offbusiness, and perhaps he was right. He once explained to me that it was a 'superfluousefflux of cerebral energies', if I remember his words aright.Lively debates followed in the Parliament of 1923 after my parting from Lord Robert,with me consequently attacking the government of which he was a member. I wasalready recorded as being among the twenty-five M.P.s most active in debate. RentRestriction Acts and other measures on the domestic front occupied me increasingly,but any long review of these aspects of my work would overburden this book andfrustrate its purpose of presenting a personal picture. As to housing and rent control,from that day to this I have taken the same line: control, until by drastic nationalaction you have built enough houses. You cannot decontrol and place the tenant at themercy of the landlord while there is still a housing shortage. That policy wascontinually developed, from my original proposal in 1918 for treating the housingproblem as an operation of war, to my modern policy for surpassing the localauthorities with a national plan.Protection was made the main issue of the 1923 election by the Conservativegovernment under Baldwin, after Bonar Law's retirement. Mr. Amery, the chiefapostle of protection, came to Harrow with a great nourish to introduce a newConservative candidate against me. We exchanged amities: he called me a 'Bolshevik',and I called him 'the busy little drummer boy in the jingo brass band'. Then followed aserious and well-reasoned debate on protection before a highly expert audience, forHarrow was inhabited by men and women working in most of the large trading andfinancial concerns of the country. Harrow had a strongly protectionist tradition, as thepre-war member had been one of the leading protagonists of this change in the fiscalsystem.The question of free trade or protection was in those days to many people almost areligious issue. My approach to it was purely pragmatic. Whether you had one systemor the other was a question of circumstance. If it was raining, you needed an umbrella,if the sun was shining, you did not. The wider considerations presented to me bycertain subsequent experiences had not then occurred to me, but even at that earlydate my ideas were remote from the old-fashioned concept of Conservative tariffs. Atthe 1923 election I accepted the classic free trade argument, with an importantaddition or variation derived from the contemporary situation and extending to thepresent day, which I believe I was the first to note in debate. My novel argument wasthat fluctuations in the exchange rate of foreign countries made nonsense of any tariffbarrier, and they were then continually occurring. Mr. Baldwin did not appear tounderstand these rather complicated arguments, though perhaps he was only 'playingstupid', at which he was as apt as some of our ambassadors. I had foreseen the era ofcompetitive devaluation to gain an advantage in the export trade. It is now wellknown that this benefit is secured through a manipulation of subsequent monetarypolicy to prevent the internal price level rising in proportion to the externaldevaluation, as it should in classic economic theory. The final triumph of this subtlemethod, of which the British Treasury became ultimately the most accomplishedmaster, came with Sir Stafford Cripps's swingeing devaluation of our currency in1949, which gave British export trade a substantial advantage for several years. Inrecent times everyone has begun to rumble the trick, and no one can now perpetrate a140 of 424