My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleythat had a mass revolutionary following. A surprise was the remarkably favourablereaction of the Labour Party when I joined them. The more I was attacked by theConservative press, the greater the enthusiasm of the Left.Doctrinaire socialism of the old school made only slight appeal to me, but socialismas I defined it two years later in the Birmingham proposals as 'the conscious controland direction of human resources for human needs', I could accept. This definitionwould still be acceptable to me with a slight change of emphasis: more reliance ongeneral direction of the state rather than detailed control, and the substitution ofpurposes for needs in order to recognise that all achievement is the result only ofintensive effort. The conscious direction of human resources for human purposes Ishould still regard as a good general principle.It may well be an error to use the term socialism because it is an emotive word whichrepulses many people, and is capable of so many different interpretations that in theend it has come to mean almost nothing except a mild shock to complacent guardiansof the status quo. Perhaps this view is too much the converse of Dr. Daltou'sobservation to his young admirers in some interval of discussing one of hisforthcoming budgets with lobby correspondents: there may not be much in socialism,but a lot of people seem to want it. The just mean is surely to approach economicproblems which are the subject of religious emotion with a method more practical andrealistic; pragmatic, if the word were not now devalued by contemporary reduction ofthe language of action to the uses of absurdity.My inclination in British politics was always toward the guild socialists— thenrepresented by such thinkers and writers as G. D. H. Cole, Hobson and Orage—ratherthan to state socialism, whose exponents were the Webbs and the Fabians. Thetradition of the medieval guilds in England, of the Hanseatic League and thesyndicalism of the Latin countries was much nearer to my thinking at that time, and Ireturned to it in my European Socialism during the 1950s, when I proposed a workers'ownership of industries already nationalised, and, in the event of their success, theextension of the principle to other fully developed industries; measures accompaniedboth by vigorous encouragement of a completely emancipated private enterprise in allremaining industries and also by a reversion to private enterprise in cases whereworkers' ownership failed; a pragmatic method implementing the test of practicalresults. When I joined the Labour Party, and later, I was not closely in tune with themandarin attitude of state-control which reached its summit in the thinking of theWebbs.It was the dynamism of the Labour Party at that time which really attracted me, andthis came mostly from the rank and file. The Clyde M.P.s represented the drive toreform, and they soon became some of my closest parliamentary associates. Before Ijoined Labour they had invited me to Glasgow and together we had seen the slumswhose abolition had been promised in 1918 but which still existed in 1924, and inlarge areas of the country are still there in 1968. Similar visits to Liverpool with JackHayes, the ex-policeman and Labour Whip, and later intimate knowledge ofBirmingham gave vivid proof in these execrable housing conditions that all thepledges given to the war generation had been betrayed. This perhaps more than anyother single factor was the motive power which took me into the Labour Party. Therewere many intellectual arguments which I had already myself developed frequently in145 of 424