My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosley10 - Birmingham ProposalsShaw and the 'Rich Socialists'The General StrikeDURING the decade 1920 to 1930 I produced a series of constructive economic andadministrative proposals; they have been generously recognised by eminentauthorities in the present period. It is said now that I was a generation ahead of mytime, and the validity of some of these policies seems to be widely admitted. Mygratification at this belated recognition is only disturbed by the thought that I havedone far more valuable creative work in recent years than I did then, but if it againtakes thirty years for it to be understood I shall be exactly a hundred when time is ripe.However, the crisis which I believe to be inevitable can at any time bridge the gulfbetween thought and action, because it will render necessary new policies. The crisisof war interrupted and retarded the slow movement towards my thinking in the thirties,and conversely a crisis of the economy can accelerate the acceptance of new ideas atthe present time.The interval between 1924 and my return to Parliament in 1926 was valuable to thedevelopment of my political thinking. The General Election of November 1924 liftedMr. Baldwin to power with a secure majority, while in Birmingham I was put out ofParliament by a narrow margin. I was free for intensive reading and reflection for thefirst time since my period in hospital and of quiet administrative work at the end ofthe war, and also able to travel through India and America and gain further valuableexperience.The background of my economic thinking was first developed by a study of Keynes—more in conversation with him than in reading his early writings, for he did not writeGeneral Theory until the thirties—and later by my American journey, which broughtme in contact not only with the brilliant economists of the Federal Reserve Board butalso with the American technocrats, very practical people who were paid theenormous sums which the United States even then accorded to its most valuabletechnicians.Much of this constructive thinking remains relevant, mutatis mutandis, to the situationfacing our country in 1968. I published first a pamphlet summarising the Birminghamproposals which I had stated in detail in a speech at the I.L.P. Summer School inAugust 1925, and had discussed during debates in the previous April at the I.L.P.Conference. At about the same time I engaged in a controversy in The Times with thebanker, Robert Brand. My own chief contributions to the Birmingham proposals were(1) The requirement of consumer credits in addition to producer credits and theircombination with national planning. (2) The recognition that banking and credit werethe key points of the economy and that their command was essential to any effectiveplanning by government. (3) The possibility of maintaining an expanding islandeconomy by monetary manipulation behind a floating exchange rate.The first point anticipated by many years and in a far more scientific form thehaphazard provision of hire purchase by private enterprise, which had long existed ona petty scale almost at pawnbroker level, but was finally expanded into a vast systemin response to the necessity for creating an industrial market by placing purchasingpower in the hands of the people. The second forestalled by thirty-four years Aneurin150 of 424