My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosley'No question could arise of one firm being assisted as against another by the grantingof these credits. Their present wage burden would remain the same, and their presentcompetitive basis would be preserved.... The credits granted would be earmarked asassistance to wages, and could in no way be a subsidy to industry.... Wages could beforced up in the highly skilled trades as their production increased simultaneouslywith rises in the less-skilled and lower-paid occupations.'These policies were accompanied by a considerable degree of socialist planning, suchas import boards, for which I was not primarily responsible. The begetters of thismethod were two distinguished civil servants of the First World War—E. F. Wise andE. M. H. Lloyd—who at this later period were much associated with us.It is not possible here to give more than a disjointed and crude summary of proposalswhich themselves were crude. Yet they contain inter alia a still valid idea for aneffective reflation in a dirigiste economy. This attempt 'to see that new money goesinto the right hands' and thereby to avoid the dangers of inflation and consequentcollapse inherent in the present hire-purchase system still has some merit. It must beremembered that the whole concept of the creation of purchasing power to evokeproduction was at that time rejected out of hand; even Keynes went no further thanurging on quantity-theory lines an adequate supply of credit to prevent a fall in theprice-level, credit which would only be available to producers and general borrowersthrough the ordinary banking mechanism. Much later came hire-purchase on a greatscale in a sporadic, almost convulsive effort of a failing system to furnish the marketwhich the normal purchasing power of the people could not provide. Yet even todayno effort has been made to meet the danger of a creation of credit without plan whichthe Birmingham proposals then foresaw. The point could come at which the hirepurchasesystem can collapse like a house of cards; it may be the first symptom ofultimate crisis.Viewed against the background of Labour policy at that time, these proposals wereessentially a challenge to the 'inevitability of gradualness', as the Webbs called it.They formed a revolutionary plan for action over the whole field of national life, andtraversed completely the previous concept of the Labour Party that developingindustries should be taken over one by one as they became ripe for nationalisation, or,as I later put it, that a Labour Government should hold the baby for capitalism bynationalising industries with full compensation just as they became obsolete.It was clearly right for me to affirm in introducing the Birmingham proposals: 'Wecannot say in face of the present situation, after a hundred years of evolutionarysocialism all over the world, the starving worker of today need not worry because hisgreat-grand-children will live in the millenium'. Yet it must be admitted that theywere in some respects crude as well as revolutionary, and that they were based on asectional rather than a national appeal. My thinking of today, both more advanced andmore sophisticated, and devised to serve the whole nation rather than any section orfaction, would condemn them as an elementary effort of an immature mind. In somerespects they were superficial and marred by youthful exuberance and social passion,but even prejudiced judgment will find it difficult to deny to them a measure ofcreative thinking and a considerable anticipation of the future, certainly a morescientific approach than society ultimately accorded to dangers and problems which atthat time we alone foresaw.153 of 424