My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleyMy policies were then produced firstly by my own capacity of creative thought,secondly by recognising quickly the value of new ideas produced by other people andby synthesising their thinking with my own, thirdly when it came to government by adynamic drive for action, fourthly by patient but firm effort to secure team work andto get from each his best contribution. The capacity for creation and for synthesis areboth essential qualities, and it is difficult to judge which is the more important.Sometimes I am almost inclined to follow Aristotle in according the highest merit tothe ability to see a connection between phenomena which is not generally apparent,and this is essentially the process of synthesis. That the capacity to synthesise—totake ideas and weave them into a harmonious whole of effective action—is for astatesman even more important than creative thought is an arguable proposition. Yetthe qualities of creation and of synthesis are by no means antithetical, and should becombined; add dynamism, and at the appropriate time we can have the action which acountry or continent requires.The familiar process of denying a man credit for his work is difficult in my case,because my creative thinking on different occasions has been assisted by entirelydifferent teams. It is therefore only necessary to contrast the present recognition of mywork with the treatment it received at the time. Our thinking was serious and our liveswere dedicated during the 1920s, in striking contrast to the squalid frivolity of theattacks upon us; ideas and labours were alike greeted with sheer silliness. When suchserious effort is simply assailed with the shrill squeals of cretinous children thecountry is heading for trouble; and today we have got it. The silliness of one periodcan produce the disaster of the next, and now that we are near disaster it may beinteresting, and possibly instructive, not only to see what we were trying to do but toassess the dominant forces which were determined to prevent anything being done.They were described in my platform speeches of the period as King Bank and KingBunk; financier and Press Lord.The following quotations mark the contrast between present recognition and pasttreatment. They relate more to the second phase of my constructive thinking, theMosley Memorandum, and my subsequent resignation speech, than to theBirmingham proposals we are considering in this chapter. By 1929 I had the benefitboth of the American experience and of my work as a Minister, with the help of theCivil Service. My developed policies at the later date were naturally more mature thanthe Birmingham proposals.A. J. P. Taylor in his English History, 1914-1945 wrote of me: 'His proposals weremore creative than those of Lloyd George and offered a blueprint for most of theconstructive advances in economic policy to the present day. It was impossible to saywhere Mosley got his ideas from. Perhaps he devised them himself. If so, they werean astonishing achievement. . . evidence of a superlative talent which was later to bewasted.'R. H. S. Crossman, when Chairman of the Labour Party and not yet burdened with thehigh office in government his talents later commanded, wrote of me in the NewStatesman on October 27,1961: 'Revealed as the outstanding politician of hisgeneration. . . . Mosley was spurned by Whitehall, Fleet Street and every party leaderat Westminster, simply and solely because he was right. . . . Mosley was prepared todiscard the orthodoxies of democratic politics and to break with the bankers of high157 of 424