My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleySnowden's appearance was interesting, because he had an impressive, splendid face,much cleaner cut and more determined than that of MacDonald. He had an intellectualcontempt for MacDonald, since within his Gladstonian limits he had a lucid intellectand was a powerful debater. The result was that he could not think why MacDonaldwas leader instead of him. The reason was possibly an accident in youth which hadcrippled him, and he could only walk with the aid of two sticks. This did not appear tohave embittered him at all, for his ascetic countenance would light up with a smile ofextraordinary charm. In politics he was completely imprisoned in the dichotomy ofhis type: there is heaven where we want to go, but this is the earth and this is what wehave to do; heaven being a vague dream called socialism and the earth being theTreasury view of capitalism in the narrowest sense. It remains a commonphenomenon within the Labour Party; the complete division of mind and spiritbetween some ideal world and the practical thing which has to be done tomorrow. Yetby reason of the precision and clarity of his mind, Snowden in practical affairs wasalways separated from MacDonald, who by then had become hopelessly woolly. As aresult, the relations between them were always bad and this used to worry MacDonald.In expansive mood after dinner one evening he suddenly said: 'All might have beenwell if I had just thrown my arms around Ethel years ago'. This concept of the way towin a colleague on the distaff side was the only contact I ever observed betweenMacDonald and the classic world.Snowden before my arrival had nothing more serious to knock over than the livingwage policy of the I.L.P. He did not find this difficult because a minimum wageconsiderably in excess of prevailing wages in industries competing for world marketscould easily be shown to cost us out of those markets, and to produce an instantaneouseconomic crash. The dilemma of attempting to move towards socialism in one smallisland entirely dependent on world markets was quickly exposed. My arrivalconfronted him with a completely new animal in the Labour Party, the pragmatic man.I was interested neither in the I.L.P.'s dreamy vision of a socialist world nor innineteenth-century capitalism which was breaking down before our eyes.The Birmingham proposals for all their complexities said in effect: let us meet theunemployment problem, which is the crux of the whole matter, here and now; nothingmatters immediately except that. We can meet it by a series of measures some ofwhich are socialist while others are not, but which all mean the active, dynamicintervention of the State under government leadership. To Snowden and his advisersin the Treasury this view became anathema. In the living-wage policy he had adummy to knock down, a pushover for any dialectician, but now he found a seriousargument in a sphere of which he was entirely ignorant. He was familiar withMontagu Norman and the Treasury thinking of that time, but the thinking of Keynes,or the comparable thinking of the Federal Reserve Board economists, was a closedbook to him. When I won the I.L.P. for the Birmingham policy he had a serious caseto answer, and he did not like the author of his trouble, though we always remained ina reasonably polite personal relationship.Clifford Allen, the Chairman of the I.L.P., also did not care to abrogate the idealisticfabric of policy he had so long and carefully woven in favour of policies which soughtresults without dogma. He was sincere and clearheaded, but his health had beenruined during his imprisonment as a conscientious objector in the First World War.Essentially the type of eminence arise, he worked assiduously behind the scenes and185 of 424