My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleycharacter within the Labour Party. The trouble is that they have the power to obstructbecause their removal can bring the party down, and a Labour Prime Minister isconsequently not an executive but an equilibrist. His only necessary quality is thecapacity to balance on the tight-rope until the whole crazy show falls off.Worse even than the obstructive bureaucrat is the Thomas type within the party. ThePrime Minister is always liable to have imposed on him a drunken clown as acandidate for high office of vital importance to the whole nation. Soon this freakimported to serious affairs by party exigencies will cut his own throat as surely as thepiglet venturing to swim in deep water; this was the inevitable end of the Thomas case,and in the process much damage was done to the national interest. Yet the PrimeMinister in his cage of party interest and sentiment cannot resist without breaking theparty, until nature has taken its course and the harm has been done. The reasonsinhibiting MacDonald from sacking Thomas were his power in the trade unions andhis backing in a strong section of the parliamentary party. MacDonald's own positiondepended on the Thomas element in the party, and although they were so different incharacter, they were also united by old and strong bonds of friendship and mutualinterest. Why should MacDonald break these ties and risk his position on account ofan internal debate on economics, of which he understood all too little? Better toretreat like a cuttle fish behind an ink-screen of indignation about the Memorandumand thus avoid all decision.Thomas too at almost every weekly meeting had been faced with the painful necessityof giving a decision in a discussion of which he understood nothing. Almostinvariably there was a point at issue between me and the brilliant Civil Servant whowas his chief assistant, an able but in my view very conservative gentleman. At theend of the debate the adviser would turn to Thomas and say in effect: may we thentake it, sir, that your decision is so and so? Thomas then had the choice of playingsafe and awarding the palm to the Civil Service, taking a risk and backing the wildman with his Birmingham and I.L.P. ideas, or telling the truth and saying in hisvernacular: 'I ain't understood a bloody word'. He always played safe. So didMacDonald, with the inevitable result not only of my resignation but of the ultimatedoom of his government. For my part I felt quite simply that if I lent myself anylonger to this cynical harlequinade I should be betraying completely the people towhom we had given such solemn pledges to deal with the unemployment problem. Iresigned in May 1930, and explained my proposals to deal with unemployment in theHouse of Commons on May 28.I was not just the young man in a hurry, as they tried to pretend, or the advocate of'wild-cat finance', in the phrase of Snowden. My plans were based on the neworthodoxy, of which they understood nothing, and had the backing not only of thedynamic genius of the older generation, Lloyd George—with all the immenseauthority of his peacetime achievement in office and of his wartime administration—but of the master of the new economic thinking himself, J. Maynard Keynes. As allmy papers were destroyed by war action while I was in prison, I have to rely onmemory for the writing of these memoirs; happily, however, extensive checking hasproved it reliable even in events of many years ago. In the matter of Keynes I amindebted to Robert Skidelsky. He wrote that I sent the Memorandum to Keynes for hiscomments—I presume this was in order, because he was in a semi-official positionand the document had not yet gone to the Cabinet: they both agreed "it was a very198 of 424