My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyable document and illuminating" '. Keynes supported me throughout this period, andeven later went so far as to say to Harold Nicolson he would have voted for the NewParty. My own memories of this brilliant and charming person with the gentle mannerand razor-keen intelligence, consist mostly of lunches ha his house, sometimes aloneand sometimes with the occasion decorated by the exquisite presence of his wife,Lydia Lopokova, of the Russian ballet.A formidable array stood for action, but it was thwarted by the machines the partieshad created over years and still more by the type of men the parties produced. Therank and file of Labour, like the rank and file of the Conservative Party, were the saltof the earth, but it was the nemesis of their complacency in a relatively quiet periodthat they could only produce leaders capable of misleading them. Bonaparte's jibe thatthe English are lions led by donkeys has often been true of the Labour and Tory rankand file. Those leaders would have disappeared and the machines would haveconsented to action or have crumpled if the crisis had become graver, as it did in othercountries; but it was only just sufficient in England to break Labour and to install inits place a combination of MacDonald and Baldwin: it was that multiplication of zeroby zero which finally produced the great nullity of Britain's present condition.After Thomas's convivial tour through Canada it was at least clear that he was notgoing to persuade the main capitalist countries to accept our goods as a favour toBritain, and few things appeared more improbable than the bureaucrats conductingnationalised industries in Whitehall or thereabouts making them more competitive onworld markets than they were under private enterprise. In any case, the first hesitantsteps in this step-by-step socialism had yet to be taken. Labour was therefore thrownback on its original theory—most remote of all from any reality—of effective actionthrough international socialism. There I had already seen not only in depressingtheory but in deadly fact what the prospects were. I had been sent as a representativeof the Labour Party to a meeting of the Second International in Brussels some timebefore we took office.The fact that some of the other Europeans were of an altogether different orderintellectually from the leaders of the Labour Party at that time in no way affected thebasic situation that it would at best take centuries to achieve anything throughinternational socialism. The Frenchmen were interesting to meet, Leon Blum, inparticular, a highly intelligent Jew; but even in the much stronger position of a Frencheconomy, which in comparison with our top-heavy island was relatively selfcontained,neither his intellectual attainments nor his international affiliations savedhim from short shrift at the hands of the bankers a few years later when he becamePrime Minister of France. Vincent Auriol, afterwards President of France, spoke atthese meetings on finance and economics with singular lucidity. Listening to hisexposition, I wondered with youthful and still partly insular curiosity, whether hisperformance would reinforce Curzon's description to me of a French statesman,stating with irrefutable logic a case which was afterwards invariably disproved byfacts. The one thing clear at the Second International was that no action of that augustand well-intentioned assembly was going to solve the immediate problem ofunemployment in Britain.This view of the Second International was emphasised by a visit to Berlin in thecompany of MacDonald shortly before he formed his second Labour Government,199 of 424