My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosley14 - ResignationThe Fight at Labour Party ConferenceIN the emergency of 1929 I was able to combine immediate action with long-termplan, tactics with strategy in military terms. I knew by then quite clearly where I wasgoing, and immediate action could therefore serve ultimate purpose. Years of study,and journeys to examine world-wide conditions had brought this clarity. Yet ingovernment I was met with urgent and menacing facts in which theory availed melittle. I had to act, and quickly, yet to retain my sense of direction and final objective.Any plan of action should deal with the immediate and the ultimate, with present factsand long-term objectives. Particularly in a national emergency, we have to act quicklywith any means to hand, sometimes without regard to further considerations. The firstneed is to live; then we can plan the future.My resignation speech and the whole policy on which I resigned from theGovernment in May 1930 were therefore sharply divided between a short-term and along-term programme. This dichotomy is not always clearly understood. For example,the unemployment proposals which Lloyd George produced with the assistance ofKeynes and other economists resembled closely the short-term emergency programmewhich I produced with the aid of the Civil Service. Yet the long-term programme inthe second half of my speech went far beyond anything which Lloyd George or evenKeynes were then suggesting. It was not until 1933 that Keynes began to approachthis position.Liberal thinkers today begin to recognise a need for new and fundamental measureswhich Liberal leaders were far from appreciating in 1930. For instance, Mr. Grimondstated recently that in 1930 I possibly understood better than anyone that 'wageregulation and world-wide changes in the pattern of trade undermined the case for acontinuing free trade by one country alone'. This indicates a considerable advance inLiberal thinking since that period, and is at least partial recognition of the facts whichmoved me to produce the second half of my programme, the long-term reconstruction.That the traditional basis of Britain's island trade was gone for ever and that we mustseek entry into a wider economic community largely insulated from the chaos ofworld markets, are facts now generally recognised; they are admitted in Britain'sattempt to enter the Common Market. My policy in the thirties was a developedEmpire market, and my policy in 1948 was a united Europe, including the Dominionsand other European overseas territories. The short and long-term programme in myresignation speech were two entirely different things, but they coincided rather thanconflicted because the short-term programme could gain time for long-termreconstruction.The long-term policies were direct heresy in terms of that period, although myresignation speech secured very wide support. It must therefore have been the shorttermprogramme, the urgent sense that something must be done and that this was areal effort to do it, which evoked the favourable reaction. It was indeed a wideresponse which cut clean across all parties.There was a real consensus in support of these emergency measures which is shownin the letters and Press support I then received. People do not applaud a speech just206 of 424