My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleyIt may be argued against my position in 1930 and subsequently that my speeches weretoo alarmist and appeared to suggest a collapse which did not occur. Yet the collapsewould already have occurred, but for the intervention of science and the SecondWorld War. Also, in order to awaken a dormant country it may be necessary to speakin strident tones, though I believe it always best, in the long term, to tell the countrythe plain truth. I know this view separates me entirely from the modern school ofstatesmanship in more than one country, which believes that you must always tell thepeople the opposite of the truth, say you are going to the left if you mean to go to theright and vice versa. Yet government by small tricks may be all right in small periodswhen everything is more or less running itself, but in great periods when great actionis necessary some voice must be raised which tells the people the whole truth androuses in them a will to act, a passion for high achievement; particularly is this true ofthe British people.I would plead guilty if at any time I exaggerated the case in order to get the peoplemoving, but on the record it does not seem that I was much to blame on this score. Myconsidered judgment in my resignation speech when I was speaking to my largestaudience in Parliament and to the whole nation outside, was contained in thefollowing passage: 'This nation has to be mobilised and rallied for a tremendous effort,and who can do that except the government of the day? If that effort is not made, wemay soon come to crisis, to a real crisis. I do not fear that so much, for this reason:that in a crisis this nation is always at its best. This people knows how to handle acrisis, it cools their heads and steels their nerves. What I fear much more than asudden crisis is a long, slow crumbling through the years until we sink to the level ofa Spain, a gradual paralysis beneath which all the vigour and energy of this countrywill succumb. That is a far more dangerous thing, and far more likely to happenunless some effort is made.' It is the tragedy of present Britain that in politics this isprecisely what has occurred.There have been a variety of reasons for this disaster to which I then and later drewattention, and will again consider in this book together with remedies for the presentsituation. We are now engaged with the clash of the thirties between the neweconomic thinking and the old methods which bear such heavy responsibility forpresent troubles. It led to a deep rift within the Labour Party between those whoregarded the problem in national and those who saw it in international terms. Westood firmly on the ground that it was possible to solve the unemployment problem bypurely national action, and our opponents took the traditional view that Britain wasentirely dependent on an inflated export trade; on world markets and therefore oninternational finance. The division between international socialism and imperialsocialism —as I called it years before anyone had ever heard of national socialism—was inevitable.Internationalism and socialism were contradictions in terms. How could we makesocialism in one small island, depending entirely on selling goods in open competitionon the markets of the capitalist world? Was this to be done by nationalising industriesone after another over a long period of time, and haying them more effectivelyconducted by clerks in Whitehall than by the businessmen who had created them?Meantime, these industries were rapidly succumbing on world markets in face ofever-gathering difficulties, while unemployment mounted at home. Were we to waitwhile the propaganda of the Second International not only captured the great capitalist214 of 424