My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyfor them to say—young man wait, why such a hurry?— it was not so easy for peopleto wait in the slums of Birmingham while we drew our salaries and they drew the dole.I was determined to have a decision between action and inaction, and if the partyrefused to take action, I felt it my obligation to seek other means to secure it. This wasnot a young man's impatience, it was a different concept of public life and duty. Noone understands now better than I do the need often to wait and exercise patience inpublic affairs. I have shown some patience in these long years. It is sometimesnecessary to delay in politics, to manoeuvre and to find other paths to arrive at desiredobjectives. Yet in addition to the ever-present urge of human suffering on a largescale, there was no logical reason at that time why our economy should not have gonequickly to a real collapse.I said in the House of Commons on September 8,1931: 'If we take the first sevenmonths of this year and compare them with the first seven months of 1929, we find a45 per cent drop in exports....' If that process had continued, Britain would have beenruined, and this would have happened, but for the unforeseeable extraneous factorsalready discussed and to which the action of British government made no contributionwhatever. If I had acquiesced in the indefinite delay of action, I should with theknowledge in my possession have been an accomplice to a real betrayal of my country.Britain survived once again by a series of lucky chances—in the long run possiblyunlucky, because the deferment of crisis can make it worse—but to rest a policy onthese shifting sands is to be a fortune-teller and not a statesman.It was a situation in which no one who cared for Britain or its people could just sitback and take it quietly. That is why I rejected the appeal of Henderson, and even ofmy friend Trevelyan and of other good men, not to take the issue to the vote at theparty meeting. Their argument was that the party was with me but was not yetprepared to act; I must play for time. Only twenty-nine voted with me. It remained myduty to try everything possible within the Labour Party before making any other move,to give the rank and file as well as the parliamentary party a chance to take action.This meant going to the Party Conference in October 1930.I have already said that the machinery provided at the Party Conference did not giveparty workers—the devoted people who do the work in the constituencies and securethe return of Labour M.P.s—any real opportunity to express their will. Eachconstituency party had one vote at the Conference for every thousand members or less.This meant that one of the big trade unions could out-number the combined vote ofthe constituency parties, and in practice the trade union vote was in the pocket of afew big bosses. When the vote was taken on the unemployment issue, it was reckonedthat the constituency parties voted ten to one in my favour. Yet a single man with thepower of Mr. Bevin, who had the Transport Workers' vote in his pocket, could outvotethe lot of them; and he did. A story was in circulation directly after theConference that A. J. Cook's taxi broke down, with the result that he arrived late andthat the miners' vote went against us instead of for us. He was often late, but I was toobusy at the time to verify whether it would on this occasion have made all thatdifference. The facts may be left to any historian interested, but it is certainly the kindof thing which could have happened.Even so, the result was a fairly close thing: 1,046,000 votes for us and 1,251,000217 of 424