My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyvotes against. The trade unions were divided. Some of their leaders were strongly infavour of action and I was on good terms with them. The trade unions and theconstituency parties together sent me back to the National Executive, of which I hadbeen a member for several years, and Thomas was voted out of the Executive. We didnot directly clash, because I was on the constituency list and he was on the tradeunion. Yet it was a fair test of our relative positions, because the trade union vote inthose days was decisive on both lists, and I was returned by trade union votes evenmore than by constituency party votes. It was remarkable, as some of the mostpowerful trade union leaders, like Bevin, were bitterly against me.Much more notable, because it was a spontaneous demonstration by the rank and file,free from the control of both party and trade union bosses, was the reception Ireceived from the Conference; it put me in a strong position which a few extractsfrom contemporary descriptions will illustrate. Fenner Brockway wrote of thereception given by the Conference to my speech: 'The delegates rose en masse,cheering for minutes on end. I have never seen or heard such an ovation at a LabourParty conference.'Emanuel Shinwell said: 'I shall never forget the occasion when Mosley was cheered tothe echo at a Labour Party conference at Llandudno'. John Scanlon wrote in his book,The Decline and Fall of the Labour Party: 'By the time Sir Oswald rose to make hisspeech . . . the volume of cheering which greeted his rising showed the amazing holdhe had acquired on the minds of the delegates. ... Sir Oswald's vote was the biggestchallenge ever delivered to the governing machine. .. .' John Hammond wrote in theSocialist Leader: '. . . The cheers echoed round him and he was hailed by wildlyexcited delegates as Labour's next Prime Minister'.Why then did I not hold on and play for time, in the confidence that the party wouldeventually come my way and I could do what was necessary? This course wasstrongly urged upon me, and I have been much blamed for not taking it. After all theGovernment was already near to defeat, and a few more votes that afternoon wouldhave meant its reconstruction, probably under Henderson as Prime Minister and withme in charge of economic policy. Was it not then madness not to have a little patienceand to wait a bit? So ran the argument against me, and it had much force.I was strongly, perhaps too bitterly conscious of the conditions of the unemployedwho had trusted us, and I felt the betrayal of that trust was a dishonour. Thisadmittedly was an emotional reaction and no one is more convinced than I am thatemotion should not hold sway in great affairs. You may rightly feel the extreme ofhuman compassion, but you should not allow yourself to be in a condition of nervousexcitement when you have to operate. However, there was more to it than that; I hadbecome convinced that the Labour Party was incapable of decisive action.I had come to the deliberate conclusion that in real crisis Labour would always betrayboth its principles and the people who had trusted it. The whole structure of the party,the character and psychology formed over years made this inevitable. The LabourParty could not, by reason of its very nature, be the force the British peopledesperately needed to save them. A year later I was proved right in the first test of thisopinion in the conditions of that time. As crisis developed, Labour simply broke andran. The leaders went over to the enemy and the rank and file dissolved into fragments218 of 424