My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyof discussion would introduce a new business method and sense of executive urgency.Once again the forces of disruption might be canalised for the purpose of construction.With this addition I would stand for these proposals today. I believe they would bothmake the work of Parliament more effective and shorten the time the House must sitwasting Ministers' time in ill-informed discussion. The right to question Ministers, toexpose abuse and, if necessary, to dismiss government by vote of censure would bescrupulously preserved. In the long interval, I have formulated a number of moreelaborate schemes, though none of these denied the basic democratic right of thepeople freely to elect and to dismiss their government by their votes. Yet for thepractical purposes of getting things done smoothly, efficiently and fairly, in the viewof rational men, I now think none were so good as these original proposals. We wantsomething which will work with the minimum of friction, and these proposals for thereform of government and the revision of parliamentary procedure may yet meet therequirement of a period when action becomes a necessity.They were resisted by men who then could not see the first crash of their economic,financial and party system which was then just four months ahead. We had reachedthe great divide between the old world and the first effort of renaissance.My struggle in office to secure an adequate machinery of government was continuous.It is now on public record that in 1929 I had advanced proposals for an 'economicgeneral staff'. In my resignation speech a year later I went straight to the point: 'Thefirst issue between the Government and myself arises in the purely administrativesphere of the machinery to be employed in dealing with the problem. I submit to theCommittee that, if anyone starts in any business or enterprise, his first considerationmust be the creation of a machine by which that business can be conducted; and,when a government comes into power to deal with unemployment, its first business isthe creation of an efficient and effective machine. That machine, in my view, does nottoday exist, and I will say why.' I continued: 'My admiration for the Civil Service hasvastly increased since I have been in office. But to achieve a policy of this nature it isabsolutely necessary that the whole initiative and drive should rest in the hands of theGovernment themselves. The machine which I suggested ... was a central organisationarmed with an adequate research and economic advisory department on the one hand,linked to an executive machine composed of some twelve higher officials on the other,operating under the direct control of the Prime Minister and the head of the CivilService himself, and driving out from that central organisation the energy andinitiative of the Government through every department which had to deal with theproblem.'It is admittedly a complex organisation. I was told that to carry such an organisationinto effect would mean a revolution in the machinery of government. ... To grapplewith this problem it is necessary to have a revolution in the machinery of government.After all, it was done in the War; there were revolutions in the machinery ofgovernment one after the other, until the machine was devised and created by whichthe job could be done. Unless we treat the unemployment problem as a lesser problem,which I believe to be a fallacious view, we have to have a change in the machinery ofgovernment by which we can get that central drive and organisation by which alonethis problem can be surmounted.'224 of 424