My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleyI returned to this theme throughout the speech. 'These things should be the subject ofconsideration and research by the most powerful economic machine that the countrycan devise. That is the point of my request at the beginning of my speech for aGovernment machine for governmental thinking. We have all done our thinking inour various political parties. Governments, officially at any rate, have never done anythinking. It is very difficult to analyse and get at the facts of the modern situationunless you have at your disposal the information and the research which GovernmentDepartments alone can supply. That is why it is so essential to have at the centre ofthings machinery that can undertake that work.'There is a case for the Government taking a more effective control of the situation.The first duty of Government is—to govern. The worst thing that can happen to agovernment is to assume responsibility without control.. .. When you are setting outon an enterprise which means nothing less than the reorganisation of the industrial lifeof the country, you must have a system. You must, in a word, have a machine, andthat machine has not even been created.' In this sphere I tried to stir them into actionwith the jibe: 'A great scientist said to me only a few months ago, "In the last thirtyyears the scientific and industrial capacity of the world has increased more than it didin the previous three hundred years", and rather unkindly he went on to add, "Theonly minds that have not registered that change are those of the politicians" '.This was, I believe, the first occasion on which a power house for government wassuggested. I understand there has been some talk of it again in recent times.According to one newspaper report, the power house began and ended with theaddition of one Civil Servant and George Wigg to the Prime Minister's department. Ihave added in recent times to these proposals the suggestion that an expanded andconsolidated Ministry both of Science and of Technology should be constructed,linked directly with the Prime Minister's department suggested in my originalproposals. This would implement my long desire that 'statesmen should live and workwith scientists as the Medicis lived and worked with artists'. In this way we couldsecure a continuous dynamic drive to implement the scientific revolution, an oldstruggle of mine within government and outside since I first clashed with MacDonaldon the National Executive of the Labour Party in an effort to secure adequate fundsfor science.My attempt to secure a national consensus after my resignation in 1930 did not extendbeyond the House of Commons, because from that House it would have been possibleto form not only an adequate but a brilliant administration. There were some absurdand many ineffectual characters in Parliament during the twenties and thirties, butthere was also a considerable number of serious and able men drawn from all parties,who sensed the national danger and were in sufficient agreement, at least on theimmediate emergency, to work effectively together. We shall see that thiscombination was not achieved because in Britain at that time the gravity of theeconomic crisis was never sufficient to break the power of the ruling politicians whocommanded the party machines.The natural instinct is to seek the easy way out in a combination of well-knownfigures who control the prevailing parties, and only to turn to more drastic measuresand dynamic personalities when this fails to work, and it is seen that zero multipliedby zero is zero. In any really serious crisis a still vital and determined people turns to225 of 424