My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleynew men and new forms, and once the necessity is plain, no people is more capable ofdecisive action than the British. That this did not occur in 1931 was in no way due tothe leaders of the National Government. Everything they did would, even in the quiteshort run, have made matters much worse by a system of 'stop'—as it would now becalled—so drastic that it would have inhibited any subsequent 'go'.Four events were responsible in the 1930s for the postponement of economic crisis:the devaluation of the pound in 1931, Roosevelt's doubling of the price of gold in1934, the armament boom, and the Second World War. The British Government didnot mean to devalue the pound, the old lady fell downstairs; she did it again in 1949,and repeated the performance at the end of 1967. For reasons I analysed in some ofmy earliest parliamentary speeches, the accidental devaluation gave a fillip to ourexport trade and temporarily reduced unemployment. Roosevelt's doubling of theprice of gold was entirely fortuitous to the British Government; it had not evenoccurred to MacDonald at the world economic conference he called—appropriately—in the Geological Museum of South Kensington, and the liquidity problem wasequally remote from the consciousness of Mr. Baldwin; but it had the same effect asthe discovery of new goldfields in the nineties—a boom which temporarily floated theworld economy off the rocks on which Britain was stuck fast. The effect ofRoosevelt's action had worn off by 1938; hence the rise in British unemploymentfrom 1,456,000 in 1937 to 1,700,000 in 1938, a warning to all who believe that purelymonetary measures can remedy a real economic crisis. However, the armament boomwhich preceded the Second World War then took over the care of the shipwreckedmariners who were called British Government, and the final outbreak of war sweptboth them and their economic troubles away in a maelstrom whose final result themodern world may shortly encounter. These were events unique to that period; a thirdworld war is not now available to solve our economic problems without blowing upthe world in the process.Both the main parties had already proved themselves impotent to deal with theunemployment question, and indeed equally unconscious of the fundamental situation.Labour was then moved by the warmer human feelings, by a true compassion, but waseven more fuddled and ineffective in method, and was betrayed by a cynical, arrivisteleadership. Conservatism was a little less incompetent, but more coldly selfish in itsservice of particular rather than of national interests, more indifferent to masssuffering, more stubbornly unimaginative in resistance to new ideas, more dullyresentful of dynamic measures and men, more inveterate in the search for mediocrityin leadership; Conservatives could only awake in a situation as desperate as war,which even induced them to accept Churchill, whom they had so long excluded. Itseemed to them in the early thirties that the worst of the crisis had passed, and officewas beckoning them across the ruins of the Labour Party. 'Danger gleams likesunshine to a brave man's eyes,' said Euripides, and office glitters like a neon light tothe Tory eye in opposition, when Labour government fails.Yet in a real crisis no serious person could for a moment believe that a ToryGovernment, or a coalition, could do much better than Labour. The basic errors andthe end results are both the same. Tories believed in doing nothing —nothing real—and Labour in office was soon scared into the same position. Neither of the old partiescould meet such a situation, although their rank and files are patriotic people whoaccording to their beliefs give generous and disinterested service. Some national226 of 424