My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleywhich summon to the head of affairs an entirely different type of man; this is evenmore valid in a world of fast-moving and decisive events. In other European countriesnothing changed until things went badly wrong, either by reason of defeat in war oreconomic crisis, but then things happened very quickly. It would be possible to showon a graph in almost every case that the rise of unemployment coincided with majorpolitical change; the degree of crisis—either in terms of unemployment or socialdisintegration, or both—was much more severe than in Britain.We shall see that the unemployment figures in Britain never reached half the crisislevel prevailing in other countries where things happened, and then, for extraneousreasons already discussed, went sharply down from the high plateau of 1931 and 1932,when the nation was beginning to turn toward action. That is why the British, whoalways take it easy when they can—but are particularly determined and vigorouswhen they cannot—took the quiet way out through the National Government of 1931,which was a combination of parties controlling the extremely powerful partymachines. The power of the party machines in Britain only yields to the storm of greatevents. The two wars brought to power leaders who were by no means favourites ofthe party machines and would almost certainly otherwise never have led the nation.Unemployment in Britain stood at well over a million during most of the twenties.Thereafter it rose sharply to 2,642,000 in 1931, the year of my discussions with LloydGeorge and others, a rapid rise which indicated that we were heading for aconsiderable national crisis. Yet it was nothing like sufficient to secure the majorchange we contemplated, and people were still inclined to think that quite normalmeasures could meet the situation. Unemployment reached its peak in the next year,1932, when I launched the new movement, but by then it was clear that the rate ofincrease was slowing considerably. Things had temporarily taken a turn for the better,which reassured most people; but I remained convinced that crisis would eventuallyreturn in an aggravated form, for the basic reasons I have described and on which Irested my whole action.Unemployment fell, except for one fluctuation, from 2,756,000 in 1932 to 1,408,000in 1939—the opposite conditions to those which make possible either a nationalconsensus or the arrival of a new movement in power obtained, for such eventsdepend entirely on the economic situation. This invariable rule has become almostexaggerated in the modern world, where fluctuations in the popularity of governments,statesmen and parties, are shown to follow even in minute detail the oscillations ofeconomics. So far no economic variation in the post-war world has been large enoughto bring changes comparable to those of the twenties or thirties, but the more sensitivestate of public opinion at the present time indicates an even more acute liability tochange in any form of crisis. In the affluent society, a man who has a full platewhisked away from in front of him can be quicker to react than the down-and-out ofthe pre-war period who was accustomed to protracted conditions of unemploymentand poverty. It is the ruined middle class which makes revolutions, and in pre-warterms nearly everyone is middle class now.The rise of new parties on the Continent during the twenties and early thirtiescoincided exactly with the decline of economic prosperity. Both Germany and Italysuffered economic collapse, accompanied by an acute inflation which dislocatedindustry, caused widespread unemployment and ruined the middle class. The Italian231 of 424