My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyit contains a concept of the state which enters the sphere of ideology. The originalcorporate thinking belongs to Mussolini, and in England its chief protagonist wasRaven Thomson. My own effort was then on the lines of my thinking in theBirmingham proposals and in my resignation speech, which seemed to me to offer amore direct and thorough solution of the prevailing economic problems. Throughoutmy subsequent life my ideas evolved much more in the direction suggested by thatthinking than in the tradition of the Corporate State.What attracted me in the ideological aspect of the Corporate State was a governmentstrong enough to keep the ring for the producer and to protect the interests of theconsumer. Just as the centralised authority of the Tudor kings protected the citizensfrom the depredations of the robber barons, who had previously held all private lifeand enterprise up to ransom, so at this stage of society would the corporate systemprotect and promote a genuine private enterprise in face of the large industrialcombines and concentrations of financial power. In The Greater Britain (1932), Iwrote that government or the corporate system would 'lay down the limits withinwhich individuals and interests may operate. Those limits are the welfare of thenation—not, when all is said, a very unreasonable criterion. Within these limits, allactivity is encouraged; individual enterprise and the making of profit are not onlypermitted but encouraged, so long as that enterprise enriches rather than damages byits activity the nation as a whole.'Defining the Corporate State I wrote: 'In psychology it is based on teamwork; inorganisation it is the rationalised State. ... It is this machinery of central directionwhich the Corporate State is designed to supply ... it envisages, as its name implies, anation organised as the human body. Every part fulfils its function as a member of thewhole, performing its separate task, and yet, by performing it, contributing to thewelfare of the whole. The whole body is generally directed by the central drivingbrain of government without which no body and system of society can operate.'I related the corporate machinery suggested to my previous ideas in government andto other English thinking: 'The idea of a National Council was, I believe, firstadvanced in my speech of resignation from the Labour Government in May 1930. Theidea has since been developed by Sir Arthur Salter [a distinguished Civil Servant, atone time head of the Civil Service] and other writers. A body of this kind stands orfalls by the effectiveness of the underlying organisation. It must not consist of casualdelegates from unconnected bodies, meeting occasionally for ad hoc consultation. Themachinery must be permanently functioning and interwoven with the whole industrialand commercial fabric of the nation.'There are many ideas of the corporate system which can make valuable contributionto the present situation. For instance, some of the policies of Mussolini's CorporateState were in certain respects practically indistinguishable from co-partnership, whichhad previously been advocated in England by Lord Robert Cecil and myself, and inrecent times has been rediscovered by the young Liberals. Quaint indeed are thedivergencies caused by muddled thinking and obscure terminology in the course ofcontroversial politics.My criticism of the corporate system in the light of experience and further thought isthat it was too bureaucratic and insufficiently dynamic; in fact, I felt this at the time,278 of 424