My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyas the different form of my writings shows. The elaborate organisation could maintainequilibrium, but did not secure sufficiently the progress which is not only humanlydesirable but essential in a world driven forward by science. I wrote in The GreaterBritain that 'industrial organisations will certainly not be confined merely to thesettlement of questions of wages and of hours. They will be called upon to assist, byregular consultation, in the general economic policy of the nation.' Yet the idea oforganisation was over-emphasised and the direction of organisation was insufficientlyconsidered, and this was my view of the Italian concept as well as the writings ofRaven Thomson, as I told him at the time.It is at this point that I consider my post-war thinking concerning the wage-pricemechanism far surpasses my thinking within the Labour Party and also within thefascist movement. The concept of the wage-price mechanism is less bureaucratic andmore dynamic; with far less detailed interference, it maintains a continuousmomentum in the achievement of the ever-higher standards of life which are essentialto absorb the production of modern science. It has the conscious direction and definedobjectives which the Corporate State to a large extent lacked. Therefore in my opinionthe wage-price mechanism surpasses the Corporate State in economics as effectivelyas the doctrine of higher forms transcends my thinking of the thirties in theideological sphere.Two valuable ideas remain from the corporate period. The first is the State strongenough to keep the ring for producer and consumer in face of the large combinationsof industrial and financial power; also—always inherent in my thinking—not onlystrong enough to hold the ring for science, but wise enough to make the support ofscience a first priority of the State. The second is the State regarded as an organicbeing which represents the past, the present and the future of a civilisation, an entitywhich asks the individual to recognise what he owes to those who preceded him andto posterity; an idea of the State as trustee for the whole course of a people and notmerely as the servant of transient whim and fashion which may destroy what sacrificeand heroism have created.Thus we return to the determination to achieve national renaissance in the thirties,rising in phoenix form from the flames of the explosion against conditions humanlyintolerable and scientifically unnecessary, which seemed to us an expression ofbrutality and stupidity. Men and women simply felt that Britain had been great andshould be great again, greater still. We owed it to the country we loved and to themind, will and spirit of the English which derived from three thousand years ofEuropean history.I tried at the end of The Greater Britain to express this dedication in languagecombining the real and the ideal: 'In a situation of so many and such diversecontingencies nobody can dogmatise upon the future. We cannot say with certaintywhen catastrophe will come, nor whether it will take the form of a sharp crisis or of asteady decline to the status of a second-rate power. All that we can say with certaintyis that Britain cannot muddle on much longer without catastrophe, or the loss of herposition in the world. Against either contingency it is our duty to arouse the nation.To meet either the normal situation of political action, or the abnormal situation ofcatastrophe, it is our duty to organise. Therefore, while the principles for which wefight can be clearly described in a comprehensive system of politics, of economics279 of 424