My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleysell so much in conditions becoming continually more impossible. Major crisis willsupersede minor crisis in Britain when any considerable decline of world demandleads to dumping by the industrial giants below production costs; this is alwayspossible to a big country with a large home market, and with a relatively minormargin of export trade, but not for a country which needs to export nearly a third of itstotal production in order to live under the present system at all. The politicians willthen have to do more than exhort some of the most efficient industries in the world tobecome more efficient; it will be necessary by a great change of policy to create theconditions in which British industry can operate.There is an increasing tendency for politicians to blame their own failures on Britishindustry, until we approach the final absurdity of fussy excursions from Whitehall toteach the experienced managers of British industry their business. This is afundamental misconception of government, for it is the duty of politicians to createthe conditions in which industry can be conducted, not to instruct the managers ofindustry in the detailed conduct of businesses in which they are experts and thepoliticians entirely ignorant, a process which adds effrontery to incompetence. Britishindustry is confronted with the necessity of selling more than any other country fromthe basis of a very small home market. In the least world crisis of demand it will facenot only dumping below production costs from countries then obliged to do this andmuch better placed to do it, but also dumping from the developing communistindustrial power with the deliberate intent to break the industrial system of the West;and, in the long run, the exploitation of cheap labour supplied with similar machinesby a profit-seeking finance in the backward countries, for whose development Britishindustry is inter alia more heavily taxed than industry in any other nation.The duty of politicians is to find a solution to these problems, not to play the universalaunt in teaching Britain's expert industrialists the details of businesses which theywere busy mastering while the politicians were equally busy acquiring theirinadequate standards of oratory.The wage-price mechanism and the principle of rewardIt is the principal paradox of this period that the only sphere of our economic systemin which government intervention is urgently necessary is also the only point at whichaction of the State is now effectively inhibited. It is in the region of wages and pricesthat we really require the continual economic leadership of government, but in ourprevailing trade structure any such suggestion has come to be regarded as impious.Eleven years before the possibility of an incomes policy was first mentioned by theBritish Government I suggested State action through what I described as the wagepricemechanism; I devoted a chapter to the subject in Europe: Faith and Plan (1958),and returned to it in Right or Wrong? (1961). Through use by government of thewage-price mechanism the conditions could be created within which industry couldoperate, and then it could be trusted in free competition to look after itself with theminimum of bureaucratic interference. This guiding principle I now more than everstrenuously maintain. Neither our British problem in the short term, nor our Europeanproblem in the long term, will ever be solved without it.To avoid overwhelming difficulty even within an European economy we shall beobliged in the end to secure the payment of the same rate for the job throughoutcomparable industries. On that fair basis of competition, the freer industry is, the410 of 424