My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleyAlready the national housing scheme appeared in my programme, as opposed to slowdealing through multitudinous local authorities. Munitions were produced like that inwar, so why not houses in time of peace? Slums were to be abolished, and back-tobackhouses. Land was to be taken for this and other social purposes by compulsoryacquisition. The profiteer and jerry-builder were to have short shrift. Electricity andtransport were to come under public control; already the debate between public andprivate ownership seemed to me irrelevant. It was just a question of which methodsuited best in circumstances which were constantly changing. In my programmehealth and child welfare schemes anticipated by many years anything effective beingdone in these spheres, and the chance of education from the cradle to university wasto be provided for all who were capable of using it.Finally, the home market was to be sustained by a high-wage system intended toproduce an equilibrium between production and consumption. I was already awarethat the cost of production depended not so much on the rate of wage as on the rate ofproduction in mass-producing industries. It was thinking of this nature which morethan forty years later sent two successive British governments bunking and shufflingtoward the European Common Market, where mass production for an assured marketis possible. In elementary form many of my later ideas were already born, and it isindeed surprising in retrospect that the Conservative Association of Harrow was atthat time prepared to play the midwife.The opportunity then was to keep and to develop the British Empire for constructivepurposes, not only to preserve the Empire, but to make it capable of giving to ourBritish people and to all its diverse races the good life which its latent wealth madepossible. I expressed my chief principles of the 1918 election with the slogan'socialistic imperialism'. It was an ugly phrase, but it was pregnant with the future. Letno one ever say that the combination of the socialist and nationalist ideas was aforeign invention copied by me. Neither I nor anyone else had ever heard at that timeof obscure soldiers in the German and Italian front lines who afterwards built politicalparties. Nor, to do them justice, had they probably ever heard of the Conservativecandidate for Harrow. Such thinking was in the very air of Europe, thrown high by theexplosion of the war, yet by inherent reason of national character it later tookcompletely different forms in the various countries. In other nations total collapsebrought it to a rapid, rough and rude fruition.Even in the tranquil air of Harrow the sober burgesses were able to support such novelthinking in the flash of post-war enthusiasm to meet the problems of peace. It was not,after all, so strange to them, for these roots were already in English soil through thecombination of radicalism and imperialism in the Birmingham school of JosephChamberlain; also, in the continuing interplay of British and continental thinkingduring all creative periods, the same tendency had been reflected in Bismarck'sadvanced social programme under the aegis of the strongly nationalist state of Prussia.The most irrational antithesis of our time always seemed to me to be the conflictbetween the progress of the Left and the stability of the Right. From this early stagemy programme cut right across it. Later I was to express in far more conscious formthe concept that progress was impossible without stability, and stability wasimpossible without progress. Synthesis, eternal synthesis, is the solution to many ofthe false dilemmas of our time. In an elementary form these ideas were present in my78 of 424