A Greater Britain

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Map: the peace settlement in Abyssinia, 1936

Chapter 9

Map: Spain, August 1936

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Map: The proposals of the Birdwood Commission, 1937

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Map: Central Europe, May 1938

Chapter 18

Map: Central Europe, August 1938

Chapter 19

Map: Central Europe, November 1938

Chapter 20

Map: the Dissolution of Yugoslavia, 1938-1939

Chapter 21

Map: Europe, 1939

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Map: the World, 1976

Epilogue

Appendix 1: The Mosley Cabinets

Appendix 2: 1976- Where are they now?

Foreword

The modern attitude towards Oswald Mosley in Britain is a fundamentally self-satisfied one. The failure of British fascism is a comforting reminder that the United Kingdom is a special case; unlike on the continent, Westminster with her long parliamentary tradition, moderate political discourse and stable party structure was fundamentally infertile ground for fascist beliefs or anything approaching them. Put simply, fascism is somehow alien to the phlegmatic and sensible Englishman.

This moral certainty is often expressed in a very British way; mockery. The uniforms, jackboots and ceremony of the Blackshirts and by extension the fascist movement in general are often seen as something worthy of ridicule. As PG Wodehouse had Bertie Wooster say to the thinly-disguised Oswald Mosley figure Roderick Spode in The Code of the Woosters;

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?'

Popular anecdotes indulge this comfortable stereotype. One story goes that when a Lancashire fascist boarded a bus in uniform, many passengers offered him money assuming he was the conductor; others relate the story of when a band of Fascists kidnapped the communist leader Harry Pollitt on a train in Liverpool, apparently intending to punish him by forcing him to spend a weekend in North Wales.

Even when Mosley’s political thought is taken seriously, it is dismissed as having had no influence, or for that matter substance. Wodehouse’s Spode, for example, is essentially a human gorilla devoid of anything beyond animal cunning. Bernard Levin wrote in the Times in the late 1970s that "The Fascist movement of the time offered little but Blackshirts and Jew-baiting", and Oswald Mosley himself is remembered more in popular consciousness as a jackbooted thug rather than a serious politician, at home in a street-fight rather than in Parliament. The dismissal of Mosley as a violent thug deeply offended the man himself. As he commented in his autobiography My Life,

"Why should a man with this electoral record suddenly take leave of his senses and with much trouble and some expense assemble the largest audiences seen in Britain, not for the purpose of persuading them, but of beating them up?"

From the vantage point of the early 21st century, it is easy to regard Mosley’s entire career from the perspective of hindsight, characterising him as an extremist fool and brawler with few serious solutions to offer for the problems Britain then faced. But this is not how Mosley was viewed at the time. In the 1920s Mosley was the rising star of the British political scene, a man marked for greatness along with other young MPs such as Harold MacMillan, Aneurin Bevan and Anthony Eden. One journalist described him as "The most polished speaker in the House of Commons"; a contemporary account of his rapturous reception at a Labour Party meeting described how "a young man with the face of the ruling class in Great Britain but the gait of a Douglas Fairbanks thrust himself forwards... The song ‘for he’s a jolly good fellow’ greeted [Mosley] from two thousand throats."

Mosley’s views also had popular purchase. In 1930 he was elected to Labour’s National Executive Council and his ‘Mosley Manifesto’ was only narrowly defeated in a vote by the Party faithful. His mixture of Keynesian, ILP Socialist and protectionist policies appealed to a broad cross-section of the Party, and had he been a more patient man then the Labour leadership could have been his for the taking.

As we know, things did not turn out that way; Mosley abandoned Labour in a fit of pique and subsequently began his long journey to the political fringes and infamy. But what if things had been different?

On one level, this seems like a frivolous question.  Yet counterfactual, or alternative, history can play an important role in the understanding of history, as well as providing entertainment. Several prominent historians such as Niall Ferguson, John Keegan and James McPherson have edited and contributed to compilations of counterfactual history essays, and recently the 'Quarterly Journal of Military History' published an entire issue devoted to the subject. Counterfactuals are also commonly employed by economists to estimate the effects of specific policies and programmes. This practice is not without its critics however. The Marxist historian E. H. Carr dismissed the idea as 'a mere parlour game' while his contemporary and fellow Communist E. P. Thompson went even further, lambasting the concept of counterfactual history as 'Geschictswissenschloff, unhistorical shit'.

Is this judgement fair? It depends on the counterfactual. All too often, they can become a wish-fulfilment exercise, where the politically motivated can look at the consequences had decisions been taken in the way that they had hoped for. The anti-clericalist Charles Renouvier’s 1876 novel Uchronie is a classic example of this problem. This book presents a counterfactual history of Europe where Christianity fails to establish itself, leading to an entirely peaceful and secular Utopia. While entertaining in itself, Renouvier’s work cannot be described as plausible. Arguably it is a perfect example of the ‘parlour game’ Carr sneered at.

Counterfactuals do not have to be approached this way however. Properly researched and rationally approached, a counterfactual can be used to pare away hindsight and discern both the likelihood of certain events and the background forces that influence them; to use a historical example, if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not been assassinated, would the First World War still have broken out? An excellent example of this approach is Professor Robert Fogel’s Nobel prize-winning study on the economic impact of the advent of rail transportation; Fogel painstakingly constructed a counterfactual model in which the railways were not built, and then compared the results with the real data.

Academic counterfactuals can be of use then, but what about literary ones? By their nature they tend to value entertainment over historical rigour; this need not be a problem however if they touch on an important truth. The effect of a good counterfactual is to encourage the reader to take a step back from their natural pre-conceptions and avoid thinking of historical personalities in lazy, two-dimensional terms; what sort of chain of events could leave future generations thinking of Winston Churchill as a villain, or George Washington a tyrant?

Thinking in terms of counterfactuals challenges comfortable notions such as time’s arrow or the idea that the world which we live in is the most likely of all possible outcomes. It easy to forget that our own history contains more than its fair share of improbable events; to use one example, the history of the Falklands war would seem ridiculously jingoistic if written as a counterfactual! It allows the historian or interested reader to determine which events were random or avoidable, and which really were the result of TS Elliott’s "vast impersonal forces".

In the case of Oswald Mosley, it demonstrates how a man vilified as the "worst Briton of the 20th century" in a recent poll could very easily have been regarded as one of the most influential politicians of his era; not through a drastic change in personality or a sweeping change affecting the whole nation, but by a single point of departure that gradually changes more and more as time passes. A famous nursery rhyme sums the effect up;

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a nail.

In Mosley’s case, his lost nail comes in the form of a handful of votes cast differently in the November 1924 General Election...

Chapter 1

I feel the hand of History on my shoulder

(Taken from My Life by Oswald Mosley, Longman 1961)

"…Six weeks before the election in November 1924 I entered the fight in Birmingham. I wanted to give some striking service to the party which had so well received me. The Chamberlains and their machine had ruled Birmingham for sixty years, first as Liberal-Radicals and then as Conservative-Unionists. Their party machine was at that time probably the strongest in the country. We had six weeks in which to smash it. I chose to fight Neville Chamberlain, who sat for the working-class constituency of Ladywood in the centre of the city; his brother Austen was the neighbouring M.P. and their names and abilities made them a formidable combination. Our own organisation had a paying membership of some two hundred, but when we started the canvass only three elderly women and two young men would accompany us….However, my raging speaking campaign, both indoor and outdoor, and the superb work done by Cimmie in leading the canvassing team, eventually turned the scales. It was a joyous day when in the courtyards running back from the streets in the Birmingham slums we saw the blue window cards coming down and the red going up….

…The count was a drama: there were two re-counts. First I was in by seven, then Chamberlain was in by six, and finally I was in by fifty-three[1]. It was alleged by some of their people that votes had disappeared, and uproar broke out with men fighting in the crowded public gallery and people pointing to the floor as they bellowed—'That one's got 'em in his pocket'. It appeared from our enquiry that their allegations could not be sustained. I was eventually declared the winner, and we left the Town Hall at six o'clock in the morning to find an enormous crowd in the square outside which had waited up all night to hear the result; they were singing the Red Flag. They seized me and carried me around with an enthusiasm which deeply moved me…"[2]

(Taken from Labour; Drift and rediscovered purpose, 1924-1939 by Simon Greene, CUP 1982)

"…Mosley’s return to Parliament enabled him to further develop his ideas in the period while Labour was in opposition, and in 1925 he published a series of pamphlets outlining his economic views… He also devoted much time and effort towards securing Birmingham as a Labour stronghold, touring the constituency parties and overhauling their internal machinery- and in the process creating for himself a personal following. Mosley’s actions in support of the workers during the General Strike also hugely enhanced his standing in the city, moving Bernard Shaw to write;

You will hear something more of Sir Oswald before you are through with him. I know you dislike him, because he looks like a man who has some physical courage and is going to do something; and that is a terrible thing. You instinctively hate him, because you do not know where he will land you.

Mosley’s effort was amply rewarded in 1929, when Birmingham saw a huge increase in the Labour vote and Mosley saw his own majority jump into the thousands… A trip to America in the summer of 1926 also developed his theories; as he put it ‘America had given me a vision, and I shall never forget the debt’… When the 1929 election brought Labour to power Mosley was offered the post of Lord Privy Seal[3], effectively acting as a coordinator for the effort against unemployment. That Mosley was given such a trusted role shows how highly he was thought of by the Labour hierarchy at the time, and also amply demonstrated the growing following he was beginning to attract within the Party."

(Taken from My Life by Oswald Mosley, Longman 1961)

"…Labour at last had the great opportunity in the victory of 1929, because we could be sure enough of Liberal support at least to deal with the immediate unemployment problem. Here was the chance to do what we had promised after long years of effort. What then was the result of all these exertions, requiring some personal sacrifice in leading an arduous existence of incessant struggle in a storm of abuse instead of the good life we so much enjoyed and for which we had ample means? The answer presents a degree of frivolity and indeed of absurdity which it is difficult to credit. Before I became a Minister I used to say that Bernard Shaw's caricatures of the mind, character and behaviour of politicians were hardly funny because they were too remote from reality. After a year in office I felt inclined to say: Shaw's plays are an understatement…

I was not just the young man in a hurry, as they tried to pretend, or the advocate of 'wild-cat finance', in the phrase of Snowden. My plans were based on the new orthodoxy, of which they understood nothing, and had the backing not only of the dynamic genius of the older generation, Lloyd George—with all the immense authority of his peacetime achievement in office and of his wartime administration- but of the master of the new economic thinking himself, J. Maynard Keynes."

(Taken from British Unemployment, 1919-1939; a study in policy by Andrew Jones, CUP 1985)

Mosley’s inclusion within the Cabinet initially seemed to promise victory for the radical reformers, but these hopes were soon dashed. The proponents of economic orthodoxy were firmly entrenched in their control of policy, and Snowden’s installation as Chancellor meant that almost any proposal he did not personally approve of could be easily buried… Proposal after proposal was ignored by MacDonald and vetoed by Snowden on cost grounds, and by the early months of 1930 Mosley found himself utterly sick and disillusioned with his role in government. His last attempt to ram home his own policy came in May, when he submitted a detailed memorandum to the Cabinet outlining a complete policy shift towards radical interventionism and Keynesian economics. It received a frosty reception, especially from Snowden…. The document was then leaked to the press, possibly by Mosley, although he denied this... Angered by accusations of underhand activities and frustrated by the lack of progress he was making, Mosley resigned on the 16th May, remarking to a friend; they wanted me to think the unthinkable, and now they criticise me for it! The long decline of the Labour government had begun.

(Taken from My Life by Oswald Mosley, Longman 1961)

"…The reception of my resignation speech by Lloyd George, Churchill and other speakers in the subsequent debate is well known, but a selection of letters I received from members of all parties may add something. They have never been published before, though none of them was marked private. They reveal the welcome from all sides of the House to an effort at action after years of drift;

'Your speech was the best I have ever heard in the House, and I imagine must be one of the best of parliamentary performances.'—Brendan Bracken.

'The best and most constructive speech I have heard in the House. It was fair and it was splendid.'—Clement Davies.

'It was, I suppose, the greatest parliamentary tour de force this generation will hear.'—Robert Boothby.

'A really great parliamentary performance ... I was enormously impressed by it... I don't believe there is anyone else in this House who could have done it.'—Violet Bonham-Carter.

'May a great admirer express his great admiration.'—John Simon.

Finally, the letter which pleased the speaker most came from his mother in the gallery, saying that 'people of all shades of opinion' thought it 'the finest speech heard in the House for twenty years'.

I depart from the usual practice, to which we English rightly adhere, for reasons I gave before; the whole requires an occasional immodesty. Certainly my life was abruptly changed, at least for a happy interval, by the effect of that speech. I had now moved from the left to the centre of British politics, where in underlying though sometimes unrecognised truth I have remained ever since. As Dalton wrote later: 'Men and women went to Mosley because something had to be done to save society'. The centre and even the right looked towards me, as well as all the more realistic and ardent spirits of the Labour Party…."[4]

Chapter 2

"I did not come into politics to change the Labour Party. I came into politics to change the country."

(Taken from Labour; Drift and rediscovered purpose, 1924-1939 by Simon Greene, CUP 1982)

Mosley’s resignation speech- a parliamentary triumph- was a long-premeditated claim to leadership designed to appeal to the political centre. Henceforth he constantly spoke about energetic leadership and decisiveness. Working with an increasingly significant parliamentary following, Mosley continued to emphasise his original policy of Keynesian monetary reform, loan-financed public works and massive state action", all of which would be accompanied by a general reorganisation of the cabinet and civil service intended to improve governmental efficiency…

…interestingly considering his later criticism of the concept of National Government in 1931, in his period out of office Mosley was careful to cultivate contacts with figures from across the political spectrum- Macmillan and Oliver Stanley from the Conservatives, and the likes of Nicholson and Sinclair from the Liberals. There was even talk of a cross-party young alliance against the older generation of politicians, although this was a pipedream and inevitably came to nothing… Such talk does demonstrate however that Mosley’s radicalism was part of the general post-war shift in British politics, as the rising stars of the 1920’s increasingly chafed at the relaxed style of their Edwardian forebears…"

(Taken from The Crisis of 1931 by George Barlow, Picador 1990)

"From May 1930, Mosley formed another small group of parliamentary rebels, and attempted to use the extra-parliamentary Party to impose his policies upon the cabinet… To some extent, these pressures could be ignored or contained. The TUC, ILP and Mosleyites tended to be mutually antipathetic, although from November the latter two had forged links and attempted to coordinate their efforts, albeit in an ineffectual way…

Criticisms from all three groups aggravated existing uneasiness within the Labour party. While Party loyalty and the recognition of parliamentary difficulties kept discontent in check to a certain extent, ministers were subjected to a constant stream of complaint from the parliamentary Party, the NEC and Party committees… The near success of a Mosleyite motion at the Party conference in October[5] and its originator’s subsequent election to the NEC confirmed both Party discontent with government unemployment policy and the existence of a major potential threat to the leadership…"

"After his victories at the Party conference, Mosley found himself in a position that his impulsive nature naturally rebelled against… He could be reasonably confident in the fact that he commanded great support in the Labour Party, and his confidants constantly rammed home the point that all he needed to do to progress was to continue his opposition to MacDonald and patiently wait until the Government drifted into a crisis…

Mosley’s impatience was never far beneath the surface however, and in an ill-advised speech at Edgebaston in February 1931 he lashed out at the cabinet, calling Snowden a dull, lethargic mediocrity amongst other terms. His comments angered many within the party and enraged the government, who saw his criticism as ungentlemanly and a direct challenge to the Prime Minister. In April Mosley’s impatience reached its peak, when he even went as far as seriously considering abandoning the Labour party and forming a movement of his own[6]… While Mosley was quickly dissuaded from his quixotic plan by being convinced that his grass-roots support would not follow him outside Labour, the incident shows how his instincts even at this stage were towards decisive action, even to the point of being self-defeating. It was a character trait that would dog Mosley throughout his political career…"

(Taken from The Encyclopaedia of 20th Century British Politics, Eds. June + Peterson. Longman, 1999)

"MAY REPORT, THE: Report issued in July 1931 by the Economy Committee on National Expenditure, chaired by Sir George May. The committee warned that in 1932 the government would have a budget deficit of £120 Million, a gap that would have to be closed by radical budget cuts. Publication of the report caused an economic and political crisis in Britain, and led directly to the fall of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government as the retrenchment proposals irrevocably split the cabinet."

(Taken from The Crisis of 1931 by George Barlow, Picador 1990)

After an ‘impassioned appeal’ by MacDonald for acceptance of his proposals, each Cabinet Minister was asked to express his or her view. In the event, ten ministers supported the unemployment benefit cut… Ten were opposed. With such an even split, the Cabinet immediately agreed upon resignation. It was decided that the King should immediately be informed, and advised to summon a Baldwin-Samuel-MacDonald conference the following morning…MacDonald arrived at the palace at 10.15 pm, looking scared and unbalanced". The King urged him not to resign, but instead to consider the national alternative, although he admitted that it seemed unlikely that the Conservatives and Liberals would acquiesce to such an arrangement[7]…

…Macdonald then telephoned from the palace to arrange a meeting that evening with Baldwin and Samuel, before returning to Downing St…. The Conservatives and Liberals arrived around 11 pm. Baldwin had brought Chamberlain, who attempted to convince the uncertain MacDonald to remain in a National Government. Although MacDonald would likely have few parliamentary supporters, he could ‘command strong support in the country’… Samuel strongly supported Chamberlain, while Baldwin said nothing. Only after the meeting when pressed by Chamberlain did he express approval, adding that he had remained silent because the appeal to MacDonald seemed hopeless…. Ironically it was Baldwin’s attitude that finally decided Macdonald. Interpreting his silence as indicating disapproval[8], MacDonald despondently informed the palace that he intended to resign the following day, and the prospect of a Conservative-Liberal emergency government became a reality on the 25th…" 

(Taken from Labour; Drift and rediscovered purpose, 1924-1939 by Simon Greene, CUP 1982)

"The resignation of MacDonald and the abrupt entry of Labour into opposition necessitated a general reorganisation of the Party. At a meeting called on the 25th August MacDonald’s resignation was accepted. The contest for the Party’s leadership seemed destined to be between youth and experience, the extroverted radical Mosley being pitted against Arthur Henderson, a veteran widely regarded as a ‘safe pair of hands’.

In the event however, the long-promised showdown between Labour’s establishment and radical wings never materialised. Henderson was naturally inclined not to seek the leadership[9], and his belief that the Party could not be reformed in time to avoid a crushing defeat at the next election made him go as far as to tell friends that the position would be a ‘poisoned chalice’. Against the advice of his allies then Henderson indicated to Mosley on the evening of the 30th that he would not contest the leadership. The following day the Party returned Mosley as leader by a huge margin… Amongst the general jubilation a single delegate rose and began shouting ‘An English Hitler!’ He was swiftly silenced by his neighbours[10]…"

Chapter 3

Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile.

(Taken from The Crisis of 1931 by George Barlow, Picador 1990)

When Parliament reconvened after the summer recess, it was to a completely changed political situation, and to a looming crisis. The new government was determined to stay on the gold standard, and government MP after government MP stood to declare their financial orthodoxy. The opposition response was muted. Mosley used his first Commons speech as leader to ram home his scepticism about government policy; why is the government so worried about inflation in a period where prices are sharply falling?" he asked, to an uneasy silence from the opposition benches behind him… Labour disquiet was soon swallowed by outrage however. After Mosley’s speech the former Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald rose from the backbenches and pointedly gave his blessing to the new Government, first to a stunned silence and then to boos and shouts of ‘Judas!’ from around him and cheers from the Government benches[11]… for a time there was thought to be a real possibility that MacDonald would join the new Government; however this was never more then a persistent rumour, and one quashed by MacDonald’s own decision to retire at the next election."

(Taken from Labour; Drift and rediscovered purpose, 1924-1939 by Simon Greene, CUP 1982)

Mosley’s insistence on his anti-gold standard position in early September began to cause serious divisions within the Party. Even the far-Left began to question his vehement belief in the total wrong-headedness of Government policy, though many Labour MPs were distinguished by their total lack of economic knowledge and followed Mosley on trust.  By the third week of September Labour’s perceived saviour of a month before appeared to be courting disaster, amid mounting moves by sections of the Party to stop the train wreck. The Unions in particular were beginning to turn against Mosley, going as far as to send demonstrators to meetings at which Mosley spoke…[12]

(Taken from My Life by Oswald Mosley, Longman 1961)

…Our meetings had been orderly except for a lively heckling, which helps rather than hinders a speaker. But the climate changed completely when a Union man threw eggs at me during a speech in Newcastle… John Strachey reported afterwards that following the incident I remarked that 'This is the crowd which has prevented anything being done in England since the war'. This is true, but it is clear that I did not mean they were merely averse to change. What I meant then and mean now is that the long-experienced and entirely dedicated agents and warriors of the vested interests always play on the anarchy inherent in sections of Labour to secure the confusion, disillusion which is essential to their long-term plan. In a crisis they will attempt to prevent any major reform or ordered progress through the medium of the Labour Party.

(Taken from Labour; Drift and rediscovered purpose, 1924-1939 by Simon Greene, CUP 1982)

On the 20th September however Mosley’s gamble paid off handsomely. The Cabinet was left with no choice but to accept the Bank of England’s advice to suspend fixed-price gold sales, and so the government finally did what it was formed not to do".  To the surprise of all those who had been predicting disaster, the apocalyptic results of the move resolutely failed to materialise… Several days after the gold standard was dropped, Snowden’s prediction of unemployment