The politics of prejudice BOOKS

ROBERT BLAKE

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'The fairy godmother had perhaps denied him one necessary gift but she had given him all, or almost all, the others. Many have risen to the highest place with far less endowment. And even with his unfulfilled promise he must be remembered as one of the most meteoric of parliamentary figures, as the shooting star of politics, and as one who when in office strove for a broad and enlightened policy to which he pledged his faith and his career.'

Thus Lord Rosebery, who knew him well, wrote of Lord Randolph Churchill, but the same could have been written of Sir Oswald Mosley too, for up to a certain point their careers were remarkably similar. Both were of aristocratic origin with deep roots in the -families of Old ngland. Both were brilliant orators with a plendid. turn of invective, epigram and wit. oth had more than their share • of arrogance nd impatience. Lord Randolph regarded with ontempt -those whom he called -`the old men roofing .round the fires of the Carlton Club.' osley' had as little use for.their, equivalent in he Labour party: Both seemed well set for aching the summit of politics when; by the itlgle'rash action of .an-impetuous resignation, hey threw away their chances irrevocably. • There is a further resemblance. Resignation as not in either case fatal in itself. It was hat they did afterwards which sealed their ates. Lord Randolph's behaviour in the House came more and more eccentric and out- geous. Even his closest friends could no longer upport him, and his extraordinary outburst at e exposure of the Pigott forgeries deprived im of Whatever sympathy he still enjoyed. losley made two disastrous blunders after his esignation in 1930. The first and cardinal error as to attempt the foundation of a new party t all; the second was to turn the New party to a spurious copy of an alien model which ourished in parts of Europe for reasons that ad no parallel in Britain. Unlike Maley, Lord . andolph died relatively young, but it seems nlikely that he would ever have been received ad into the Tory hierarchy. Nor, pace Lord

osebery, could he have found a place among

e Liberals. Sir Oswald2Mbsley is With us Still Lit his political activities since 1930 haVe got

im nowhere. Nor can this simply be attributed the Unnecessary cleCision to lock him up rider Regidation..18/3. In many a country those ho got into trouble during the war have been le to stage a comebaCk later; in some it was positive qualification.

The truth is that in Britain during the last ndred -years it .has been virtually impossible pursue a successful political career except rough one of the great traditional political

rties. It is possible to change from one to the her, as both Gladstone'and Disraeli managed do. It is even possible—just possible—to ange from one to the other and back again, Sir Winston Churchill did. But attempts to eak out of the hardened mould of the two- rlY system altogether have, at any rate until )v, invariably failed. Even Lloyd George, the eatest politician (which is not the same as ing the greatest statesman) of the twentieth century, could not achieve this. When he fell, he fell sheer, never to rise again; and the remaining twenty-two years of his life were a frustrated, unhappy epilogue to a glittering career.

Sir Oswald was disliked from the moment that he decided to form a breakaway party. It is one of the oddities of his autobiography (My Life, Nelson 70s) that he never gives any real explanation of his reasons for this decision. After all, he had not been badly defeated in the party conference when he challenged the leadership after his resignation. His opponents had 1,251,000 votes to his 1,046,000. It is true that the electoral system under which that august body operated was just as dotty then as it is now, but, however one interprets the figures, they do not suggest that his cause was entirely hopeless. He agrees that he was 'perhaps too bitterly conscious of the conditions of the unemployed who had trusted us . . . This was admittedly an emotional reaction and no one is' mote convinced than I am that emotion should not hold sway in great affairs.' But he would deny that his action was solely the result of an emotional spasm. 'I had come to the deliberate conclusion that in real crisis Labour would always betray both its principles and the people who had trusted it.'

The events of 1931 seemed to justify this opinion. Mosley quotes a speech of his own at the time: 'Spokesmen of the late Labour government saw in the crisis that collapse of capitalism which they had prophesied with religious fervour . . . The great day dawned and Labour resigned . . . What must we think of, a Salvation Army which takes to its heels on the Day of Judgment?' But those who resign will always find a justification for doing so

in the conduct of those who remain behind. The ' Labour- Cabinet may have behaved

ignobly in 1931 but the party survived to fight another day and to make a notable contribution

Sir Oswald Mosley

to the nation's welfare in the postwar years. One can compare Lord Randolph in 1891:' `So Arthur Balfour is really Leader and Tory Democracy, the genuine article, is at an end' But on one of his definitions of Tory Demo- cracy—`a democracy which supports the Tory Party'—this was anything but true. The British people voted for the Tory party far more often in the forty-six years since his death than it did in the forty-six years of his lifetime.

Mosley was right on the issue which prompted his resignation. In a curiously intuitive way he saw the errors of current economic ortho- doxy. Of course, he was not alone in doing so. As Mr Robert Skidelsky, in his admirable study, Politicians and the Slump, has shown, it is a fallacy to think that Keynes was the only eco- nomist. Mosley and Lloyd George the only politicians, to diagnose what was wrong. On the contrary, there was a very considerable bloc of intelligent opinion on the same side. The trouble was that it had little effect on the official leadership of either of the two major parties: the Conservatives had long been prisoners of Treasury orthodoxy on capitalist, ideological grounds, and Labour was in the same position because, though they regarded capitalism as doomed, they also believed that, until the Labour millennium arrived, the only thing the party could. do was to operate the capitalist system according to capitalist rules. By resign,. ing Mosley hardened this attitude among his colleagues. Had he stayed, he might perhap have persuaded them.

If Mosley had merely resigned, or evert if he had not gone beyond the creation of the New party which fared so disastrously in the election of 1931, his reputation would be very different today. He would have been criticised for impatience, even as Lord Randolph has been. But, unlike Lord Randolph who resigned on an old-fashioned issue of Treasury economy, he would have received the sympathy accorded to one who was ahead of his time. As for the New party, it was a harmless enough affair to begin with, although it is hard to see how Mosley could have expected it to be an electoral success. Certainly there was nothing sinister, authoritarian or racialist about it. W. J. Brown, Harold Nicolson, John Strachey, C. E. M. Joad were personalities about whom very 'divergent opinions could be held, but there was nothing of the dictator in their make-up, although all of them were members of the New party.

The decisive step which made Mosley one of the best-hated figures in public life came after this, and here the parallel with Lord Randolph Churchill no% longer applies. That was Mosley's belief---and his resolve to act on his belief- -that Britain was ripe for a fascist party on the lines of those that flourished in Italy and Germany. One can see to some ex- tent why he thought it might work. The 1930s were a period of widespread disillusionment with parliamentary democracy. There was the same hostility to 'the system,' the same irrita- tion with the older generation, the same impatience, the same streak of violence which we find now; and who can be absolutely con- fident today that constitutional government is going to survive unscathed in the 1970s? The reason for the disillusionment in Mosley's time was in part the same as it is nowadays: the failure or seeming failure of the parliamentary system to solve a major national problem.

For a nation's institutions inspire respect only in so far as they provide a framework within which that nation's internal conflicts and ex- ternal dangers can be contained and overcome.

It is not accidental that the prestige of Parlia- ment was more shaky in the reign of William IV and the early years of Queen .Victoria than it was in the high noon of nineteenth century prosperity, lower during the stresses and strains of the Edwardian era than in the period during and just after the Second World War when the nation seemed to have survived triumphant from a terrible ordeal. In the early 1930s, as in the late 1960s, Parliament's prestige was at a low ebb because it had failed to solve an economic problem, not the same problem, it is true—indeed a much graver one—but the effect was not so very different.

Mosley had, then, some cause to believe that a new demagogic appeal over the heads of the traditional political parties might come off, but in reality the conditions in Britain were not analogous to those in Germany or Italy. In both those countries there was a depressed lower- middle class sinking with bitter resentment down to the economic level of the proletariat. In both countries there was a recent history of extreme nationalism on the part of that class —a nationalism which flourished largely be- cause nationhood had come to both countries only a couple of generations earlier. Circum- stances were ripe for a chauvinist, anti-socialist, anti-trade-union appeal against parliamentary institutions, with only shallow roots and little appeal to an upper class which anyway in Ger- many was strongly authoritarian by tradition. The British upper class, whatever its party colour, has been basically Whiggish in outlook

for over 250 years. It viewed) the manifesta- tions of Mosleyitint with increasing distaste, and the liberal tradition was further offended by his anti-semitic policy.

Admittedly .Mosley denies that he was anti- semitic. It may be true that he got on well with individual Jews, and it is undoubtedly true that he would never, even given supreme power, have aimed at the appalling 'final solu- tion' adopted by Hitler. But this does not alter the fact that in his memoirs he slides over certain aspects of British fascism, including paisages from his own speeches which leave a very nasty taste in the mouth. Mr Bernard Levin and others have rightly chastised in the letter columns of The Times the reviewers who have taken Sir Oswald's retro- spective account as gospel without checking what he actually said at the time. No one who refers to his hecklers as 'the sweepings of the continental ghettoes hired by Jewish financiers' can seriously complain. if he is regarded as an anti-semite. The facts, for those who are interested, can be easily ascertained from Mr Colin Cross's impartial and wholly untenden- tious account in The Fascists in Britain.

Mosley's memoirs are full of amusing stories, lively portraits, and contain some interesting information. But the book should not delude the reader into believing that Mosleyism was other than a thoroughly evil manifestation of the human spirit or that the political obscurity into which its author descended was anything but thoroughly well deserved.