The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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      If Dalton thought that the Cabinet was ‘full of overworked men growing, older, more tired and more timid with each passing week’, the dashing Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was seething with energy and radical solutions. After several frustrating months working with Jimmy Thomas, who was not only ‘growing old and tired’, but also more lachrymose, and was inclined to drink too much, Sir Oswald Mosley produced what he declared was ‘a coherent and comprehensive conception of national policy’, which he sent to Ramsay MacDonald on 23 January 1930. The ‘Mosley Memorandum’ asserted that the government needed to take charge of the economy, with a new department set up under the direct control of the Prime Minister to ‘mobilise national resources on a larger scale than has yet been contemplated’. Britain’s long-term economic problems would be met by systematic planning to create new industries and revitalise existing ones, while the immediate problem of unemployment would be solved by an ambitious three-year £200-million programme of public works which would cut through all the red tape involved in local authority schemes, and make roadbuilding a national responsibility. In addition, the school leaving age should be raised and retirement pensions paid earlier — shrinking the workforce from both ends. It amounted to a ‘British equivalent of the Russian “Gosplan”’, thought Fenner Brockway. It didn’t really, though it was in favour of pretty heavy — if somewhat ambiguous — state intervention. But for Beatrice Webb its proposals were ‘as grandiose as they are vague’.

      Nevertheless, the Cabinet debated Mosley’s package at length over the next few months. Snowden was obdurate: investment capital was limited, and if it was spent on ambitious public works schemes it would not be available to make Britain’s export industries competitive. A loan such as Mosley proposed would push up interest rates and destroy overseas confidence. MacDonald was ambivalent: he was depressed by Snowden’s ‘hard dogmatism expressed in words & tones as hard as his ideas’, yet was unconvinced that massive public spending was the answer. By February 1930 the government had already sanctioned £37 million worth of road improvement programmes but only £27 million worth of schemes had been put in hand, and only 1,620 men had been given jobs.

      Mosley was coldly furious. Sneering that a Napoleon could spend £200 million in three years if he wanted to, he quoted Keynes against the Treasury orthodoxy, and resigned on 20 May 1930. His resignation speech to the House on 29 May, during the debate on a Conservative vote of censure on the government’s unemployment policy, was a powerful indictment: present government policies were providing jobs for only 80,000 people a year, at a time when unemployment was over 1.75 million and still rising. It was a brilliant performance, and the sharp-tongued diarist and tireless social reformer Beatrice Webb, who recognised that Mosley possessed both ‘a young man’s zeal’ and the ability to ‘use other men’s brains’, wondered, ‘Has MacDonald found his superseder in O.M.?’ MacDonald turned in a lamentable performance, seeming completely out of his depth in answering his critics.

      The government survived nevertheless, and MacDonald reshuffled. Thomas was shoved off to the Dominions Office (though he was later allowed to retain responsibility for rationalisation), MacDonald put himself at the head of a panel of Ministers set up to develop the government’s unemployment policies; that barely noticed rising star Major Clement Attlee, who considered that Mosley ‘always speak[s] to us as if he were feudal landlord abusing tenants who are in arrears with their rent’, replaced him at the Duchy of Lancaster.

      Mosley, showing his arrogance and fatal lack of political judgement, founded his New Party in February 1931, since in his view the ‘old men’ in the ‘old parties’ had signally failed to deal with the problems of the postwar world, and thus a new party must be formed ‘not to introduce Utopia but to prevent collapse’. His would be a party of neither right nor left, composed of young men with an agenda of parliamentary reform and economic planning, which sought to ‘apply scientific method to public affairs to determine precisely what things must be done’, untrammelled by party loyalty or political dogma, ready to take ideas from ‘anyone so long as they are realist — be they Gladstone, Marx or Joseph Chamberlain’. Its role would be somewhere between a parliamentary ‘ginger group’, an intellectual think tank and a ‘new movement’ designed to ‘sweep away the mockery and pretence of the old game of party politics’. Nevertheless the party formed to save Britain in its hour of crisis attracted only three Labour MPs, one of whom, John Strachey (a former member of the ILP and future Communist supporter who had resigned with Mosley when his memorandum was rejected — he had been Mosley’s best man when he married the daughter of Lord Curzon) soon left. The New Party, which appeared to have ‘no vision beyond the immediate emergency’, largely disintegrated after failing to win any seats in the 1931 election. In October 1932 Mosley, who felt that the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had the vision and drive the British government lacked, founded the British Union of Fascists.

      ‘Parliament itself is too big, too clumsy and too inexpert a body even to begin to tackle the complex problems of a modern community,’ John Strachey and C.E.M. Joad (a maverick philosopher, writer and self-styled polygamist who became a household name in the 1940s as a member of the BBC’s ‘Brains Trust’) had written in an article on parliamentary reform for the journal Political Quarterly in 1931. And in the crisis years of the early 1930s setting up committees to root around trying to find ways out of the blizzard was not indeed the prerogative of Parliament alone. As a young economist, Colin Clark, was to observe, ‘The most recent universal remedy is apparently contained in the word “Plan”.’

      ‘Everyone has a Plan,’ complained the Labour weekly the Clarion, though it considered most to be little more than ‘undergraduate work’, seeking compromises rather than the root-and-branch reconstruction of capitalism it deemed necessary, for which the Soviet Five Year Plan was something of a model. Indeed, there was soon an organisation the rationale of which was planning. On 14 February 1931 a 20,000-word ‘National Plan for Great Britain’ was published as a supplement to the Week-End Review, a magazine started by Gerald Barry and the editorial team who had all resigned from the Saturday Review when Beaverbrook converted to his policy of Empire preference. This plan was much needed because, in the view of Barry and its author, Max Nicholson, the country was in the hands of ‘elderly men with elderly ideas’, working with a ‘Heath Robinson contrivance composed of the clutter of past generations and tied together with rotten bits of string’. The ‘drift’ and ‘stagnation’ must stop, since ‘a great part of the present troubles of this country and the world are due to the failure to adapt erratic and conflicting national policies into a Plan’. The result was wide-ranging and prescient calls for an overhaul of the machinery of government, turning the Post Office and the Ministry of Works into autonomous public utilities — indeed, a measure of devolution from Whitehall and Westminster to industry the creation of a Bureau of Statistics to inform planners, designating national parks, trying to attract tourists, throwing a green belt around London and redeveloping the South Bank of the Thames. And that June, intending to lobby to turn vision into policy, the Political and Economic Planning (PEP) group held its inaugural meeting, and started to issue regular reports and circulate digests of these reports as ‘broadsheets’ entitled — what else — Planning. With a growing number of research groups — fifteen within a year — beavering away on various topics such as town and country planning, fuel policy, housing, the press, consumer protection and government spin, PEP saw its role as being ‘the ginger group of gradualness’, in the words of Israel Sieff, vice-chairman of Marks & Spencer, who took over as chairman in December 1932, aiming to influence opinion-formers of any political hue in ‘a crusade for continuous change’.

      Unemployment hit the trade union movement hard, with falling numbers of members and a greater proportion of the wages of those in work going to support their unemployed brothers and sisters. However, until 1931 the movement had few alternatives to propose, and generally felt that the Labour government was doing its best — certainly no other party would do better — and that in general economic decisions were beyond its remit. But Keynes’ attack on the Gold Standard, and the suspicion that Treasury economic orthodoxy was likely СКАЧАТЬ