When Labour won the General Election in Britain in 1929, a rising political star was given the job of finding ways to end the country’s worsening unemployment. At least that was the official version. The truth may have been he was saddled with a task some hoped would sink him, and his ambition, forever.
That star was Sir Oswold Mosley, a handsome philanderer and aristocratic gadfly married to Lady Cynthia “Cimmie” Curzon, second daughter of the 1st Earl Curzon of Kedleston who was Viceroy of India before, and Foreign Secretary after, WWI. During this marriage he began an extended affair with his wife’s younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, another with her older sister, Irene Curzon, 2nd Baroness Ravensdale and a separate affair with their stepmother, Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston.
These three examples barely scratch the surface of his romantic exploits, which rival those of Cassanova, and which later included the beautiful, also married, Diana Guinness (nee Mitford). Yes, an Alpha male, no doubt.
Mosley fought in the war on the Western Front and then become a Member of Parliament, first for the Conservatives, then as an Independent and finally as a member of the Labour Party. In the 1924 General Election he stood in Birmingham Ladywood against the future prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, coming within 100 votes of defeating him.
Chamberlain, of course, was the man who extended a military guarantee to Poland which prompted him to declare war on Germany in September 1939. Had he been defeated 15 years earlier he might not have had that opportunity. So that was the first missed opportunity to derail the war party.
This brings us to 1930 and Mosley’s assignment, which he completed and presented to Cabinet as “A National Policy.” Charles Mowat, writing in “Britain Between the Wars 1918-1940,” summarized it this way:
“The one minister whose proposals [might] have helped Britain to recover quickly from the worst effects of the Great Depression was Oswald Mosley, a former member of the Conservative Party. Frustrated by the government’s economic orthodoxy (a controversial policy upheld by the fiscally conservative Chancellor, Philip Snowden), Mosley submitted an ambitious set of proposals for dealing with the crisis to the Labour Cabinet in what became known as “Mosley’s Memorandum”. These included much greater use of credit to finance development through the public control of banking, rationalisation of industry under public ownership, British agricultural development, import restrictions and bulk purchase agreements with foreign (particularly Imperial) producers, protection of the home market by tariffs, and higher pensions and allowances to encourage earlier retirement from industry and to increase purchasing power.
Wikipedia quotes Andrew Thorpe, author of “A History of the British Labour Party,” who puts it more succinctly:
Realising the economic uncertainty that was facing the nation because of the death of its domestic industry, Mosley put forward a scheme in the “Mosley Memorandum” that called for high tariffs to protect British industries from international finance and transform the British Empire into an autarkic trading bloc, for state nationalisation of main industries, for higher school-leaving ages and pensions to reduce the labour surplus, and for a programme of public works to solve interwar poverty and unemployment.
The key takeaway of these two passages is that Mosley wanted higher tariffs to protect British industry, major public works like Motorways and food and resource sourcing inside the Empire. In other words, since Britain was small, it needed to turn the Empire into a trading block and the block needed preferential tariffs. Does this begin to sound familiar?
It should, because an autarkic economy is more or less what President Trump is proposing for the United States which already is running an empire in fact, if not in name. It is also, paradoxically, what the United States has done to Russia through a system of sanctions. Sanctions from the outside have exactly the same effect as tariffs from the inside; they protect national industries.
You can imagine the reaction from the Cabinet. They turned it down flat. To put this in today’s perspective, it was like Elon Musk presenting the DOGE program to Joseph Biden.
So, Mosley took his program to the Labour Party’s annual convention in Llandudno, Wales. In effect he attempted to go over the head of Cabinet and appeal to the party faithful. Laura Thompson, writing about the Mitford sisters in “The Six,” says this is what happened.
A large section of the Labour Party supported the Memorandum – although others thought it far too bold – and it was only narrowly defeated at the party conference in 1930. Typically, this spurred Mosley into irreversible action. He resigned from Labour.
This then was the second missed opportunity to defeat the war party, the entrenched conservative financial interests, yes even in the Labour party, that couldn’t see past the conventional hands-off approach towards national economies. Had the motion passed, the Cabinet would have been forced to put Mosley in the Cabinet to implement some, or all, of his program. If this had revived British industry, cut unemployment and produced general prosperity, Mosley might well have become Prime Minister.
As such, he would never have declared war on Germany, which he admired, and which his wife, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law also loved.
Instead, Mosley and Diana were thrown in jail and the rest of us got what we got. I blame those delegates in Llandudno. It was their timidity coupled with Chamberlain’s stupidity that failed to see they had a way out of the dirty thirties, out of another war, out of the postwar austerity that followed.
There is a lesson here, if we can but see it.
