SWALD MOSLEY...BRITON, FASCIST, EUROPEAN.....PART SEVEN By Robert Row. Source: Institute Of Historical Review Oswald Mosley came out of prison to a very different Britain from that of 1940. Politicians who had refused to unite the nation for construction in peace-time had now done that to wage a destructive war. He regained some measure of his freedom to see his claims for what a united Britain could do fulfilled -- but to wage war, not peace. Unemployment had vanished. Huge armies in the field had replaced the queues of the workless, and with the rising tempo of American war production (some of which had gone to Russia to aid its turn-around after the Stalingrad battle) these armies spelled the end of Nazi Germany. Another end could be foreseen. The days of the British Empire were numbered. The old imperial spirit had been submerged beneath a wave of propaganda for worldwide democracy. Something called trusteeship for the overseas territories was in high fashion, the preliminary to pushing even the cannibal islands into Westminster-style democracies in that brave, bright postwar world when Hitler and imperialism were dead. Facing the spread of this doctrine, growing ever more luxurious in the war propaganda hot-house, it is true that the old imperialist Churchill was to growl out his defiance at the Mansion House in November 1942: I did not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. Yet he had already sold the pass. Had he not signed in 1941 President Roosevelts Atlantic Charter, which in real terms meant the break-up of the Empire? Had not the President told his son Elliot that he meant to make Winston live up to it? Had not Sir Stafford Cripps been sent to India by Churchill eight months before the Mansion House speech with an offer of independence after the war? In the event the offer was rejected. Indian Congress leaders preferred to wait and see if they could get better terms when the war was over. They got what they wanted from a Labour government in 1947 and the liquidation of the British Empire began. Thus the war left a world in flux and dissolution. Every nationalist leader in the Empire was to demand the same independence. And peace brought a Britain divided again under strident party banners: the unity of the nation was the first casualty of peace. Two main facts stood out clearly then First was the fact of Britains new second-rate status. It showed in many signs of weakness. Britain went to war as a creditor nation and came out a debtor. Huge assets were sold to pay for the war, yet Britain owed billions to the world at the end of it, mainly as the sterling balances. American Lend-Lease was cut off abruptly with the defeat of Japan. A big dollar loan was advanced instead, under humiliating conditions despite all the efforts of Keynes. The money was spent by a Labour government in about two years, and the loans repayment was added to the general indebtedness which has bedeviled Britains position to this day. Further, inflation gained its first real grip on the nation during the war: the cost of living index doubled between 1939 and 1945. Rationing of essential foodstuffs like sugar lasted as long after the war as during it. And in 1945 the electorates revulsion against Churchills war-time rule swept a Labour government into power, ushering in the age of rampant bureaucracy and industrial nationalization. Look at the plight of British Railways today. The same dismal story was told by A.J.P. Taylor in his English History 1914-1945: The legacy of the war seemed almost beyond bearing. Great Britain had drawn on the rest of the world to the extent of 4198 million pounds... The British mercantile marine was 30 per cent smaller in June 1945 than it had been at the beginning of the war. Exports were little more than 40 per cent of the pre-war figure. On top of this government expenditure abroad... remained five times as great as pre-war. In 1946, it was calculated, Great Britain would spend abroad 750 million pounds more than she earned... Something like 10 per cent of our pre-war national wealth at home had been destroyed, some by physical destruction, the rest by running down capital assets. Was it really worth fighting the war which Mosley opposed to produce these lamentable results at home and turn Britain into a second-rate power abroad? And this second-rate Britain was now compelled to earn its living on uncertain world markets, in place of that first-rate Britain which had enjoyed a measure of Imperial Preference before the war. Labour, triumphant in office, saw the end of the Imperial Preference it had always detested, but now was to issue an urgent official exhortation: Export or die!......Part Eight to Follow.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 00:43:06 +0000