Why Oswald Mosley turned to Fascism

this is a history video I am not a fascist or anything else the purpose is to learn from history so we don't repeat it so with that in mind let's find out why Oswald Mosley turned to fascism in order to understand Oswald Mosley and his conversion to Fascism we need to start our story a little bit before this time prior to the Industrial Revolution the people worked on farms From Dawn till Dusk receiving low pay for back-breaking labor the life expectancy of a British person was 35. in London between the years 1730 and 1749 74.5 percent of children died before they reached the age of five that's three quarters of all children imagine a world where that happened because that world was the reality for the vast majority of human history centuries before the Miracles of modern medicine England was Awash with parentless sick and dying children farmers in places like France and Russia hibernated for six months of the year due to a lack of food I don't have evidence of that happening in Britain but I do have evidence that one in 10 families in England were below the breadline during the Georgian era and people did starve to death in Britain during the pre-industrial and early industrial era but in the late 1700s people started to move from the Farms to the cities as a result of industrialization now this is not to say that there wasn't poverty in the cities of course there was but the industrial jobs weren't as long hours as the agricultural jobs and they were better paid as well if they weren't then why would people have left the idyllic Farms to go to the squalor cities it doesn't make sense for them to choose the worst option and the reason why they chose the terrible city jobs was because the farm jobs were even worse you were basically impoverished by working on the farms whereas you had a better chance of survival working in the factories as a result poverty decreased from a child mortality rate of 74.5 percent in the 1730s and 40s it was down to 31.8 percent in the 1810 to 1829 period a staggering decrease in child deaths for the first time in human history and just to note Charles Dickens was writing during this era Oliver Twist was published in the late 1830s so at a time when industrialization had barely gotten going and as urbanization was happening Dickens was seeing all this poverty and was writing about it and that's fair enough 31.8 percent of children are still dying as late as 1829 but what is not said is that this was a vast Improvement compared to what had happened earlier in the mid 1700s it was 74.5 so industrialization was making life better not worse but Charles Dickens like so many other early anti-poverty activists doesn't know this so he and others conclude that the poverty they saw was caused by industrialization and the so-called free market when in reality poverty was decreasing because of industrialization and the free market I know he's a fictional character but Oliver Twist would have died had he been born in the 1700s whereas he had a much better chance of survival because he was in the early 1800s despite the great success of Classical liberalism in boosting wealth living standards lifespans Liberty peace education and Technology faster than ever recorded in human history its achievements were continuously scorned by wealthy adversaries with ulterior motives and ideologues with political ends to serve I have to at this point give a shout out to the book Killing history the false left-right political Spectrum by LK Samuels it's a fantastic book highly recommended for various reasons and no this isn't a sponsored video I'm not getting commission and I only recommend books I genuinely think a Gordon would be of interest to you on a given topic now I have been reluctant to do this but I hereby declare my aversion to the left and right political spectrum and all spectrums I've given up on the whole thing calling something left and right or whatever just muddies the water because the terms have been Shackled with deliberate distortions that cause confusion therefore it's better to abandon political spectrums altogether in favor of looking out the individual policies of a given faction and then judging them accordingly you might disagree with this approach but well these terms just aren't helping so with that in mind we have all this industrialization and urbanization going on and standards are living for the poor was slowly getting better but there was an establishment backlash against this in the 1840s the conservative party was the pro-status party they stood for Authority monarchy nationalism high taxes and heavy intervention in the economy the conservative party exists to conserve it is the party of the status quo and what was the status quo back in the 1840s monarchy Authority high taxation and heavy intervention in the economy to prevent the poor from improving their standards of living they wanted things to go back to as they had been before the Industrial Revolution they wanted to be the Lords on the manor with the poor and starving peasants working their fields that's why they were against change because of what had happened in the French and Industrial revolutions now yes technically they were opponents of other utopian political visions but that doesn't mean that they were against all utopian Visions they wanted to protect the church and the aristocracy who they believed were Central to British Society at the time and again they wanted a feudal style Britain because that was their Utopia because they were the landowners thus they were pro-taxation and pro protectionism because taxation benefited the government who were the aristocrats and protectionism would benefit them because they owned all the Farms during the 1870s the large-scale Imports of cheap grain from North America triggered a long-term decline in agriculture marked by Falling rents and land values which left a generation of country gentlemen and aristocratic landowners disillusioned with conventional conservativism and was eventually to make them susceptible to extremist politics so the conservative Aristocrats were pro-state they were statists machantalists nationalists it was the conservatives who implemented the income tax in the 1840s because up to this point taxes have been largely indirect and they wanted direct taxation on the industrialists who were benefiting the poor they didn't want to get rid of the Corn Laws which had previously been implemented to protect British agriculture by guaranteeing High food prices that had to be paid by the poor if you want to know why people were going hungry in the 1800s it wasn't because of evil capitalists it was because of statist price setting High regulation and Taxation in other words it was a lack of a free market and the conservatives weren't the industrialists they were against the free market and the industrialists that was who they were implementing regulations and Taxation against and by the way the source I'm using for this is a standard history book not someone from The mises Institute or something the historians are largely in agreement with what I've just said so this shouldn't be controversial but I know that people's perceptions of what the conservatives are is different to what they actually are they've just implemented higher taxes on the poor and businesses and lower taxes on the establishment aristocracy and last year when comrade zonak got in he raised taxes that's why they're known as the low tax party because they always implement low taxes on the establishment and higher taxes on the rest of us they've been consistent throughout their entire political history now yes there have been times where they lowered taxes or got rid of regulations the political situation had changed in the 1850s because the British people were all in favor of a free market the people understood that free markets resulted in better living standards so conservative leader Disraeli realized in October 1849 that the conservative policy of protectionism was costing them votes and thus political power since most of the society was in favor of free trade so they turned in favor of free trade to get elected but that was a political Ploy they still remained the party of the establishment the state and remained a high tax and protectionist party disraeli's greatest Legacy to the conservatives was to make them the National Party from the late 1870s the conservatives were able to wrap themselves in the Union Jack and when all other tactics failed they were able to identify themselves with a strong foreign and defense policy whatever else changed between Disraeli and Thatcher that at least remained the same Thatcher implemented the poll tax almost doubled vat and it was increased again during John Major's term and again under Cameron's term in 2010. yet despite this people vote for them hoping for lower taxes no they hate the free market and the for higher taxation regulation and protectionism and they always have been on occasion they might lower its taxes to win votes or for stability reasons but usually they raise them again or lower them against one part of the economy and hire them on another they've never been low tax now why am I bringing this up well where did Mosley start his political career the conservative party forget left and right and up and down or any of that nonsense look at the facts Mosey was an aristocrat he was Lord Mosley he was pro-monarchy Pro taxation pro-regulation Pro or Target protectionism he was against the free market he was against industrialists the businessmen and the self-employed he thought that they all should be forced into a giant hierarchical structure led by an aristocratic type Elite that's why he started in the conservative party because that's what the conservatives have always been about now he did disagree with certain policies of the conservatives even when he was first elected in 1918. he disagreed with the hereditary principle of the House of Lords and he was in favor of modern reforms to the British State he was also against aliens in this case the Germans living in Britain because he thought that they were reducing wages under selling Goods ruining English social life and also spreading disease okay however even at this point he believed that the British State should provide welfare and education for the British people a typical conservative position why is that well it's because as we just saw before conservatives are the aristocratic Elite they want higher taxes for themselves so by providing limited welfare and an education they can impose higher taxes and pocket the rest however Mosley wasn't your typical conservative he seems to have genuinely believed that the British people should be looked after by the British State and he disagreed with the conservatives government's policies in Ireland at the time he questioned the use of British troops and compared their tactics to that of the Germans in Belgium during the first world war he was branded a renegade by his fellow conservatives and therefore in November 1920 after two years in the conservative party Mosley crossed the floor and became an independent as one historian has said the Irish controversy signaled the start of Mosley's liberal moment now Mosley stays independent for a couple of years before siding with the Liberal Party he doesn't become a liberal member but he's basically with them for a short time so it's worth talking about the Liberals the Liberal Party had its origins in the Whig party which had its origins in the 1600s but we'll start off in the early 1800s the wigs were against the conservatives they were for free trade and property rights they were basically the Adam Smith party they weren't and caps by any stretch of the imagination after all they were an aristocratic faction but were classical liberal in their Outlook individual liberty was seen as something to aim for however there was a flaw in their reasoning some argued that Liberty could only come about if the state intervened in the life of the people liberals had no Scruples about interfering with the poor even without their consent through the vote in the interests of improved social morality as they understood it they weren't entirely free markets through no fault of their own everyone's understanding of Economics back then was primitive as it is for a lot of people today they were still operating under the labor theory of value since the subjective theory of value was only discovered in 1871 so back then they didn't really understand what was going on so while they freed the slaves in 1832 they implemented legislation that banned football and animal fighting and said that it was okay to dissect the bodies of people who had died in the workhouses they also weren't a zero tax party they implemented interventionist legislation but they certainly were more hands-off than the others skipping over a whole complex history of various factions and inviting the Liberal Party emerges from the wigs sort of by the 1860s but there's a problem poverty still existed and people started to falsely assume that laissez-faire economics was causing this poverty Dickens is socialist propaganda because it was socialist propaganda falsely blamed poverty only Seafair economics but he wasn't the only one a hegelian called Thomas Hill green started the ball rolling in the 1870s followed by one of his students a guy called Arnold toynbee who questioned the idea of Lacey Fair economics being good for society towing B especially believed that the poor were being trampled by it of course the E Haley perfect solution toynbee viewed the state as something more than a mechanical contrivance for material ends as a union of men for the highest purposes of human nature I would like to point out that green and toynbee were hegelians and I think it's extremely interesting that they went to the Liberal Party to demand reform the conservatives were the party for the strong state yet green and twin B went to the Liberals the Lacey fair market party that's very strange but anyway because of the hegelian attack John Stuart Mill who had been a classic liberal had a crisis of confidence and basically turned into a socialist as a result he wasn't a Marxist he became a classic utopian socialist believing that private property and money should still exist but that Society should help the less Fortune because he now believed that freedom for the individual could only occur Under The Guiding hand of the state so the old classic liberalism of laissez-faire economics was under attack and the Liberals began to think that they should intervene in the more extreme cases of poverty or when it was deemed that the free market had failed in the 1880s and 1890s Roundtree and Booth published studies on poverty and basically confirmed to everyone that laissez faire was anything but fair now I want to make it clear that the free market wasn't causing this poverty the free market was pulling people out of poverty during this period between 1870 and 1914 the amounts of food consumed by the British people skyrocketed all Departments of Life showed improvements people ate and dressed better many items once considered luxuries now were being mass produced furniture books pictures carpets cigarettes pianos watches neckties and roller skates entered General circulation similarly entertainment became universally accessible annual consumption of goods increased markedly consumption of sugar Rose from 12 pounds per person in 1870 to 34 pounds in 1907. that of beer from 78 liters in 1872 to 123 liters in 1900. in 1873 average annual consumption of meat was about 59 pounds per person that had gone up to 105 pounds in 1912. the guys back in the 1800s should have known this yes they didn't have the statistics that we do now but one of Karl Marx and engels's disciples eddard Bernstein who was one of the people who buried Engels at Sea could tell with his own eyes that the poor were getting richer as a result of laissez-faire he began to deviate from Marx in the early 1890s and started publishing literature against Marx's ideology so if he could see it why couldn't any of the laissez-faire guys but regardless as a result of the crisis of confidence brought on by The Hague aliens a radical faction emerged and eventually took over the Liberal Party by 1890 old liberalism had died and new liberalism was cast to the side although it wouldn't die completely until about 1911. new liberalism effectively abandoned laissez faire and free market economics and was decisively more interventionist almost socialist in order to differentiate the two the liberalism of the 17th and 19th centuries has been dubbed classic liberalism also called laissez-faire liberalism while the more contemporary version has been labeled modern liberalism social liberalism or Nanny State liberalism the so-called new liberals then went on to implement policies like State Pension School Reform and so on nothing dramatic compared to what came later but enough for historians to note the significance and also the change in tactics by 1890 the Socialists seemed to pose a serious threat in the possible creation of an independent working-class party Progressive liberals responded to these socialist threats by advocating lib lab cooperation and by supporting working class and Industrial reform in one since then the change from the old to the new radicalism lay in the new orientation towards socialist reforms and indeed the border between the left wing of liberalism and the right wing of the Socialist groups was so indistinct that it depends mainly on point of view whether some individuals are classed as radicals or socialists they favored the same practical reforms the Fabian Society is also involved here and the fact that the Hague aliens were there as well I I don't know my Spidey senses are tingling the fact that they went for the classic liberals and not the conservatives really strikes me as suspicious and the fact that the Liberals folded so easily just doesn't make sense especially since the vast majority of the British public were still laissez-faire advocates up until the late 1880s the workers and their bosses the so-called capitalists were on the same team yes there was a union movement but it wasn't until 1889 that the two sides started to Clash again really suspicious in my opinion the major basis of liberal support came from an alliance between the middle class and the working class this Alliance was made possible because working-class voters generally shared middle class goals and middle class assumptions about the nature of the economy and of Politics the great bulk of the working class in the 1860s and 70s was still pre-industrial in the modern sense the typical Workman was a Craftsman or a small-scale capitalist in the economic world of these small-scale producers it was still possible to rise by Thrift and self-help these working-class voters therefore shared the middle class ideal of individualism and as small-scale producers they did not see the capitalist as their class enemy until the end of the 1880s then the leaders of organized labor had no desire to use politics for economic ends so wait there's no antagonism between the workers and their employers throughout most of the Industrial Revolution until the late 1880s which just so happens to be when the laissez-faire Liberal Party abandoned their free market economics let me just read that first line again the major basis of liberal support came from an alliance between the middle class and the working class so you're saying that in the middle of a century with the aristocratic elite were losing power to a free population that was pulling itself out of poverty for the first time in human history off the back of free market economics that just so happened to be a gnostic cult attack upon the very principles that were enriching the entire population at the expense of the power of the elite and then after a century of progress an artificial split was created between the employers and employees dividing the very Alliance that had weakened the elite and strengthened the poor and middle income earners and as a result of that split it turned the entire political landscape into a pro-authoritarian pro taxation pro-regulation Pro reform and pro-inflation Cesspool all pulses designed to hurt both the employer and employee and keep them divided as the aristocratic Elite get richer and richer and we all end up back in feudal times eating bugs and being happy I'm sure this is all just a coincidence right now we've been played this is all a trick if you get rid of the left and right nonsense and forget Party politics for a moment they're all the same pick a party they're all pro state they're all pro-establishment they're all pro-tax they're all on the same side when they get in nothing ever changes yeah we've been played employers and employees have been divided why patriarchy fat versus thin a million genders and races class Warfare we've been played they're keeping us divided and the keeping goes against the free market and Liberty socialists are just puppets of the elite you know let's start at the top go around that's one revolution nothing ever happens nothing ever changes the elite staying power it just goes round in circles it's a gnostic snake eating its own tail it's a con game and we've all been conned The Establishment always wins the revolution benefits them it keeps them in power but going back to Mosley we can see now why he sided with the Liberals he was hoping to tackle the economic and social issues of the time he was described as a de facto liberal and Asquith the leader of the Liberals regarded him as a member of his party there's also evidence that he was anti-war throughout this period not just later he was against the rural crisis against involvement in Mesopotamia and said that war in Europe shouldn't be repeated the Follies of Europe have been cleansed sufficiently in the blood of our people and never again will they contemplate or will they tolerate military intervention from this country in the internal affairs of the continent it is better to be in isolation than in sheer desolation if the worst comes to the worst this country May once again have to turn away from Europe towards the new world and ultimately call in the new world to redress the balance of the old on economics Mosley was even at this time presenting a very Keynesian approach to the problem of unemployment he called for the stabilization of the International Exchange as a way to tackle unemployment this isn't a coincidence because he has started to study economic theory via the writings of Lord Baron Keynes and I don't think it's a coincidence that the aristocratic Keynes was criticizing the free market capitalist system which he called a Double Bluff or deception and advocating for inflation and the destruction of the free market money since unemployment was the major issue at this point Mosley got re-elected as an independent in 1923 but he was moving closer to the labor party who were now taking an interest in him for the first time the labor party became the second largest party after the decline of the Liberals to third place and in January 1924 a minority labor government the first ever took office on the Ramsey McDonald Mosley realized that the tide had turned and that his policies weren't much different to that of the labor policies so he joined the labor party in March 1924. he ran against Neville Chamberlain in the 1924 election and with an 80.5 percent turnout Neville won with 49.1 percent of the vote Mosley came in second with 48.9 percent with the liberal candidate receiving 2 percent this was a loss but a huge blow to Chamberlain and Mosley's campaign had caused the second highest turnout in the country labor ended up losing the election anyway but the liberal party was all but destroyed losing 118 seats and leaving them with 40. so Mosley moving over to labor was the correct Choice even though he lost against Chamberlain by 77 votes the labor party which had been founded in 1900 was and still is the Socialist Party of the UK and so at the by-election of December 1926 when Mosley ran again he was attacked by the conservatives for being rich you know he can't be for the poor workers when he's a rich arister crowd it shows the hypocrisy even though every labor party politician is Rich we'll just ignore that however being in the middle of a severe winter where there was a coal crisis brought on by a minor strike the people voted for the labor candidate anyway it makes no sense why they would vote for a so-called worker party that was designed to convince the workers not to work and make them cold but that's beside the point Mosley won although his performance wasn't anything atypical for labor at this time however what is important is that because Mosley entered the labor party he also ended up becoming a committed member of the Fabian Society in the 1920s and 30s you won't find that fact on Wikipedia Samuels delivers the goods once again and Mosley ended up having to deal with the trade unions who were Allied to the labor party Mosley had never dealt with them before 1924 and was now getting stuck into their debates and Strikes bearing in mind that the labor party was also full of communists a handful proclaimed that admiration of the Soviet Union three banners included images of Lenin in one case accompanied by Marx and rather incongruously MacDonald the workers were so poor that they had the money for these banners and what's interesting about this is that when the miners went on strike in 1926 they were demanding better pay better working conditions and less working hours however the minds they were demanding these things from were unprofitable so how could the employers give them better pain and allow them to work Less hours if they didn't have the money to do that Moses response was to publish an essay titled Revolution by reason saying that the banking sector should be socialized allowing it to expand consumer credit to the poor because obviously the solution to low pay and poverty is to get the poor in debt Mosley also talked about the international financiers in his Revolution by reason and used racist terminology which the historian Howl in his really in-depth book on Mosley's early years says was commonplace at the time this is true but once again it shows that racism is fine when it's in the labor party and not fine when it's outside the labor party Mosley later went on to say that the socialization of the banks would be used to create a minimum wage for the workers perhaps unaware that minimum wage creates Mass long term unemployment so not only would the state and the poor be massively in debt they'd be split in two with some benefiting from the system and most not doing low-skilled workers who would be employable at a low wage become unemployable at an artificially higher wage and that explains the perverse cruelty of minimum wage laws it inflicts the greatest harm on the very workers it is allegedly designed to help nonetheless the labor party in Birmingham adopted Mosley's proposals and later he was given the task of addressing the problem of unemployment when he entered the cabinets of the labor governments in 1929. for context unemployment Rose from 1.1 million in 1929 to 2.5 million in 1930 which was 16 percent of the British labor force so something had to be done while Mosley ended up at loggerheads with the Lord privy seal Jimmy Thomas who was a labor trade unionist also in charge of solving the unemployment problem Mosley proposed several measures from early old age pensions designed to free up jobs for the young and a public works program designed to revive the economy and get people back to work these were rejected due to expense with Thomas and the government favoring cost-cutting measures and an unemployment insurance bill many labor and trade unionists were disappointed with mostly accusing the labor party of just taking a conservative stance on the issue he therefore wrote what is now known as the Mosley memorandum trying to solve the issue of unemployment through bank loans to fund job creation plus other measures he sent a copy to Keynes who responded in favor of what Mosley had proposed which is interesting considering that historians like Pew and Taylor do their utmost to ignore the Keynes and Mosley Connection by not mentioning Keynes at all Taylor even says this Mosley's proposals were more creative than those of Lloyd George and offered a blueprint for most of the constructive advances in economic policy to the present day it is impossible to say were Mosley got his ideas from perhaps he devised them himself no he got them from Lord of Baron Keynes you just don't want to associate gains with fascism if so they were an astonishing achievement evidence of a superlative Talent which was later to be wasted ah just get a room will you but here's why I've brought this quote up Mosley was offering a radical Economic Policy more radical than the labor or liberal parties could offer and they rejected it the labor government considered Mosley's policies and then dismissed them with a vote of 202 against the 29 for Mosley they said that unrestricted debt spending would be unpopular with the public wanting security not insecurity and would hand the conservatives a win at the next election despite McDonald's suggesting that he should stay on Mosley resigned on the 20th of May 1930 the first Minister ever to resign from a labor government the crisis demanded a war footing a revolution in administrative procedure his conception of a machine for a vast program contrasted with the more restrained criticisms of other labor party members yes Mosley wanted a revolutionary war economy which he described as a machine and what he had proposed was typical of a labor supporter the government is the one that creates jobs right but for whatever reason the labor government did not want to deliver on its promises it didn't want to attempt to solve the economic issues by implementing socialism the labor party possessed a utopian ethic of socialism but it failed to develop the pragmatic program either to alter the capitalist state which it inherited or to reform it from within not that socialism would have worked it never does but if you're the Socialist you should at least attempt to do what you claim to do but they didn't well Mosley adapted the principles of the Mosley memorandum which was Rewritten became known as the Mosley Manifesto Keynes was highly in favor of it but he didn't have any influence on the labor party at this moment nonetheless Mosley and six other labor MPS left the labor party to form a new party called the new party one Ulster unionist William Edward David Allen also joined them bought historians are split on whether to call Allen a conservative or not regardless they were mostly socialists who were sick of the current party system and didn't see the labor party as good enough in contrast to the other parties they now campaigned on action because they thought the other parties were just talking and weren't actually doing anything in fact the new party's Journal was called action unfortunately Mosley was Ill so the campaign didn't go so well but what's interesting is that the Socialists violently attacked Mosley's new party during the by-election at Ashton on the line in 1931 which the new party won the by-election provoked a Bitter Display of tribalism on the labor side instead of blaming the defeat on its own leaders the movement turned its anger against Mosley damned as a traitor and a Judas he was subjected to physical attack throughout the campaign on the steps of Ashton Town Hall where he was buffeted by labor supporters after the Declaration Mosley remarked bitterly to strachley that is the crowd that has prevented anyone from doing anything in England since the war Mosley's not a fascist at this point but Mosley learns what I learned and what so many others have learned as well you're not allowed to abandon Socialism or the left you're not allowed to have an independent thought or offer criticism to them as soon as you do you'll come under attack Mosley didn't provoke the left the left attacked him first before he was even a fascist he didn't have his bodyguards yet or anything like that in fact it was the labor violence that caused him to employ Security Forces the violent attacks to which the new party was subjected by left-wing groups accelerated the evolution of Mosley's political strategy well aware that the conservatives employed fascist stewards to police their meetings he quickly concluded that the new party would have to provide its own so all stewards of fascist now apparently but the point is that Mosley reacted to political violence with political violence however the historians only paint mostly As violent not his political opponents bias much you know and I'm not trying to defend any side here because they're all pro-establishment anyway but my concern is with the double standards which historians have employed when the fascists do something it's violence but when the pro-establishment forces do something it's mostly peaceful protests like seriously they need to stop being consistent on the threats of political violence Mosley decided to recruit a trained body of stewards to keep his party protected these were trained by Edward kid Lewis a Jewish boxer and the fact that Pew fails to mention when Mosley spoke at Glasgow 500 Communists attacked him and this new bodyguard with stones and razors so again there's no justification for this Mosley wasn't a fascist at this point the boxer who trained the bodyguards was Jewish and Mosley's policies were entirely in alignment with Keynes and though left for once of a better word you know who was being more violent violence aside the new party were crushed in the 1931 general election not a single member got elected and to be fair the labor party was crushed as well they lost 78 of their seats because everyone had lost confidence in them the conservatives won 470 seats a huge majority and formed a national government with others creating a 554 seat strong government so let's just think about this the labor party was in power during the beginning years of the Great Depression it failed to solve the crisis and was subsequently destroyed in the general election Mosley then turns to Fascism which we'll get to in a second but what would you conclude from this would you conclude something like the labor party was insufficient or inactive would you conclude that the labor party's inactivity meant that Mosley had to seek an alternative route because that's not what the historians think British fascism was born of the failure of economic conservatism to check the rapid decline of Britain in the into war years okay there's several things wrong with this statement economic conservativism wasn't laissez-faire free markets even though people think it is and this author doesn't clarify that given a false impression of what was really happening here secondly it wasn't conservativism that was in power the labor party was the one that failed so the British public turned to the conservatives in the hope that they would free up the market which they didn't do because again the conservatives were never laissez-faire even though people think they are it was the labor party party's economics that failed the labor party had implemented things like the coal mines Act of 1930 where they introduced quotas for production they guaranteed a minimum price for Colton not maximum minimum meaning they made it more expensive and then reduce the workday from 8 hours to 7.5 what did that all do it increased the price of coal during the Great Depression the coal mines Act of 1930 was their most important domestic achievement and a landmark in British history the ACT protected the inefficient coal mines it operated restriction and stable prices at the expense of the consumer here was the pattern for British capitalism in the 30s oh yes because labor introduced capitalism to Britain because they're not real socialists clearly AGP tailor is incorrect In His assessment of whether this was capitalism or not but the point is that though consumer was getting hurt by the higher prices that were forced upon them by the labor party they also introduced an Agricultural Marketing Act in 1931 which created boards for government bureaucrats to fix prices again hurting the consumer once more and what did McDonald do what did he blame we are not on trial it is the system under which we live it has broken down everywhere as it was bound to break down oh I see we've got to blame it on capitalism and economic conservativism which we're going to assume is capitalism even though it's not despite the fact that the labor party was the one in power and it was them who were implementing socialist policies you know the labor party guy said so so we've just got to believe him and all the historians did just that you know is anyone else thinking that these historians are a little bit hegelian in their assessment was it just me but yeah labor and Mosley's new party got defeated as the British people voted for the conservatives Mosley could have just stayed within the system he could have gone back cap in hand to the labor liberal or conservative parties but he wasn't impressed by their lack of Action Labor weren't willing to do anything and have been crushed plus they were violently hostile to him anyway and the Liberals were basically dead at this point plus Baldwin's conservative party had emerged apparently as the party for all anti-socialists the conservative party was increasingly dismissed by Mosley as unimaginative and reactionary this is important because a lot of the historians say that Mosley was a reactionary conservative but even by their own standards he wasn't he could have rejoined the conservative party at this point and a political opportunist would have done just that since the conservatives had just won one of the greatest landslides in history but he didn't do that because to him they were reactionaries despite this historians like Thurlow State over and over again that Mosley and fascism was a conservative and reactionary movement now in the way that he's using these words he's wrong but he is correct for the wrong reasons fascism is a conservative movement just like socialism is a conservative movement as well they're all pro-state pro elite pro tax Pro regulation and pro-inflation none of them are for actual progress they're all for locking down the economy to save the granny State rather than freeing the market who locked down the entire world for two and a half years they all did doesn't matter who was elected they all marched in Goose step so in this sense yes they are ultra-conservative reactionary fascism which is what Thurlow calls it at one point but he's using it in the wrong sense you know far left and Far Right Marxist socialist conservative Ultra this radical that it's all the same so Mosley ends 1931 as a political Outcast he has no party it has been dissolved and he can't bring himself to go back to the old gangs as he called them so he starts to study the non-mainstream parties which leads him to go see Mussolini in 1932. but I want to make this clear until this moment there's no way that you can call Mosley a fascist he was beginning to consider the fascist idea in late 1931 but he hadn't yet converted and I'm not the only one to say that Mosley's political career until the brief and troubled life of the new party can be explored and analyzed without any significant reference to Fascism or to any alleged burgeoning sympathy for fascist doctrines but in the aftermath of the defeat he turned to Fascism there's several reasons why he does this but the main reason why is because the other parties had failed they were not radical enough to implement the Revolutionary economic and social policies that Mosley thought could save Britain and improve the welfare of the British people he only saw two factions that he could join communism will quickly supersede the woolly-headed and woolly-hearted social Democrats of Labor and communism's inevitable and historic opponents will arise to take the place of a flabby conservativism Mosley went to Italy to see Mussolini in the January of 1932 who warned him not to attempt a military coup in Britain and Mosley had effectively converted to Fascism in the summer of 1932 he wrote a book called the greater Britain which basically became the new Manifesto of the fascist party he was about to create that party wouldn't be created until the October but nonetheless the greater Britain spells out exactly what he was thinking in the ranks of conservatism there are many who are attracted there by the party's tradition of loyalty order and stability but who are nonetheless repelled by its lethargy and stagnation in the ranks of Labor there are many who follow the party's Humane ideals and are attracted by its vital urge to remedy social and economic evils but who are nonetheless repelled by its endless and inconclusive debates it's cowardice its lack of leadership and decision these elements comprise the best of both parties and to both fascism appeals the two Essentials of government are stability and progress and the tragedy of politics is that the two essentially coincident are organized as contradictions stability implies order and Authority without which nothing can be done it is regarded as belonging to the right progress implies the urge to reform without which society cannot survive it is regarded as belonging to the left stability is confused with reaction and a stamp at resistance to change progress with ill-considered changes or with the futile and paralytic discussions so characteristic of a timorous democracy this is a dynamic age stability cannot exist without progress for it implies the recognition of changes in the world which no political system can alter nor can progress exist without stability for it implies a balanced and orderly view of the changes which have taken place the right seeks stability but denies the power of adaptation which makes stability an active Force the left seeks progress but rejects all effective instruments and Rob's authority of the power to make decisions the result of both systems of the two great organized parties of the state is in the end the same stability confused with reaction and resistance to change together with progress confused with obstructive debate and committee irresponsibility and alike in chaos both are instruments for preventing things being done and the first requisite of the modern age is that things should be done both political parties and the remnants of liberalism as well stand Bound By the Great vested interests of right and left which created them in opposition there is the same profusion of Promise in office the same apathy and inertia in post-war England their Creeds have become platitudes they consistently failed to Grapple with the problems of the time their rule has led with tragic inevitability to the present chaos therefore our fascist movement seeks on the one hand stability which envisions order and Authority as the basis of all solid achievement we seek on the other hand progress which can be achieved only by the executive instrument that order Authority and decision alone can give the main object of the modern and fascist movement is the establishment of the corporate state in our belief it is the greatest constructive conception yet devised by the mind of man in Psychology it is based on teamwork in organization it is the rationalized state it is this Machinery of central Direction which the corporate state is designed to supply this does not mean control from Whitehall or constant interference by government with the business of industry but it does mean that government or rather the corporate system will lay down the limits within which individuals and interests May operate those limits are the welfare of the nation not which all is said a very unreasonable quotation Within These limits all activity is encouraged individual Enterprise and the making of profit are not only permitted but encouraged so long as that Enterprise enriches rather than damages by its activity the nation as a whole but so soon as anybody whether an individual or an organized interest steps outside those limits so that his activity becomes sectional and anti-social the mechanism of the corporate system descends upon him this implies that every interest whether right or left industrial Financial Trade union or banking system is subordinated to the welfare of the community as a whole and to the overriding authority of the organized State no state within the state can be permitted all within the state none outside the state none against the state and here he's quoting Mussolini's speech in Milan 20th of October 1925. Mosley was fed up with the current system he wanted to get things done and those things required a totalitarian state that could centrally organize the society and economy to better help the welfare of the people yes profit is mentioned and he claims that there will be individual Enterprise but he is not talking about a free market this isn't let's say fair and if you read the rest of the book you'll see that but he's mentioning profit and Enterprise because he's aware of his audience the British people wanted laissez faire they voted for the conservatives for a reason they mistakenly believed that they were the low tax and laissez-faire party much like people still think this today so he's addressing his audience and saying yeah don't worry you can still have profit but in reality it's nowhere near that now we'll come to look at Mosley's policies in more detail at a later date but what can we conclude today well it's clear that Mosley was a radical who's only criticism of the current system was that it wasn't doing enough the conservatives never wanted to help the people anyway the Liberals were destroyed by the hegelians and labor were all bark no bite so Mosley wanted to actually Implement policies that he believed would help the British people now they wouldn't help the British people because they were typical status policies that always resulted in economic ruin but he believed that they would as many do to this day however his Evolution through the political system trying out every party wasn't because he was a flip-flopper or an opportunist it wasn't because he had no principles or was always a secret fascist it's because he was fed up with the old system he even says that the political and economic system is old and that there's a need for a new movement he then presents fascism as the modern movement which is false because it's anything but modern you know what policy do they have pro-tax pro-inflation Pro Authority Pro protectionism all the traits that every all the party advocated as well since the collapse of old liberalism in the late 1800s all the parties had the same policies these were the exact policies The Establishment wanted yes there were differences in the methods Mosley wanted syndicalism which arguably the conservatives don't want and there's an anti-communist bias which labor doesn't want either but otherwise their policies are all aiming in the same direction the methods were different but the madness was the same the only other major conclusion worth coming to is that the historians have not approached this with a critical eye in some cases they've ignored the evidence and then attached a bunch of adjectives to the word conservative in the hope that nobody would notice my question is why can't they come at this from anything other than an establishment perspective there's also a question about the fabians and the hegelians they did exist and they were influential but again are ignored by the mainstream so there's a lot still left to look into and I'm sure this video will cause some controversy so I look forward to the debate in the meantime here's a bunch of videos you might also find interesting thanks for watching bye for now

Channel: TIKhistory

Views: 278,239

Keywords: history, TIK, documentary, oswald mosley, fascism, fascism explained, fascism in britain, british union of fascists, buf, conservative party, liberal party, labour party, uk, britain, british fascists, mosley, lib lab con, british

Id: AGaPaOPNubo

Length: 55min 51sec (3351 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023