Tomorrow We Live -British Union Policy 1938

 ( The auto conversion from PDF to text chopped parts of the text but in the main the concepts are plain enough for any man to understand. Mosley had ideas. He had vision. And frankly I cannot see why something like his British Union cannot be implemented in all the Anglo-sphere which are all variants of the UK's system at any rate. )





Tomorrow We Live -British Union Policy 1938





Tomorrow We Live -Foreword



The subject is too great to be confined in all detail within such limits of space. But the reader

who inquires further will discover in the publications of the British Union an amplitude of

detail on every subject of the day. Books and pamphlets by my colleagues, whose range of

abilities now cover every sphere of national life, will meet any inquiry, and further detail on

some topics can be found in my own books, "The Greater Britain" and "100 Questions

Answered."



In these pages the reader will discover, with the exception of the chapter on Foreign Affairs, a

policy suited to the character of this country and no other. British Union in whole character is a

British principle suited to Britain alone. It is true that our National Socialist and Fascist creed is

universal, in different form and method, to all great countries of the modern world. That was

true also in their own period of every great creed, political or religious, that our country has

ever known. The only difference in this respect between British Union and the old parties is

that our creed belongs to the twentieth century, and their creeds to the past that conceived them.

But a greater difference arises from the fact that National Socialism and Fascism is in essence a

national doctrine which finds in each great nation a character, policy, form and method suited

to each particular country. For this reason a far greater divergence will be found in the

expression and method of the modern Movement in different countries than prevailed in the

case of the international creeds of the past such as Liberalism and Socialism, or Conservatism,

which, under various names, can be found in every country in the world.



So the reader will find in these pages a policy born only of British inspiration, and a character

and method suited to Britain alone. He will be able to judge for himself our claim for British

Union that in constructive conception our policy already far transcends any previous emanation

of the modern Movement. We do not borrow ideas from foreign countries and we have no

"models" abroad for a plain and simple reason. We are proud enough of our own people to

believe that once Britain is awake our people will not follow, but will lead mankind. In this

deep faith we hold that no lesser destiny is worthy of the British people than that the whole

world shall find in Britain an example. The aim of British Union is no less than this.



Oswald Mosley -May 1938





Financial Democracy



THE will of the people shall prevail. The policy for which the people have voted shall be

carried out. This is the essence of good government in an enlightened age. This is the principle

which is denied by the system misnamed democracy, which in degeneration is more

appropriately called financial democracy. The reason is that government is paralysed by the

maintenance of a parliamentary system a century out of date. When the Government elected by

the people is incapable of rapid and effective action private and vested interests assume the real

power of Government, not by vote or permission of the people, but by power of money

dubiously acquired.



In recent years the trifling measures which have struggled through parliamentary obstruction

have been insignificant in their effect on the lives of the people by comparison with the

immense exercise of money power. Decisions and movements of international finance on Wall

Street, and its sub-branch in the City of London, may send prices soaring to create a

speculator's paradise at the expense of the real wages of the people, or may send prices

crashing to throw millions into unemployment as the aftermath of some gigantic gamble. In

terms of the things that really matter to the people, such as real wages, employment, the hours

of labour, food prices, and the simple ability to pay the rent, finance, under the present system,

can affect the lives of the mass of the people more closely and more terribly in the decision of

one afternoon than can Parliament, with puny labour and the mock heroics of sham battles, in

the course of a decade. For the instrument of the money power was designed to fit present

conditions and to exploit the decadence of an obsolete system. Parliament, on the other hand,

was created long before modern conditions existed to meet an altogether different set of facts.



New Conditions



Parliamentary Government, practically in modern form, was designed primarily to prevent the

abuse of elementary liberties in a relatively simple rural community with a primitive national

economy. The facts of that age have no relation to the periods of steam and power, which were

followed swiftly by vast accumulations of finance capital that possess the unlimited

international mobility of a world force. Is it really likely that the parliamentary instrument of a

century or more ago should be equally suitable to meet the facts of an age which science has

revolutionised? Yet on the assumption that the system of government alone required no change,

during the century of most startling change that mankind has known, rests the policy and the

philosophy of every one of the old parties of the State, Conservative, Liberal and Labour alike!



This patent fallacy which all the old parties teach the people admirably suits the financial

exploiter. A parliamentary system devised to check personal outrages by medieval courts or

nobles is represented still as the effective guardian of liberty in this age of international finance.

It would be as true to say that the bow and arrow with which primitive man defended his farm

from the marauding wolf is equally effective to defend him against the tanks of a modern

invading army. But the people are persuaded that the instruments by which they preserved

some semblance of liberty in the past are still effective to preserve their liberties in modern

conditions, in order that these liberties may be taken from them without their loss even being

realised.



Parliament and Liberty



It suits our financial masters well that all parties should combine to tell the people that

Parliament is the sole effective guardian of liberty, and, naturally, the national Press, which the

money power so largely controls, is in unison to echo the same refrain. It is also not surprising





That such power in Government does not exist today can scarcely be denied. It is admitted that

only two big Bills can be passed through Parliament in the course of a whole year, which

means that any effective programme submitted as a pledge of immediate action to the

electorate would take more than the lifetime of a generation to carry out.



Under such conditions every election programme becomes a fraudulent prospectus, which,

contrary to die experience of business life, carries the most fraudulent not to gaol, but to

Downing Street. Every main Bill has four stages of debate on the floor of the House of

Commons alone, and in two stages can be debated line by line by a committee of over six

hundred people. In such circumstances the ability of the Opposition to obstruct is unlimited,

and no measure can in effect reach the Statute Book in face of really determined opposition.

The result is that bargain, compromise, and delay completely stultify the programme for which

the majority of the people have voted. Yet this is the procedure which we are told "honest" men

are prepared to operate, within a system which renders impossible the execution of the

promises which they have given to the people, and by means of which they have secured office

and power.



The First Duty



On the contrary, we ask whether any honest man or Movement in politics would not make his

first proposal and his first duty to create an instrument of Government by which he could carry

out the promises he had made and the policy for which the people have voted. Yet all the old

parties combine to resist this principle of elementary honesty, and to denounce as the denial of

liberty any suggestion to give to the people the first principle of liberty in the actual execution

of the policy they desire. As a result the vote becomes ever more meaningless, and fewer

people take the trouble to exercise it as they learn by bitter experience that, no matter the party

for which they vote, they never by any chance secure the policy for which they have voted.

Farcical becomes the parliamentary scene as the people realise that in a dynamic age this

system can never deliver the goods, and like all systems in decline the parliamentary mind

seems anxious only to produce its own caricature.



In the Light of history it will ever be regarded as a curious and temporary aberration of the

human mind that great nations should elect a Government to do a job and should then elect an

Opposition to stop them doing it. Fortunately, even in the wildest excesses of this transient

mania, this delusion never spread to the business world, and no business man outside an

asylum has yet been observed to engage a staff of six to carry on the work of his firm, and then

to engage an additional staff of four to stop them doing their job. Curious to posterity will

appear the principle of creating at the same time a Government to do the nation's work and an

Opposition to frustrate it. But stranger still will seem the final reduction to absurdity of the

parliamentary system whereby a Prime Minister is paid £10,000 a year to do the nation's job,

and the Leader of the Opposition is paid, and accepts, £2,000 a year of the nation's money to

stop him doing it. Yet this extraordinary harlequinade, in which nothing serious, in terms of the





The instruments by which this great racket has been achieved are plain to see. The first is the

maintenance of an obsolete parliamentary system still invested from a past of difficult

conditions with the myth of liberty, by means of which Government is paralysed in order that

the real power of Government may be exercised elsewhere, not by the chosen of the people but

by the chosen of finance. The second instrument is the monopoly of propaganda by the money

power in the shape of a Press also invested with the myth of liberty from a past of different

conditions. The Free Press built by genuine journalists who were vendors of honest "news"

long ago gave place in most of the national Press to the financial combine which acquires

control of great blocks of newspaper shares. So the money power again in the name of a Free

Press can serve to the people not only the opinions but also the "news" which serves the

interests of the money power. Not only are our "free" British denied any meaning to the vote in

the shape of ever getting what they want, but they are also denied even the small privilege of

learning the truth. For power and propaganda alike are in the hands of a force whose interests

conflict with the interests of the people and is careful that they should not even learn the truth.

Thus the myth of freedom in Parliament and Press combine to promote the slavery of the

people.



Finance Power



Most of the Press is owned outright by the money power, or is controlled by the advertisements

which money power controls, and Parliament is paralysed by talk that power may reside

elsewhere. But the argument may be taken further, for the economic system which is

maintained by finance power for the benefit of its own interests, and to the detriment of every

interest of the people, also ensures that any Government may at any time be broken by the

money power. The international economic system is supported by every party of the State,

Conservative, Liberal and Labour alike. It will be shown in detail in chapter three of this book

that this system enables any Government to be broken at any time by the financial power, as

the weak Socialist Government was broken in Britain in 1931, and the weak Socialist

Government of Blum was broken in France in 1937.



It was not enough for finance to dope the system of Government with the talkative

parliamentary system of a century ago. Finance in the economic system also retains the power

at any time to knock a Government on the head. By way of further precaution the finance of

the money power controls the party machines, which in their turn control Parliament and

Government.



So this is finality in the land of "liberty and free speech": (1) Government is paralysed by the

system of talk that power may reside elsewhere; (2) Government can at any time be destroyed

by the power of money alone; (3) the Press which controls opinion is itself largely controlled

by the money power; (4) the party machines which control even the right of the individual to

make a speech to an appreciable audience in public are also controlled by the money power.



So what is left to you "free Britons" to voice your opinion and make your will effective? You

can go into a public-house and grumble in the assurance that no one will take the slightest

notice of what you say. But even then you must be sure to be out in the streets by closing time,

because the Old Woman of Westminster prefers, even in your private life, to treat you as a

child rather than as a man.





Is that really the Briton -tricked, fooled, hagridden, exploited, enslaved? Or does a generation

arise again, breaking from the hands of manhood resurgent the fetters of decadence and seeing

with the ardent eyes of an awakened giant the land that they shall make their own.





THE will of the people shall prevail. The policy for which the people have voted shall be

carried out. This is the essence of British Union Government. In the previous chapter the

present complete frustration of the people's will has been examined and the formidable

instruments of that frustration have been surveyed. In cold fact the money power commands

Government, Parliament, Party Machinery and Press. Not only does it possess the power to

render Government impotent and, if necessary, to break Government; money power also

possesses the means of preventing any new opinion or even any true news from reaching the

people at all. Faced with this formidable power and almost limitless corruption of a decadent

system, those who founded the British Union were moved by the deep belief that from the

people themselves alone could be created the instrument by which freedom could be won for

the people, and by which our country could be redeemed to greatness. Such an instrument

clearly, in its whole character and structure, must differ from the old parties of the State.



It would be idle with infinite labour to create a new movement to combat current corruption of

such a loose and flaccid character that, like the revolutionary movements of the immediate past,

it would fall an easy victim to the very corruption that it was designed to destroy. If this basic

principle is understood, much in the history and character of our Movement that has been

misunderstood will be easily comprehended. We had to create an "instrument of steel" because

we know from our experience of democracy that any character less hard and tested would

easily succumb to the system that it was designed to combat. Consequently our Movement has

rested from the outset upon the principles of struggle, sacrifice, and voluntary discipline. In the

fire of that struggle and by the force of the sacrifice for which I have never called in vain, the

"instrument of steel" has been forged that shall cut through corruption to a larger freedom than

this land has ever known.



It has been forged from the heart and soul of the people alone in the sacrifice of thousands of

unknown but utterly devoted men and women who have been ready to give all that Britain

might live. This Movement has been created by simple people in face of money power, party

power, and press power without any aid from the great names of the present system, and in

face of every weapon of boycott and misrepresentation that the money power could mobilise.

Thus ever have been born the great determinist forces of history in face of all material things

by the force of the spirit alone.



So has been accomplished the first stage in the mission of regeneration which is the creation

from the people themselves and from the people alone of a Movement capable of leading the

mass of the people to freedom. Those who sacrifice all for an undying cause are inevitably a

minority even in the movement they create. Soon thousands came and now come who are

gladly welcomed to give support or any kind of service, but many of whom for innumerable

reasons, domestic and business, are inhibited from the supreme sacrifice that builds this

Movement. Still later a whole nation will give support with enthusiasm to a cause that has been

built through the sacrifice by pioneers of most that makes life dear to men.



But they who lead the people to a higher civilisation are ever those who are capable of supreme

self dedication. The authority of leadership carries with it the responsibility of such a life. Thus

our new leaders of the people in every area of the land have been discovered, tried, and tested

in the actual ordeal of struggle. Their sacrifice during a struggle harder and fiercer in its whole

nature than any movement has known before in this country is the guarantee to the people that

they will not again be betrayed. Men and women do not sacrifice all in order to betray the thing

to which they have given their lives. A Fascist who, in power after such a struggle, betrayed his

cause, would betray his own life blood. Thus the struggle of a National Socialist Movement is

a necessary preliminary to the exercise of power, because the bitter character of that struggle





The Leadership Principle



The rebirth of a nation comes from the people in a clear and ordered sequence. The People,

their Movement, their Government, their Power. To create their Government and to overthrow

the Government of the money power which oppresses them the people have first to create their

Movement. This act enables them for the first time to give meaning to the vote by electing their

Government to power. The final stage is to arm this Government with power in their name to

act.



To represent this process as the constitution of a dictatorship against the will of the people is a

travesty of the facts as dishonest as it is childish. The only dictatorship that we propose for this

country is the dictatorship of the people themselves, which shall replace the present

dictatorship of the vested interests. Our Movement offers to the people not dictatorship but

leadership through an instrument by which their will can be carried out. British Union and

leadership seek not to be dictator to the people but servant of the people.



The only stipulation that we make is the simple condition that if the people want us to do the

job they shall give us the power to do it. Is that unreasonable? Is it not a waste of the people's

time and money to create a Government which has not the power to act? Is it not simple

dishonesty for any man or movement to accept office without the power to act and without the

ability to perform what he has undertaken to do?



Our principle is the leadership principle which has nothing whatever to do with dictatorship. It

is true that this principle is the opposite to the collective irresponsibility of the " democratic "

committee system but that does not make it dictatorship. British Union believes in the

following simple principles: (1) give a man a job to do; (2) give him the power to do it; (3)

hold him responsible for doing it; (4) sack him if he does not do it. Our principles, therefore,

are neither dictatorship nor the fugitive irresponsibility of a committee. We have seen the

committee system in action within financial democracy and have observed its consequence. If

several men are in name responsible no one is, in fact, responsible, and no one can be held to

account for failure.



Everyone shelters behind his colleagues and disclaims personal responsibility; all wanted to do

the right thing, but none could persuade their colleagues to do it. Not only does the committee

system of financial democracy dissipate action in endless talk; it breeds cowardice and evasion

in leadership in place of courage and responsibility. Therefore, in the building of our

Movement and in the building of a Government we believe in the leadership principle, which

means personal and individual responsibility.



Whether a man occupies a position of minor responsibility or a position of the gravest

responsibility in the State that task is his responsibility and that of no other, and for the

execution of that task he shall be held responsible to the people. Authority can never be divided

because divided authority means divided responsibility, and that leads to the futility and

cowardice of the committee system. Failure to comprehend this principle is failure alike to

understand the principles of National Socialism or the essence of any creed of dynamic action

and achievement since the world began. But to represent as dictatorship authority freely

conferred by the people in return for the manly acceptance of personal responsibility is a

misunderstanding, or rather misrepresentation, equally gross.



The Structure of Government



British Union seeks power by the vote of the people alone at a general election. But we tell the

people quite frankly in advance that we will not accept responsibility without power, because

we believe it to be dishonest to take office without the ability to carry out the policy for which

the people have voted. The first measure of British Union Government will, therefore, be a

General Powers Bill conferring on Government the means to act by order, subject to the right

of Parliament elected by the vote of the people at any time to dismiss the Government by vote

of censure if it abuses power. Subject to this right of dismissal by Parliament the Government

will be free to act without delay or obstruction from the interminable rigmarole of present

parliamentary procedure. Parliament will be called together at regular intervals to review the

work of the Government and to criticise and suggest. M.P's will be armed with facts for

criticism and suggestion which they do not at present possess, because they will not spend

most of their time in the corrupting atmosphere of Westminster but in the stimulating

atmosphere of their own constituencies among the people whom they represent. In particular

British Union will give most of the M.P.s an executive task in place of a purely talkative role in

a complete reform of the local authority system. Local authority areas will be enlarged and all

purely local matters will be delegated to their jurisdiction. Again, the leadership principle will

be employed and the executive leader of the local authority will be an M.P. of the majority

party in Parliament elected from the area over whose local authority he presides. He will be

advised and assisted by a local Council elected on the principle of occupational franchise, the

method of which both local and national will be described later in this chapter. Each member

of the Council will be an executive officer in charge of a Local Government department and

responsible to the local leader, who will be responsible to the Government of the nation. Thus

committee irresponsibility in local, as in national affairs, will yield place to the leadership

principle of personal responsibility and effective action.



Local leaders both in the first Parliament of British Union and in the permanent system will be

selected from the Movement for which the majority of the people have voted. To many this

may seem a revolutionary principle but, in fact, is it not plain common sense? Local leaders

will be selected as ministers are today from the party for which the majority of the country

have voted and will be given power to act. Can Government ever be effective or action ever be

taken if differing policies are pursued by National Government and local authority ? What

would happen to a business whose head office pursued one policy and whose branch offices

pursued another? Can any real democrat object to the principle that the programme for which

the majority of the people have voted shall be carried out both nationally and locally? We hear

so much these days of the rights of the minority that many are inclined to forget the rights of

the majority. Is it democracy or any form of free government for the majority of the people to





Many a good revolutionary has arrived at Westminster roaring like a lion, only a few months

later to be cooing as the tame dove of his opponents. The bar, the smoking room, the lobby, the

dinner tables of his constituents' enemies, and the "atmosphere of the best club in the country,"

very quickly rob a people's champion of his vitality and fighting power. Revolutionary

movements lose their revolutionary ardour as a result long before they ever reach power, and

the warrior of the platform becomes the lapdog of the lobbies. In the light of this experience

British Union M.P.s from the outset will go to Westminster under solemn pledge not to mix

socially, or even to speak, to their opponents. They will go to Parliament to fight for the people

who sent them there, and not to fraternise with men who have betrayed the people.



Thus only with sustained fighting spirit and revolutionary ardour can the nation's cause be

served. In Westminster, as out' side, British Union must be the " instrument of steel" in the

service of the people. Until we win power we shall fight every inch of the way, and directly

upon the winning of power we shall establish an instrument of Government capable of

executing the people's will. This instrument, nationally and locally, will be created by the vote

of the majority of the people and this instrument, nationally and locally, will execute their will.

Power conferred by the people in their name will be exercised, and that power shall be

removed by the vote of the people alone, to whom alone, under the Crown, we will account

and be responsible.



Occupational Franchise



We have observed that in the first Parliament of British Union complete power of action by

Government is combined with the right of Parliament elected by the people to dismiss the

Government if it abuses power. Government's power of action nationally and locally is

complete, but so also the control of the people over Government is complete.



We come now to the consideration of the permanent system which is created with the second

Parliament of British Union. The first Parliament, by necessity, is elected on the existing

franchise which is geographical. That franchise is a relic of the past, in which the interests of

men and women were more centred in their locality of residence than in their occupation

within the national economy. Such conditions have long passed away as the main categories of

occupation assumed a national in place of a purely local character. Today the fact that a man is

an engineer or doctor, a farmer or cotton operative, is a greater factor in his existence than the

particular locality in which he happens to reside. In modern and scientific organisation

occupation definitely supersedes in importance the chance of residence. In geographical

constituencies thousands of diverse human beings and interests are fortuitously brought

together by the franchise without much knowledge of each other and with few interests in

common. Again this system of voting in its obsolescence produces the abuses of decay.





It is, therefore, necessary to restore not only reality but understanding to the vote. The idea that

all men on all subjects are equally competent to give a verdict becomes, in modern conditions,

an ever more manifest absurdity. Therefore, we propose an occupational franchise that men

and women may vote on problems they well understand for personnel with whom they have a

long familiarity.



Men and women will vote not as residents in a particular locality but as persons engaged in a

particular occupation. Doctors will vote as doctors, engineers as engineers, miners as miners,

farmers as farmers, farm workers as farm workers, married women as housewives and mothers

with a franchise of their own.



Women's Part



It is noteworthy today that the mothers of the nation possess few representatives in Parliament

with any special competence to represent them.



Women's questions are usually handled by ageing spinsters, for the simple reason that most

women with any practical experience of maternity find the conflict between home and public

life so intolerable that they retire again to a sphere where their true interests lie. The problem

can only be resolved by occupational franchise, which gives them special representation in a

Parliament that will not remove them altogether from the interests they represent.



The care of the mother and the child is one of the main neglects of the present system and will

be among the main concerns of British Union. It is only right, therefore, that this great interest

should secure proper representation with the other great interests of the nation. This does not

mean that we seek to relegate women purely to the home, which is a charge denied in practice

by the act that we present today a larger proportion of women candidates to the electorate than

any other party. In our permanent system women in industry or the professions will have their

vote and their representatives within their occupation.



An economic system which provides work for all has no need to drive women from industry.

But a political system which guards the health and strength of the race will certainly prevent

the grave scandal of women being driven from the home against their will because the

miserable wages of the men cannot keep the home together. Women, whether in home or

industry, will hold a high and honoured place in accord with British tradition and will receive

full measure of representation and weight in the counsels of the State.



Occupational franchise, therefore, will secure a technical Parliament suited to the problems of a

technical age. A vote given with full information and, consequently, with a sense of

responsibility will secure a serious and dignified assembly. Such a Parliament will consider

national questions freely on their merits and not beneath the lash of the party whip in the

ignoble scramble for place which has become the hall mark of present politics. It is clear that

such a system brings to an end the party game and apart from other advantages it is deliberately

designed to that end. British Union means to bring to an end the party game. There is no time

in the modern world, with menacing problems of a dynamic age for mere opposition for the

sake of opposing, in the hope of getting the other man's job by the simple process of blacking

his face by any means, fair or foul.



Under our system a man or woman will be elected because he, or she, is a good engineer or a

good doctor, not a party doctor or party engineer. The M.P. will emerge to prominence and

office not by dexterity in mere debate, or by bibulous capacity to sit up all night to obstruct the

business of the nation, but by serious criticism and constructive suggestion which will make

real contribution to the deliberations of the nation. In a new age the party type will pass,

together with the corruption of the party machine.



People's Control Over Government



Few will deny that the constructive seriousness of such a Parliament will be an improvement

on the frivolity and chicanery of an obsolete system. But the question is often raised how, in

the absence of organised opposition, the people can change the Government if they wish. The

answer is that in the permanent system of British Union the life of the Government will depend

on the direct vote of the people, held at regular and frequent intervals. If the people wish to

change the Government the simple remedy is to vote against it. In the event of an adverse vote

the Crown, to which British Union is entirely loyal, will intervene, and H.M. the King, in the

restoration of his full historic prerogative, will send for new ministers Who in his opinion have

a good chance of receiving the support of the country at a fresh vote. Thus in the permanent

system of British Union nothing intervenes between Government and people. No log rolling in

Parliament or intrigue in the lobby can shake the power of Government. The will of the people

and that alone can make and break the Government.



Opposition Parties



But the "democrat" at this point usually expostulates that the people cannot decide to vote

against a Government if no opposition parties exist organised for party warfare. Surely of all

the insults which financial democracy offers to the intelligence of die electorate this is the

gravest. Are we really to believe that a great people cannot make up their mind that they do not

like a Government, and give a vote to that effect, without a lot of little politicians bawling in

their ears that they do not like it, and asking them to vote for a dozen confused and

contradictory policies. The suggestion that a great nation cannot live without professional

politicians is an insult alike to their intelligence and their temper. Yet the "democratic

politicians" who pretend that the people are capable, without such advice, of giving a decision

on the broad issue of whether they want a Government or not, are at pains to defend the present

system, which rests on the grotesque assumption that every elector understands every national

question ranging from currency reform and naval strategy to the price of beer.



The facts are surely at complete variance with the pretensions of financial democracy. The

people are perfectly competent to give a verdict on the general conduct of Government without

any assistance from a bawling match of politicians. The elector also is perfectly competent to





We are faced with the necessity of combining the right of the people to control and dismiss

Government with serious discussion of highly complicated and diverse problems. The solution

of British Union is to give the people direct control over Government by direct vote of the

whole nation at regular intervals, when they will give their verdict on the general issue whether

Government is good or bad, and, at the same time, to give them a separate occupational

franchise for the election of a serious and modern Parliament on which Government will rely

for the detailed consideration of modern problems.



With this solution we challenge the present system of financial democracy which in theory

rests on the absurd assumption that everyone understands everything. In practice it results in

such complete confusion that the great interests can govern under cover of the all-pervading

smoke screen, and the great rogues of finance can get away with their booty, while the antics of

the little kept politicians distract the attention of the people from reality.



A Government resting on the direct vote of the people and a Parliament elected by the

informed vote of the people reconciles freedom with action and lays the foundation of the

modern State.



The House of Lords



The present House of Lords can find no place in a modern system and will be abolished by

British Union. It will be replaced by a new Second Chamber which reconciles British tradition

with modern Government. That Chamber will represent the proved ability and experience of

the nation. It will comprise industrial representatives from the National 'Council of

Corporations, representatives of all the main religious denominations, representatives of

education, representatives of the Services and men and women automatically appointed by

their long occupation of positions of conspicuous service to the State. From such an assembly

of personal experience and ability Government can draw great reserves of capacity for advice

and constructive suggestion in all the multifarious variety of modern problems. This

conception also carries out in modern form the original aim of the British Constitution. The

House of Lords was constructed to represent the industrial, cultural, and spiritual aspects of the

national life. In those days agriculture was the only industry and the peers owned most of the

land. today agriculture is not the only industry and most peers have little to do with the land,

while even the most ardent defender of the House of Lords will not claim that the peers are

today the sole repositories of national culture.



The present House of Lords, therefore, no longer executes the original idea of the Constitution

and is an anachronism. British Union will implement that original British tradition by giving to

the Second Chamber a character really representative of the industrial, cultural and spiritual

life of the nation. In the latter sphere it is only right that in an enlightened age the religious

beliefs of all the main sections of our fellow citizens should be represented. In practice as well

as in theory British Union believes in religious toleration, and that belief will be implemented

by the representation of all denominations.





The Press



It remains to consider the effect on the individual of this structure of Government in terms of

human freedom and the full individual life. If we accept the premise that economic freedom is

the only true basis of individual freedom in modern conditions it must be agreed that effective

power of action in Government is the prerequisite of individual freedom. For such power of

action is necessary to bring to an end the economic chaos which today robs the individual of

economic liberty in an age from which science can win this boon for all. But some still shrink

from the only means of securing the larger economic liberty for the people through fear that the

process will deprive them of a " political liberty " which in fact does not today exist. This type

can find no answer in practical detail to the simple query, when have they ever got anything for

which they have voted? They are baffled completely by the further question, what is the use of

a "political liberty" which has never yet brought them any practical result? So they usually fall

back on vague generalities concerning the inestimable boons of freedom of speech and

freedom of the Press.



It is, therefore, necessary to examine in a little detail in what freedom of Press and speech

today consists, and what would be the position of these "principles" under British Union

Government. It may at once be stated categorically, to the surprise of many, that the freedom of

the individual in these respects will be far greater than it is today. What freedom of the Press

does the individual possess today? He certainly does not possess the freedom to secure the

printing in the Press of either news or views which do not suit the interests of the Press. In the

national Press, at any rate, he may not even humbly creep into back page correspondence

columns if his opinions be regarded as in any way dangerous.



What prospect has the individual of founding a national newspaper of his own in conditions

where monopoly has reached the point that no newcomer can hope to make good unless he can

command millions of capital? A man of relatively moderate capital resources may possibly

acquire control of a local paper of purely local influence or even, by a lifetime of hard work,

may build such a modest influence in the State by genuine journalism without much capital

resources. But no other save the great finance powers can now arrive in the national Press in

modern monopoly conditions. So, in fact, when our opponents speak of the freedom of the

Press they mean the power of the great financiers to purvey their opinions and their news to the

people, with scant reference to the merits of the journalism, but with much reference to the

weight of money power, which enables them to purchase circulations by canvass and free gifts,

for which the advertisements of the great interests alone can recompense them.



The national Press, in fact, long since has become a matter not of journalism but of finance. In

such circumstances what transparent mockery it is to tell the individual that he possesses

freedom of opinion and of Press, for he, too, can start a newspaper. It is equivalent to the

alleged statement of the classic Tory that Britain was a free country because rich or poor alike

were free to sleep on the Embankment.



Free Speech



As for freedom of speech, in what today does it consist? It is true that anyone can carry a soap

box to a street corner and from that eminence may make any moderate noise that he sees fit to

emit, unless the whim of the local police chief transports him on charge of obstruction before a

bench of magistrates selected for other political qualifications than street corner oratory. But

may we not assume as the premise of the argument that none but a purely "' mental" type

desires to talk under these conditions purely for the sake of talking without any effective action





Freedom of speech for the individual is confined to the "mental" type who enjoys indefinitely a

fruitless exercise of his lungs at a street corner without the slightest prospect of his words ever

being translated into action. In fact, "freedom of speech " under financial democracy is merely

another solemn make believe which obscures the reality of tyranny. No individual has any

hope of producing any practical effect by words unless he serves one of the great party

machines and, as we shall observe in the next chapter, the party machines in their turn serve the

great interests and by the very nature of the system which they support are inevitably the

servants of finance. So in actual practice under this system freedom of speech is the freedom to

be the servant of the financier.



To this the retort may be made that any individual is free to win the support of his fellow

countrymen, and in so doing from their enthusiasm to create his own machine in face of the

money power. To that argument in turn we make the proud reply that this phenomenon has

been achieved but once in post war Britain in the creation of British Union. And, the writer

may add a note from that unique experience at the end of some years of such a struggle; if

anyone believes that it is an easy and everyday task to create a new Movement from nothing by

the force of the spirit alone in face of Money Power, Press power and Party power, he is

welcome to the unparalleled exertion of that experience, but he will win success only at the

cost of something in his own life and being that is not an everyday occasion.



Real Freedom of Press and Speech



In face of the present negation of freedom in the realm of Press and speech, British Union

approaches a constructive solution in the determination to win real freedom of Press and

speech for the people. That freedom will rest on two main principles: (l) that freedom of Press

means the freedom of the people to read the truth in the national Press and not the freedom of

finance power to tell lies to the people in support of vested interests; (2) that freedom of speech

for the individual means an effective method of translating his opinion into action if by words

he can persuade sufficient of his fellows to agree with him. In the sphere of the Press, therefore,

we lay down the truly revolutionary principle that the Press shall tell the truth. To this end the

proprietors of great newspapers will be liable to prosecution if it can be proved w Court that

they have published news which is not true, and the penalty will be particularly severe if it can

be shown that such Publication was deliberately and maliciously conceived in support of a

private interest to the detriment of the national interest. It is a curious anomaly of present

confusion that an individual who is libelled can obtain redress from the law but the nation

when libelled can obtain no redress. Therefore, it will be open to a Government, elected by the

people, on behalf of the nation to sue a newspaper proprietor if his paper publishes facts which

are false to the detriment of the nation's interest, particularly if the object is to promote a

private interest at the nation's expense. This will curtail the freedom of the Press to publish

news which is untrue, but it will confer upon the people the freedom to read news which is true.

British Union takes the simple view that the freedom of the people to learn the truth should

supersede the freedom of the vested interest to deceive the people. For this reason our new "

freedom of the Press" rests on the simple but revolutionary principle that die Press shall tell the

truth. Consequently neither national nor local paper which tells the truth will in any way be

affected, and no proprietor can have any complaint unless he makes the unexpected admission

that he is in the habit of not telling the truth in his papers at present.





If the whole national Press was conducted in the same method and in the same spirit as the

majority of the local Press they would have nothing to fear from British Union Government.



Free Speech and Corporate Life



The machinery for putting into practice the principle ot freedom of speech is equally definite.

We start from the premise that if freedom of speech is to be a reality the individual must

possess effective means of translating words into actions. To this end any individual with

industry, interest, or profession, will be invited to enter into the appropriate Corporation, the

detailed structure of which is suggested in Mr. Raven Thomson's able book on this subject and

will not here be repeated beyond a survey of economic function in Chapter 4. Within the

Corporation every one is not only permitted but by every means encouraged to express

opinions both constructive and critical, and is provided with a means of making opinion

effective. For if the individual can move the relevant Corporation by argument that

Corporation's opinion, representing a very substantial factor in the State, is transmitted to

Government, and for Government to ignore Corporate opinion would be to court dismissal at

the next vote on universal franchise by the sum of individual voters who comprise the

Corporations.



The mechanism of the Corporation, ready to the hand of the individual, is a more powerful

instrument for the expression of free speech in effective terms of reality than the lonely and

meaningless pedestal of the street corner orator. Through Corporate life the individual wins

meaning and reality for freedom of speech. Such real and effective freedom of speech is a basic

necessity for British Union Government which in the achievement of a revolution in national

life must ever carry the people with it, and maintain a far closer contact with the people's

opinion than Government possesses today. It is good enough for the Governments of financial

democracy to consult the people in a mock election once in five years in the hope that they will

go to sleep in the interval so that Government can go to sleep as well. That is a procedure

possible for Governments which in reality only exist to preserve the existing system and to

guard its vested interests. But such a conception is not good enough for a revolutionary

Movement determined to wrest from chaos a nobler civilisation. For such an achievement it is

not enough to obtain the tacit consent of the people, it is necessary to carry the people with us

all the way and all the time on the march to higher things. That is why we must know all the

time what they are feeling and thinking and have precise means to that end. That is why we

must devise machinery not only to give the people freedom of speech but to make that freedom

effective. Contact between Government and people must ever be so close that the flame of our

own revolutionary passion may pass continually from the souls of pioneers to fire and maintain

the spirit of the people at a white heat of ardour unknown to the doped and tepid supporters of

financial democracy.



For this shall be a great comradeship between the people and the Government they have

elected to lead them. They must ever know what we are doing and we must ever know what

they are thinking. That is why we believe in the people's real freedom of speech and will win it

for them. Thus only can be secured that close and sacred union between the people and their

Government by which alone a great nation shall march again to greatness.





Economics of Poverty or Plenty



THE economic system is breaking down for reasons that are plain to see. But these reasons are

never seriously discussed in Press or Parliament because the decadence of an economic System

suits well the money power which controls Press and Parliament. Realisation by the people of

the reasons for economic breakdown means the end of finance power. Therefore, every reason

other than the plain and true reason must be provided, and every difficulty must be represented

as temporary and transient rather than fundamental and inherent to a system in decline.



Every boom of the present system grows shorter and lesser; every depression grows deeper and

longer. The crazy machine of the present economy rocks ever more violently toward a final

disaster. The plain and simple reason is that the economic system is a century out of date. That

system is the international system of trade and that system is responsible both for the evils and

for the danger of the present time. In the sphere of economics, even more than in the sphere of

Government, it should be clear that the method which grew from the facts of a century ago is

not designed to meet the facts of today. The economic system was born of the age of poverty

economics; we live in the age of plenty economics.



The facts are precisely the opposite to a century ago; yet the system in all fundamentals is

precisely the same and the attitude of the parties is the same. To the international parties

everything that has happened in the interval might never have occurred. The arrival of the

technician, the introduction of the age of steam and later the age of power has altered for ever

the economic environment of mankind. Yet all parties, including the Labour Party, support the

international system of trade which preceded this vast revolution in fact and circumstance.



At the beginning of the international system the world was faced with the problem of poverty.

Mankind could with difficulty produce enough to live. So it was argued with force by the

economists of the period that each nation should produce what it was best fitted by nature to

produce, judged by die sole criterion of cheapness, and should exchange such products with

corresponding products from other nations. It was further argued that any barrier cutting across

the thin trickle of international trade would universally diminish the standard of life, and in

ensuing chaos might even result in the return of man to a primitive agricultural existence from

which he had so recently struggled. It is unnecessary to discuss the merits of the arguments for

or against that theory, though in retrospect we may condemn strongly the sacrifice of British

agriculture to the extremes of that conception, It is redundant to discuss in modern times that

theory because the whole premise on which it rested has been destroyed. It was born of the age

of poverty, in which the question of the hour was how to produce enough to live.



This is the age of plenty, in which the question of the hour is how to sell what we can produce.

The facts and the problem are exactly the opposite but die system and the parties remain the

same. From all parties, platforms and Press we hear, in varying language and degree, insistence

upon the maintenance and restoration of international trade and the free exchange of goods

between nations. The main object of their denunciation is "economic nationalism," by which

they mean any suggestion for nations themselves to produce as large a quantity as possible of

the goods that they consume. Yet none can deny that every great nation today, with the aid of

modern science, is itself capable of producing in almost unlimited quantity practically every

commodity it requires, provided it has access to raw materials.



In face of all fact the politicians maintain a system that rests on the assumption that mankind

can only with difficulty produce enough to live, and that goods must, therefore, be produced

only by nations particularly suited to produce them and freely exchanged between nations. On





In fact, the old parties all support a system resting on an assumption of facts which the

thousands of technicians over whom they rule well know to be nonsense. Facts may change in

gigantic revolutions of science but the politician changes never. This is not because he is so

stupid as he appears but because, for a reason we shall study later, a system of decadence suits

his masters better than a system which functions for the welfare of the people.



Export Trade



So our unfortunate industry is compelled to serve the international system and at all costs to

national economy to fight for the export trade on which that system rests. In the battle for

exports modem science and modern condition has again confronted our trade with an entirely

new set of facts which have built such insuperable obstacles that the fight for exports ever

since the war has been a steadily losing battle. The spread of modern science and technique has

enabled our former customers to industrialise themselves. These new foreign industries are

protected not by the obsolete weapon of tariffs but by barriers of complete exclusion which

have not yet been lowered in response to the pious requests of British statesmanship, at

innumerable international conferences, that these foreign nations should ruin their own

industries in order to provide us with the markets that we lack. In remaining markets still open

to us we are faced with a competition, unprecedented and irresistible, which has been created

by the vile exploitation of modern science by finance power in the industrialisation of the

Orient.



Western finance has provided the loans which have equipped the East with equal machinery to

the West, and has hired the Western technician to teach the Oriental to perform the simplified

tasks of mass production with modern mechanical technique at a third of the wages and for

longer hours of monotonous toil that white labour can endure. The result has been a stream of

sweated goods undercutting British products or the markets of the world. Their deadly effect

can be observed in the cold statistics that show the decline of Lancashire and Yorkshire exports

under the attack of rising Japanese exports and the vast increase in Indian sweated products.



Internationalism and the Standard of Life



Not only are we subject to the undercutting of sweated products in the markets of the world. In

addition the blessings of the international system permit, despite all pretence at protection,

great and increasing quantities of these goods even to invade our home market. British industry

is not only being driven by new enemies and new weapons from our world position, but is

being counter-attacked as well on the home and still more on the Empire market.



In such circumstances we ask the old parties a simple question that has never yet been

answered. How can any international system, whether capitalist or Socialist, advance or even

maintain the standard of life of our people? The international system of trade admittedly means

the more or less free exchange of goods between nations. How can we raise or even maintain

British wages in the face of competition from sweated labour supplied with the same

machinery but paid a third of the wages and working for far longer hours? Whether industry be

capitalist and owned by the unrestricted individual, or Socialist and owned by the State, how

can it function in modern conditions if the system be international? This question is the epitaph

of international Socialism, for it drives every thinking Socialist, together with men of all





Purchasing Power



The construction of that system belongs to the next chapter, for the analysis of breakdown must

be pursued further to a conclusion. We indict the international system as the root of present

evils in the economic sphere. In view of the facts above recited the effect of the international

system is plain to observe on the main problem of our day, which is the problem of

"purchasing power." Few will deny that the industrial question today is how to sell what we

produce. None can deny the truism that to sell one must find customers and, as foreign markets

progressively close in the light of export figures over any substantial period, the home

customer becomes ever more the outlet of industry. But the home customer is simply the

British people, on whose purchasing power our industry is ever more dependent.



For the most part the purchasing power of the British people depends on the wages and salaries

that they are paid. Here the effect of the international system on the central problem of

purchasing power becomes obvious. The wages and salaries of the British people are held

down far below the level which modern science and tike potential of production could justify

because their labour is subject to the undercutting competition of sweated labour on both

foreign and home markets. Again we ask, how can British purchasing power be increased or

even maintained in face of such competition? Yet internationalism condemns us to such

competition and as a result, while foreign markets close, the purchasing power of the British

people remains far inadequate to provide a home market capable of absorbing anything

approaching the full production of British industry. The result is the tragic paradox of poverty

and unemployment amid potential plenty.



Thousands even in the boom periods of this system, let alone the depressions, walk the streets

in unemployment, and machines are idle which are capable of producing the goods that

millions require but lack the power to buy. Internationalism, in fact, robs the British people of

the power to buy the goods that the British people produce. In final frenzy of this system, with

accompanying mumbo jumbo from the witch doctors of its economics, the people are even

taught to believe that some mystic virtue resides in goods exported for foreign consumption,

but that no good can come of the production of goods by Britons for the benefit of Britons.



Rationalisation



In economic result every blessing with which science now endows mankind becomes in

practice a curse. The rationalisation of industry with higher wealth potential should be the

greatest benefit of the period. In fact, it is dreaded by the people because it brings ever

increasing unemployment with every increase in the power to produce. The reason again is

plain to see because each increase in the power to produce goods is not accompanied by a

corresponding increase in the power to consume goods. On the contrary, because

internationalism restricts purchasing power rationalisation results in a lesser rather than a

greater power to consume the wealth that it produces. Rationalisation enables industry either to

produce more goods with the same amount of labour, or to produce the same amount of goods

with less labour. Because the purchasing power of the people is held down by the unfair

competition of the international system purchasing power cannot increase at the same time that

rationalisation increases the power to produce. As a result only the same amount of goods as

before can be produced after rationalisation, and they are produced with less labour. More are

thrown, with loss of wages, on to the scrap heap of unemployment, and purchasing power is



Labour and Inflation



With the millstone of internationalism round their necks the old parties are incapable of dealing

with the central problem of purchasing power. They are inhibited from the only solution of

building up British wages to provide, by higher purchasing power, a greater market for British

products, because higher wages are immediately undercut by cheap foreign competition and

the industrialist who gives higher wages is put out of business. So Conservatism contents itself

with a quiet drift to disaster in the hope that endless repetition of the lie prosperity may by

medieval incantation invoke prosperity. Labour, on the other hand, turns to remedies which

make confusion worse confounded on the lines pursued by Mr. Leon Blum, the Jewish

Socialist Prime Minister of France, who was hailed by Mr. Attlee as a model for the Labour

Party just before he fell from power, leaving French economics in chaos. Because it is

impossible for Labour genuinely to increase purchasing power in face of the sweated

competition of the international system, which they support, they turn to the false creation of

illusory purchasing power by the disastrous measure of inflation.



This process was well described in the City columns of Labour's organ, the "Daily Herald," in

an eulogy of their other foreign hero, Mr. Roosevelt. "In modem conditions a reforming

Government must maintain a constant stimulus of Government spending ... we have learnt, not

that a reforming Government cannot make a system of partly private enterprise work, but that

it cannot make it work today without a constantly inflationary pressure . . . The mere pressure

of unemployment and of falling Federal revenues will force a big budget deficit on the

President."



So the once Socialist Party places its only hope in reformist doctrines which rest on the simple

disaster of unbalanced budgets and inflation. This is the Nemesis of making great promises

within the limits of a system that cannot deliver the goods. This is the fatality of supporting

international Socialism in an age when only National Socialism can work. To inflate means to

increase the supply of money without any corresponding increase in the supply of goods, and

the result is on historic record in all countries that have tried it. Prices rising far more rapidly

than wages diminish the real wages of the workers and create a speculators' paradise, with vast

profits for the Stock Exchanges and rising cost of food and living to the people. Inflation and

the opposite policy of deflation, which was pursued by the previous Labour Government, alike

serve none but the financier who lives by flux and chaos. Inflation with a continually rising

price level diminishes real wages and makes speculators' profits. Deflation by continually

depressing the price level throws thousands into unemployment and increases the burden of all

dead weight debt by making the fixed interest of the bond holder more valuable than it was

before.



Each process serves the financiers alone; the first process was the policy of the last Labour

Government and the second process would be the policy of the next. For Labour is prevented

by an obsolete international creed from pursuing the only solution of building high British

wages within a British economic system to enable the British people to consume what the

British people produce. Any fool can inflate and appropriately enough this is the only remedy

now left to the Labour Party.



They talk of "public works" and certainly public works of a useful and remunerative character

should be undertaken by any vigorous Government to bridge the gulf between the breakdown

of the present economic system and the creation of a new. The writer, when a Minister in the





The Obsolescence of International Socialism



That Labour now has no serious intention of even attempting the building of a new system is

all too clear. They are paralysed into ineffective and ever disastrous reformist doctrines by new

and modern facts which their original theorists could not foresee, and the present leaders of

Labour are incapable of fresh original Bought.



The new facts which have destroyed the theory of international Socialism and in practice

reduced it to an ineffective and disastrous reformism are plain to see. The first fact is the

sweating of Eastern labour by Western finance to undercut the standards of the West. This

event has already been examined and alone renders impossible international Socialism. The

second fact is that international Socialism has always rested on the theory summarised in the

slogan "workers of the world unite," and that after 80 years of this appeal the workers of the

world are further than ever from unity. On the contrary, in the interval capitalism has got on

with the task of introducing new and sweated workers who are incapable even of reading a

Socialist manifesto. Therefore, all hope of freeing themselves from the consequences of

internationalism by effective international action has completely faded. The third fact is that

the evolutionary method of the Labour Party has become entirely unsuited to an age of

revolutionary fact. In practice revolution by the method of evolution has proved a contradiction

in terms. Facts move too fast for the Labour Party and the process of nationalising one or two

industries and awaiting results before taking "the next step" becomes a farcical delusion in a

period during which the whole economic system threatens to collapse about our ears.



While an economic system crashes the only contribution of Labour's evolutionary method is to

nationalise one or two of the most obsolete industries, of course, with full compensation, as

they always emphasise, to the dispossessed capitalist. So Labour is left holding the baby of

decaying industry while the rogues of capitalism make merry with the proceeds of

"compensation" in the decadence of a dying system, and the arms of Government are cluttered

with their discarded and exhausted offspring. The "inevitability of gradualness" and

nationalisation step by step with the hope of arriving at the Socialist State in the course of

several generations have become doctrines too absurd to be tenable in the face of the modern

electorate. So, at a loss for any effective plans of universal action which can only rest on the

principle of power in Government, that in principle Labour denies, they tamely accept their

Trade Union Leaders complete negation of Socialism which was summarised by Mr. Bevin's

remarkable statement: "We must consider carefully the question how far the State should be

permitted to interfere in the regulation of wages and conditions.



Our Movement is a voluntary one, and the claim for State regulation must not be carried too far.

It might easily lead us on to the slippery slope of the totalitarian state" (Trade Union Congress,

reported in "Manchester Guardian," 7/9/37). Their original theory thus entirely abandoned,

Labour falls back in practice on the "reformist" doctrines of inflation after the model of Blum

and Roosevelt. In so doing Labour performs its classic role and fulfils its historic destiny. For





In every sphere of national and world policy we find today international Socialism and

international finance marching hand in hand. International Socialism creates, by weakness in

Government and muddled folly in method, the flux and the chaos on which battens and thrives

the financial parasite of the world.



Finance and Flux



By flux lives the financier and by flux dies the producer. The financier in the inner ring buys at

the bottom and sells out at the top. To him, therefore, it is essential that a bottom and top

should exist, or in other words that flux should exist. The producer, however, before all else

requires stability. To him the greatest disaster is that the price level should be lower when he

sells his goods than when he produces his goods. Yet this occurs in every depression of the

system of flux by which the financier lives. The up and down of the economic system, in what

are called booms and depressions, are poison to industry but the life blood of finance. Such

fluctuation provides the normal business of finance, but in recent years greater and richer

harvests have come its way in the sudden crash of currencies and economic systems. Before

the pound was devalued in 1931 and the franc in 1937 it was a happy coincidence for the

financiers that the respective Socialist Prime Ministers in Britain and France (old "model"

MacDonald and new "model" Blum) should assure their nations that never, in any

circumstances, would pound or franc be devalued. The interval during which the currencies

were sustained by public belief in these statements enabled the financiers to get their money

out of the country at a high rate of exchange, and later after devaluation to make enormous

profits by bringing it back at a low rate of exchange.



Further fortune fell to the financiers towards the close of 1937, when the prosperity boosting of

Conservative ministers gave such confidence to small investors that stock markets for the time

held up fairly well, no doubt with the result that big financiers were able to unload on the

public in a good market with a view later to buying back when prices touched bottom. But

these are rare and refreshing prizes of finance apart from the normal business of profiting by

the flux of the system.



Gambling in Commodities



To understand the present fate of the producer it is necessary to study how the flux of the

international system is created. The flux of the system arises from the unlimited mobility of

inter optional finance and the unlimited power to gamble in the primary commodities which

supply the productive industries of the world. It is notable that each post war depression has

been preceded by a large rise in the price of primary commodities, followed by a collapse in

price. This is due for the most part to gambling by financiers in the raw materials that supply

the industries of the world. The immense power of modern production responds immediately to

boom demand by an increase in production which exceeds even boom demand. Glut is the

result because even a boom of the present system is inadequate to absorb production by reason

of the fact that the ultimate market of the people's purchasing power is insufficient. Therefore,

glut arises in relation to effective demand and price collapse ensues, with all the familiar

phenomena of depression. Finance greatly accentuates the chronic tendency to overproduction,

born of under-consumption, by speculation, particularly in primary products, directly a boom

increase in demand sets in motion a tendency to increasing price.



Wall Street Dictatorship



The same power of almost unlimited mobility of finance in practice subordinates completely

the economy of Britain to the economy, or rather chaos, of a foreign country. Finance in the

City of London is so interlocked with finance in Wall Street, New York, that in practice the

City of London has become a sub-branch of Wall Street. Let anyone who doubts this study the

immediate reaction on the London Stock Exchange of any movement on Wall Street. For

London follows Wall Street entirely irrespective of British conditions. In recent years adverse

movements on the London Stock Exchange have followed adverse movements on Wall Street

even in face of good British trade reports. On the other hand, upward movements on the

London Stock Exchange have followed an upswing on Wall Street, even in face of a disastrous

British unemployment return the previous day. What matters to finance in the City of London

is not what is happening in British industry, but what is happening in Wall Street, New York.



Therefore, as under the present system the City of London controls British industry, the life of

this nation in the final analysis is controlled by a sub-branch of Wall Street finance. A British

farmer may be deprived of his livelihood because a gamble in the Chicago Wheat Pit has

produced a collapse in price. A prosperous British industry may suddenly be reduced to a

stand' still because Wall Street speculation in primary commodities has brought a subsequent

fall on the Wall Street Stock Exchange with consequent fall in the City of London, and a

downward swing of all prices into depression. Thousands of Britons may walk the streets in

unemployment because some big rogue of finance on the other side of the world has gambled

in the raw materials of industry.



In fact, the British craftsman will make less money by studying and perfecting his craft than by

studying the symptoms of Wall Street. Ironic indeed is the tragedy of this dependence for a

people which possesses within our own great heritage of Empire the means to produce every

raw material and every commodity we require, not only in abundance but in complete

independence of world supply or world speculation.



Finance Power Over Government



This same power of almost unlimited mobility which the international system confers upon

finance affords it also almost unlimited power over Governments which support the

international system. It is inherent in the system that capital and credit shall nave power of

movement from one country to another. The power of the financier as an individual to shift his

fortune in and out of the country is entirely unrestricted. If these great mobile forces °t finance



In simple fact the power of international finance is absolute over all the old parties, because the

operation of the system which they support gives finance at any time the power to break them.



Foreign Lending -the Object and the Disaster of the System



When we analyse the power of finance over the old parties it is not difficult to see why a

system is maintained which serves the financier alone, although it is destructive in modern

conditions of every producer's interest, and is disastrous not only to the economy but to the

integrity of the nation. Finance is the master of the parties, and finance forbids the building of a

national system to meet modern facts and maintains an international system whose

obsolescence provides the parasite of decadence with profit. Not only is that profit provided by

speculation in the fever of the system which has already been examined. The traditional

business of finance under the present system depends on the maintenance of internationalism

and is admittedly brought to an end by the creation of an Empire system. That traditional

business is foreign lending which we have earlier observed has equipped against us our foreign

competitors all over the world, and in recent years has exploited the East to the threatened ruin

of the West.



The only motive of foreign lending is to derive a higher rate of interest from the equipment of

our competitors than from the equipment of British industry. That interest can only be drawn

annually from foreign nations in the shape of gold, services, or goods. As few of them have

either gold or services to offer the annual interest on foreign loans is derived almost entirely

from the import of foreign goods. Consequently the business of finance depends on foreign

imports, because without such imports it cannot draw usury from abroad. Therefore, the

interest of finance conflicts directly with the interest of the producer, because imports from

abroad are a necessity to finance but a disaster to the producer For it should further be noted

that the entry of foreign goods representing interest on foreign loans is not balanced by any

corresponding exports of British goods. They are tribute from one country to another in respect

of a past transaction without any countervailing payment. In fact their economic effect is

precisely the same as the payment of German reparations after the war, which represented

tribute from one country to another, in respect of the past transaction of the war, without any

balancing export. The effect on the economy of the recipient was then clearly observed and





Thus the part of international lending in our national economy is clear. It is firstly to supply

backward nations with the means to undercut us in the markets of the world, and secondly to

draw a high rate of usury from the transaction in the shape of cheap sweated goods, which

enter the British market to the complete displacement of British labour because they are

balanced by no form of export. Yet the extension of foreign lending has been laid before the

country as the highest ambition of British industry in almost all Mr. Neville Chamberlain's

annual orations to the Bankers' Dinner as Chancellor of the Exchequer, while the theory of

foreign lending and the rights of foreign investors are eagerly championed by the Labour Party.



Behind this theory every influence of the Press and old world economists is also arrayed.

British Union challenges, root and branch, the whole conception of foreign lending. We have

already observed that the result is interest payment in the shape of foreign goods, which

displaces British labour by sweated labour as surely as if thousands of Japanese were imported

to Lancashire and Yorkshire to take British jobs. We will now examine the original effect of a

foreign loan which means the permanent divorce of British wealth from British consumers for

the benefit, or rather for the exploitation, of foreign countries. That wealth, as a capital sum,

can never return to this country, for the repayment of the capital of all foreign loans in the

shape of foreign goods would not merely disrupt industry like the payment of interest, but

would completely shatter the British economic system. Foreign loans mean in practice the

permanent consumption of British produced wealth by foreigners, and the permanent loss of

that wealth to the Britons who produced it.



Yet the whole conspiracy of politicians, Press and economists teaches the British people to

believe that to send steel to a remote country to build a bridge over a far away river, and to

send bicycles for savages to ride over the bridge, without any hope of repayment of this

exported wealth, is a transaction of sound economy and finance. While to keep that steel at

home to build British dwellings, and the bicycles at home for Britons to ride along well made

roads, is a principle of wild cat finance.



The greatest of all bluffs put over the British people is the loan-export bluff, for it has induced

them to alienate from themselves for ever an enormous proportion of the wealth they have

produced by the genius of their technicians and the sweat of their workers. Late in the day they

begin to see that the export of machines which they created, and taught the world to use, is

today resulting in the equipment of sweated labour to undercut them on every market in the

world. Finance, secure in the equipment of the East by the effort of the West, cynically deserts

the origin of its strength and wealth for fresh Oriental pastures, where the yield of usury from

the sweated is greater than the return of interest from the civilised. So in the final frenzy of the

system finance drives the West to produce the means of its own destruction, and, not content

even with this classic business of the money power, our financial masters now make the

primary commodities and raw materials which serve our, stricken industries the subject of

world gambles whose fluctuations create a chaos in which industry is prostrated. But

internationalism and the parasite which drives it to destruction have gone too far; and today

greed and fully bring their Nemesis in the threatened destruction of the body on which they

prey. That body is the industry and life of Western Man.





BRITISH Union recognises the disintegration of the system and will not attempt to reform the

system. The machine in modern conditions has broken and a new machine is required to meet

modern fact. By this we do not mean that we shall ever destroy for the sake of destroying or

uproot existing institutions merely because they now exist. That was the fallacy of international

Socialism, which began with the theory of changing everything and ended with the practice of

changing nothing. On the contrary, whatever is good we shall preserve and adapt to a new

synthesis and harmony of the nation, while ruthlessly cutting away the dead wood of

obsolescence and decadence. The essence of our economic creed is the realist facing of facts

and the adoption, even more in practice than in theory, of the quickest means of securing the

essentials of national reconstruction. To that end we seek to reconcile every motive of

individual exertion with the welfare of the nation as a whole.



The interest of the nation transcends the interest of every faction, but, in recognising the overriding

interest of the community, the individual as a member of the nation secures his own

ultimate advantage. Every great institution of our national and traditional life which is

workable and can be adapted to new ends will be preserved and woven into a new national

pattern and purpose.



Empire System



Above all, we are determined not wantonly to discard but to turn to high advantage the heritage

won for our generation by the heroism and sacrifice of those who have gone before. The

conjunction of the vast resources of our Empire with the genius of modern science can solve

the problem of our age. We are no weak nation stripped of overseas possessions and denied

access to raw materials, for our past has bequeathed as opportunity to the present one quarter of

the surface of the globe. Therefore, in pride of our past and in confidence of our present

abilities we turn to the Empire as the basis of our economic system. In so doing we ask what

other alternative is open to our generation? what other means have we either of finding an

outlet for our production in face of closing world markets, or of winning freedom from finance

tyranny which rules through the obsolescence and decadence of the international system?



If we believe from the evidence of our eyes and of every present experience that

internationalism is outworn and in continuance threatens the very life of our industrial system

and national integrity, what alternative to that system can we discover except an Empire

alternative? If the analysis of the last chapter be accepted, or even in part accepted we are

driven to our own Empire as the only alternative to chaos and exploitation.



The only relevant question to the modern mind is whether or not the Empire can supply the

modern alternative to the breakdown of the obsolete international system. Can an Empire

system afford to our people not merely as good a material life as they possess today, but a

higher standard of civilisation than the world has yet seen? To that question we return an

unhesitating "yes," and prelude a detailed description of the system with the statement of

certain facts which none has yet been found to deny.



(1) Within these islands and the Empire are workers whose skill is second to none in the world.

(2) Within these islands and the Empire we possess technicians and can produce machinery

second to none in the world.

(3) Within the Empire alone we possess practically every resource of raw material which

industry can possibly require.

27

Within the Empire alone and with our own resources of men, machines, and raw materials,

we can immensely increase our present wealth production, provided we have a market for

which to produce.

These facts have not yet been challenged and, unless they can be disproved, it is possible to

build in our Empire alone, without the need of any assistance from the outside world of chaos,

a far higher standard of life than we possess today or than mankind has yet witnessed. But all

depends on the condition of the last proposition stated above. Empire industry must have a

market for which to produce and that is nothing else but the power of our people to consume.

We have studied in the last chapter the factors which deprive the British people of the ability to

consume the goods which they produce. Deliberately we build an Empire system that rests on

the simple principle that the British people shall consume what the British people produce.



Home Market



The first act in the building of a new system is clearly to free the people of these islands from

the forces which deprive them of purchasing power and to build a home market which rests on

the high purchasing power of the people. High wages is a basic principle of our economic

system, because high wages alone can give the people the power to consume the goods which

they produce. The first factor which prevents high wages at present is the undercutting of

British labour, even on the home market, by cheap foreign products often far below in price

our present production costs



To this situation we apply the simple principle that nothing shall be imported into Britain

which can be produced within Great Britain. The implementing of this principle means the

exclusion from these islands of some £360 millions of manufactured and agricultural products

which are now imported annually To replace these by British products, on any current

computation of production and employment, will give employment to nearly a million and a

half of our people. In addition, British industry will be free on the home market from the cheap

foreign competition which today holds down wages and diminishes the extent and purchasing

power of the home market.



But British Union system for the home market does not end there for it would be idle to

prevent the undercutting of British labour by sweated goods from abroad if we still permitted

the undercutting of British labour by sweated goods produced at home. It is useless to protect

our standard of life from the foreign employer who pays low wages if we still expose it to the

attack of the British employer who pays low wages. To meet this situation British Union

constitutes the Corporate system, and the effect of that system in preventing sweated

production within Great Britain is plain and direct.

The first objective of the great industrial Corporations will be the elimination of sweated

competition from within, when the Government, by exclusion, has eliminated sweated

competition from without. They will lay down the minimum wage rate over the sphere of

industry which they cover and infringement of these wage rates will be a criminal offence. But

the function of the Corporations will be not merely static but dynamic. It will be their task

progressively to adjust consumption to production power, and thus to overcome for the benefit

of industry and people the problems created by rationalisation and our ever advancing

industrial and mechanical technique. In other words, it will be the duty of the Corporations to

raise wages and salaries over the whole sphere of industry as science and industrial technique

increase the power to produce. Consequent on the elimination of sweated competition, both

from without and from within, no limit will exist to the extent to which producing power can

thus be increased except the limit set by scientific and productive advance.





Position of Individual Firms -Tory Protection



We seek to build a home market in which the British can consume what the British produce by

the joint method of excluding sweated products from without and the prohibition of sweated

production from within. The relative position of individual firms will remain the same on the

new high wage basis as on the present low wage basis. If you compel A to raise wages but

permit his rival B to maintain low wages the only effect is to put A out of business by giving

an advantage to his rival B. But if you compel both A and B to raise wages their relative

competitive position remains the same. Under British Union system any individual is free to

put his rival out of business by greater efficiency than his rival, but he is not free to put his

rival out of business by paying lower wages. The essential difference between the economic

"insulation" of British Union policy and any protective proposals ever advanced by the

Conservative Party can thus easily be discerned. We will assume, for the sake of argument, that

the incredible happened and that the Conservative Party gave to industry the real protection

from foreign competition which they have always promised at elections, in glaring

contradiction of their practice when they recently possessed record majorities in Government

and yet permitted the annual import into these islands of £360 millions of foreign manufactures

and agricultural products. If the miracle occurred and Conservative pledges were actually

carried out this vital difference would exist between their policy even in this regard and that of

British Union. Behind their protective barrier no organisation would exist to prevent the

production of sweated goods and unfair undercutting by low wages of one British firm by

another.



Conservative rejection of the Corporate system deprives them of any means to this end.

Consequently, despite their protection, British wages would still be kept down by sweated

competition from within even if they had eliminated sweated competition from without. A

further evil undoubtedly would arise under this unregulated and anarchic system which

provides freedom only for the exploiter to exploit. Freed from all check and threat of foreign

competition under Conservative protection the present tendency towards trust, combine and

monopoly would greatly accelerate. Even more combines would come together to exploit the

protected market without any let or hindrance. The classic tendency of the monopoly would

quickly emerge in the increase of price to the consumer and the decrease of wage to the worker.

Consequently protection unaccompanied by organisation and power in Government is an

unmitigated evil. On the other hand, insulation from world chaos is the first and necessary

action in the building of an economic system which can only thrive and advance in the high

purchasing power of the mass of the people.





Thus British Union builds a home market capable of absorbing the maximum production of

British industry, subject only to the necessity of acquiring outside these islands what we cannot

here produce. At this point we turn to our own Empire overseas to secure the raw materials and

some foodstuffs which Great Britain cannot produce. We shall offer to our Dominions and

Colonies the direct bargain for which they have always asked. We will buy from them raw

materials and any foodstuffs which we cannot produce here on condition that they accept an

equivalent value of our manufactures in return. They are primarily producers of raw materials

and foodstuffs and we are now primarily producers of manufactures and exports such as coal.

A natural balance of Empire economy exists which policy in this country has done much to

destroy by preferring to buy essential raw materials and food from foreign countries. As a

result the Dominions have already been driven to the development of secondary manufacturing

industries. That process, if long continued, may develop in the Dominions an economic self-

sufficiency which may lead in time to their complete inability to accept our exports. Great

Britain will then be faced with the retribution of internationalism in dependence on foreign

supply, for which she can only pay by exporting goods to foreign markets that are rapidly

closing against her. In fact, continuance in the policy of preferring the foreign to the Empire

supply of raw materials and certain foodstuffs might finally spell the doom of these crowded

islands when, in the future, they seek outside supplies for which they cannot make payment

either in foreign or Empire markets.



On the other hand, an early development of Empire economic system can arrest the drift to this

catastrophe. The process of developing secondary industries in Dominions and Colonies has

not yet gone far enough to prevent a balanced Imperial economy. They offer to us still the

simple bargain of their raw materials to be balanced by their acceptance of our manufactured

exports in a £1 to £1 equivalent.



Why are the international parties, Conservative and Labour alike, so mad as to refuse? The

answer to this riddle may be found in the deliberate maintenance of the adverse balance of

payments under the existing foreign trade pacts, which should provide a conclusive argument

for the abrogation of these pacts in favour of a balanced Empire trade. Under almost every

foreign trade pact Britain imports more than she exports in return. The adverse balance of

goods received represents interest payments made on past loans without any balancing export

in return as described in the last chapter. So Great Britain refuses Empire trade and maintains

the adverse balance of trade pacts with foreign nations for the sole reason that the process is a

means of collecting the usury of the City of London.



An Empire system is sacrificed and we drift towards the disaster of dependence on an ultimate

world system, in which we can find no means of payment for necessary imports, solely because

the British Government and our economic system are debt collectors for the City of London.

Not only must British labour be displaced in the home market by the import of sweated goods

as interest payment, but we are forbidden to develop our heritage in an Empire economy

because the millstone of foreign lending is still around our necks. We have to choose between

an insulated Empire system, containing within its free boundaries the highest standard of

civilisation that the world has yet seen, and the maintenance of a world usury system which in

every sphere destroys the productive interest and oppresses the people. We have to choose

between Empire and Usury; British Union chooses Empire.



Empire Development



It is clear that our system depends on the intensive development of an Empire which is today

producing only a fraction of what it could produce. The question is sometimes asked whether





In the case of the Crown Colonies we affirm frankly that what has been won by the heroism of

the British people shall be used for the benefit of the British people. Instruments like the Congo

Basin Treaty, which are supported by the Conservative Party and make our African

possessions the dumping ground of the world, will be repudiated, and British possessions will

be preserved as a British market, with a result in itself, that current statistics prove, will go far

to restoring our export trade. The great British colonial tradition of good and fair treatment of

native populations will be preserved, but we shall challenge the illusion that backward and

illiterate populations are fit for self-government when obviously they are not. Nor do we admit

that the Western nations should be confronted with closed areas in the supposed interests of

native populations, which have done nothing to develop their own territory before the genius of

the Western mind and energy put them on the map of the world.



If "Left" theories in this sphere were logically applied America would be handed back to the

original Red Indian inhabitants, and the white man would be barred from the land which his

talent has created. In practice these high-sounding theories of native self-determination have

resulted in no higher reality than the ruthless sweating and exploitation of native populations

by Western finance capitalists for the undercutting of the Western standard of life. In practice

native "rights" have been the right to be exploited. Such exploitation of backward populations

will be absolutely forbidden in British Union Empire, and as a result the poison stream of

sweated goods will no longer enter the arteries from within the body of Empire. Good and fair

treatment of native populations is a British tradition, but to stultify the white man's genius in

order to preserve native "rights" to neglect fertile areas of the globe, or native "rights" to be

exploited by finance capitalists for the destruction of the West, is an historic absurdity and a

British tragedy. Therefore, consciously and determinedly we develop for the benefit of the

British people the territory which the energy of the British people has made their own.



Agriculture



In developing the territory of our Empire British Union policy by no means forgets the

development of our own native soil. The measures already described will not only save

agriculture, but are the only measures that can save British agriculture. For our policy meets

the two factors which today destroy agriculture and depopulate our countryside. They are (1)

the flood of foreign imports, (2) the low purchasing power of our British people which

deprives them of the ability to buy good British food.



By present conditions a conflict has been created between town and country in which the

countryside has always been worsted since the Conservative Party ceased to be the party of the



British Union overcomes the dilemma of the countryside : (1) By raising the purchasing power

of the mass of the people to the point that modern science permits by means already described;



(2) By prohibiting entirely the import into Britain of any foodstuffs that can be produced within

Great Britain. This policy preserves for British agriculture the home market and provides a

market capable of paying for British products. In practice no substantial increase of price to the

consumer need be anticipated, and in any event, the general increase in wages and conditions

under a modern system will be far greater than any increase in farming prices. The farmer can

increase production for an assured market without any very great increase of his present

overhead charges. Consequently an increase in production without a commensurate increase in

production costs will tend to prevent prices from rising. Yet greater production for an assured

market will afford the farmer profit instead of loss, and the labourer a living in place of a

starvation wage. In addition a Distributive Corporation will cut our redundant distribution costs

and bring farmer and consumer closer together in the absence of a host of unnecessary

middlemen who now take their toll of farmer and consumer alike. Measures to prevent

profiteering in food are overdue, and if necessary, will be severe. But the basic guarantee of

prosperity to British agriculture is the high purchasing power of the British people and that

great home market is the constant aim of British Union policy. A market that is capable of

paying for British food products can easily be preserved for British agriculture, because if the

townsmen can pay for British food they will always prefer it as they know it to be the best.

More British Food



So British Union policy deliberately excludes from these islands all foodstuffs that can be

produced within them. This will entail the production of another £200 million of British

foodstuffs each year to replace foreign imports that will be excluded. The writer, in addressing

hundreds of farmers' meetings throughout the land, has never yet found a farmer to deny that it

is possible, pro' vided they have an assured market for which to produce. Clearly it will take

some years to evoke the maximum of British production. In practical method Government will

meet the Farmers' Union, which will have an even greater status within the Corporate State,

and will inquire by how much British production can be increased in each succeeding year.

Government will then undertake to cut down foreign imports by a corresponding amount until,

at the end of a specified period, British production has entirely taken the place of the foreign

import. The end will then be secured of a market for the full production of British agriculture

which rests on the high purchasing power of the British people.



It is true that we cannot here produce all the diverse kinds of foodstuffs that we require. But

like our raw materials we can acquire all the outside foodstuffs we need from our own

Dominions and Colonies. In a choice between British and Dominion products the British must

always come first, but plenty of room will still exist on British markets for Dominion

foodstuffs. We now import annually £180 million worth of foodstuffs from the Dominions, and

it is possible to increase British production by £200 million a year at the expense of the

foreigner alone, without touching Dominion imports. Further, any cut in any particular branch

of Dominion imports which it is necessary to make in the interests of British farming will be





Foreign Food Prices



The absence of the foreign food product from the British market is a distressing thought to

those international parties, Conservative and Labour alike, who have taught the people that to

buy abroad is to buy cheap. But the people are no longer impressed, for they have found in fact

that to buy abroad is to buy dear. In all recent sudden rises in food prices the rise in price of the

foreign has greatly exceeded the rise in price of the British product. The reason is that the

combine and monopoly have invaded also the control of the people's food. Immediately a

tendency to price rise occurs the foreign monopolies rush up the price of food to the British

consumer. If the international parties were allowed to carry the financier's game much further,

and the British consumer by the ruin of British farming became completely at the mercy of

foreign supply, the British people would find that to buy abroad from the foreign food

combines was the dearest folly that they had ever committed.



The import of foreign foodstuffs is pursued as a sacred rite of the financial democratic system

because those imports more than any other pay the interest on foreign loans as previously

described. But as ever in decadence parasite grows on parasite, and today the policy of foreign

food combines is to undercut and put the British farmer out of business in order that they may

have the British consumer completely at their mercy. This crime has been permitted and

encouraged by Conservative Governments which have given to the British farmer the "Board"

and to the foreign combine the "Market."



Organisation for a market which does not exist is in any case without purpose. The old parties

have merely given to the farmer restriction when all he needed was opportunity. The British

farmer may be trusted to carry on his own business once he has a market for which to produce.

He must be freed from the foreign import which destroys him, and the redundant middleman

who exploits him, to serve a market which is capable of paying him a living. This Government

can do this for farming and more, for every method of modern science and organisation to help

the farmer in his task must be made available to British agriculture. British Union knows that

no people can live that is uprooted from the soil and that the universal urbanisation of a

population spells a doom inevitable and historic. British Union knows too that the men who

carried British genius and the glory of our name and our achievement to the far corners of the

earth, had roots deep in the soil of our native land. The little men and the little parties in the

service of an alien finance have tried to sever the roots of the oak. We who come from the soil

of Britain say that the oak shall stand.





For the development of agriculture and most of our staple industries a complete revolution in

our financial system is required. British credit that now equips our foreign competitors against

us is urgently needed here at home. To this end foreign lending and the export of British capital

and credit in all forms will be forbidden under heavy penalty. A Finance Corporation will be

constituted to control all organs of finance and credit on the basic principle that British credit

shall be used for British purposes. Prominent among such purposes will be the re-equipment of

British agriculture for greater production. Today the farmer can usually secure credit only on

collateral security and only in rare cases can he even secure it on his machinery and stock.

British finance devoted to British purposes will develop an agricultural banking system which,

with knowledge of the industry, will advance credit on farming record and ability. Similarly in

industry, a banking system designed primarily to serve industry will secure the inventor and the

new process from the neglect or exploitation which are the usual alternatives today. British

finance which has its eyes on home problems, and not on the chance of quick profit at the ends

of the earth, will be required to develop an industrial banking system which carries the

invention from the stage of proved experiment to the public market. Finance and the technique

of industry will be interwoven in an industrial banking system consciously designed to serve

and to promote British industry. The neglected technician who today so often has to sell his

talent abroad, while finance gambles abroad, will be the most cherished possession of our new

industrial and financial system.



The Necessity of Power Over Finance



"What a transformation of the present system and what forces you are challenging" the old

world replies. "Yes," we retort, "we are challenging great forces and we are carrying through

nothing less than a revolution in the subordination of finance to industry." But the key to the

problem is power in Government and it is for no light or idle reason that we ask real power.

This struggle requires in Government a power so all pervading that the financier who resists it

and breaks the law may know with certainty that he will go for a good spell where the poor go

today when they break the law. Once confronted with overwhelming power in Government,

willingly conferred by the people, the resistance of finance to the new order will break, and the

financier will become the servant and no longer the master of the people. To play with the

problem of finance merely by nationalising a Bank of England which for all practical purposes

is nationalised already, is only worthy of the make believe of a Labour Party which has no

serious intention of putting any of its theories into practice, and resists in principle the power in

Government by which alone finance can be subordinated to the nation. We do not propose by

nationalising the banks to substitute tot financial ability a miscellaneous collection of civil

servants and party hacks to play with intricate problems of which they have little understanding.

We propose, by the exercise of ruthless power in Government, to make those who understand

finance do what the people want done, and to let them know in plain fact what will happen if

they do not do the job the nation commands. The financiers have long compelled the people to

work for them. We now propose that the people shall compel the financiers to work for them.

Further, that process will be greatly assisted by the preliminary deportation of alien financiers,

who have abused alike the hospitality of Britain and the credit power which the British have

created.



The remaining British financiers will be confronted with the alternative of playing the nation's

game, in place of the alien's game, or facing the nation's retribution. Their natural patriotism

thus stimulated will make them the servants of the nation within a Corporate system of finance

that subordinates and utilises every existing instrument and ability of the financial system to a

new national purpose. Thus British Union's attack on the citadel of finance will not be partial







Credit



Within such a system the supply of credit must be adequate to a system of greater production

and greater consumption. The credit system will rest on certain clear and basic principles: (1)

that British credit created by the British people shall be used for British purposes alone; (2) that

British credit shall be no monopoly in the hands of a few people, and often alien hands at that,

but shall be held in high trusteeship for the British people as a whole; (3) that British credit

shall be consciously used to promote within Britain the maximum production and consumption

by the British of British goods; (4) that the credit system shall maintain a stable price level

against which the purchasing power of the people is progressively raised in the development of

higher wages.



Tomes could be written on credit policy and have been written with infinite diversity in

particular if with broad agreement from modern minds in general. The writer in earlier years

has contributed to these divers studies of one of the most fascinating subjects that can engage

the modern mind. But experience brings some lessons, and one lesson is that the creative urge

of modern man to build a modern credit system that serves the people and not the financier

may well be lost in the desert sands of divers detail. The broad principles of action are agreed

by most thoughtful and modern minds. The full details must await the vast resources of a

Government armed with power and a full mobilisation of the finest intellects of our time to

evolve the final pattern. But the principles here stated shall stand and a new credit system shall

be opened by the key of revolutionary Government entrusted by the people with real power. To

play with credit problems in the absence of real power is merely to court the classic inflationist

disaster of an impotent reformism.



Taxation



The problem of taxation is lifted naturally by the general economic policy of British Union.

Taxation depends upon revenue and revenue in turn depends upon national wealth production.

A lesser burden of taxation can produce a larger revenue if based on a greater national

production of wealth. Therefore a system which is designed to evoke the maximum wealth

production of the nation automatically lifts the burden of taxation. We rely for greater wealth

production not only on the absorption into productive industry of those now unemployed or

working short time, and not only on the maximum production of all present machinery; the

elimination of redundant middlemen, and the great network of purely parasitic occupations

which have grown up of recent years in the decline of productive industry, will release great

new forces for wealth production, in addition to the labour of those unemployed or on short

time. Any analysis of the swing over from staple productive industry to distributive, and still

more redundant quasi-luxury occupation in service of the profiteering rich, will yield the most

startling figures. In a civilisation in which the rich profiteer can buy too much of the inessential

and the poor can buy too little of the essential a disequilibrium takes place in the national

economy and hundreds of thousands are drawn from productive to non-productive industry.

The elimination of overlapping and redundant distributive services, and the reabsorption of

such labour, together with labour employed in ultra-luxury trades, back into productive

industry, in response to the people's new demands for "real" goods, will increase the productive

power of the nation in almost incalculable degree. The proportion of the people actually

engaged in real productive processes is small to the point of being one of the outstanding

anomalies of the system.





The Passing of Capitalism -Industrial Freedom



Thus in the new economy a nation emerges organised in the divine parallel of the human body

as the Corporate name implies. Every organ plays a part in relation to the whole and in

harmony with the whole. The warfare of sections and interests gives place to a co-operative

synthesis. Within that system every great institution of national life that can be adapted to a

new and higher purpose will find not a lesser but a greater part. Trade unions and employers'

organisations will no longer be the opposing armies of class war. They will be the twin pillars

which support the structure of the economic corporations. These will be controlled by

representatives of the technical and managerial staff and of employers' and trade unions, plus

consumers' representatives appointed by Government to prevent exploitation of the community.

Trade Unions, so far from being suppressed, will find not only greater status but greater power

within the Corporate system. Free from the dog fight of a system in which, with the odds

against them, they are ever on the run, they will be able to negotiate for the workers binding

and fair agreements with the force of law. The guarantee of this ability is that in the event of

deadlock within the Corporations, between employers and trade unions, either Government or

consumers' representatives appointed by Government will intervene and secure a binding

settlement. As Government depends on the votes of the people as a whole, among whom the

workers are in a vast majority, the people by their vote can at any time dismiss from power a

Government that does not secure the workers a fair deal.



They may rely on the Government which they created and which they can destroy to secure

them justice. This is the "power action" of the working class with which British Union

challenges the "strike action" of class war. The advantage of "power action" to the wage

earners is plain both in comparison with the "strike action" offered by class war and the

"political action" offered by the Labour Party. Through the Corporations they secure by law a

fair share in the expanding proceeds of industry and if, in their view, the share be not fair they

have the right to vote against a Government whose ultimate authority in industrial disputes

does not secure justice. Without recourse to class war a proper and automatic balance is

maintained between wages, profits and savings by the constant operation of the Corporate

system. Not only is justice secured to the working class, but a planned equilibrium is

maintained between the production of "capital" and "consumption" goods, which overcomes

one of the grave defects of the present system.



Similarly "power action" presents an overwhelming advantage to the wage earner in

comparison with the " political action " offered by the Labour Party. For the "power action" of

the Corporate system gives the workers immediate and equal participation in control and profit

over the whole field of industry. On the other hand, the "political action" of the Labour Party

merely offers "step by step" nationalisation, beginning with the most obsolete industries, while

the worker remains at the mercy of a chaotic capitalism over the whole sphere of industry

which is left unaffected by these measures. Labour policy is partial and ineffective. British

Union policy is universal and effective. In that policy the trade unions play not a lesser but a

greater part than they do today.





British Union is determined that the small man shall not be crushed out, because his energy and

individuality is a factor of progress and stability within the State. We want to see as many

owner-occupier farmers, as many individual industrialists and as many small shopkeepers as

possible. We are not against capital thus widely diffused, but we are against great monopolies

of capital in the hands of gigantic combines. This is the system of capitalism by which capital

uses the people for its own purpose. British Union is the system by which the people use

capital for their own purpose. But to win this freedom from finance capitalism the people must

elect and arm their Government with power and support their individual position with the

power of Corporate organisation. Scattered and divided they are helpless but within the

Corporate life they are all powerful.



To secure that Corporate life the individual is called upon to make no further sacrifice than to

accept some public obligation in return for private freedom. That public obligation is in his

work and contact with his fellows to serve the nation as well as to serve himself. He is not free,

by anti-social practice, by the cornering of commodities the people require, by sweating of

labour, or by price cutting to make profit for himself at the expense of his fellow Britons. But

he is free by his exertions and enterprise to build up a business which enriches himself and the

nation in the production of wealth, and to transmit the result of his life's work to his children if

they also are later prepared to play their part in the national life. The individual, in fact, is free

to develop but not to exploit, and the latter limitation is the only public obligation that he is

called upon to accept in return for private freedom. That new freedom of the individual is the

ability to carry on his business without let, hindrance or sudden ruin from the operations of

trust, combine, or finance power. It is conferred by the protection of a Government and the

operation of a system which the sum of the nation's individuals has created.



In this new forward march of humanity we but extend the basic principle and obligation of all

civilisation. Any man can escape from obligation by cutting himself off from his fellows and

living in the wilds. He may thus conceive that he wins freedom, but in fact he deprives himself

of freedom, for he loses not only the protection but the services which civilisation alone can

afford him. By accepting the obligations of civilisation, and civilised conduct which contact

with his fellows involves, he receives in return the freedom of countless services and amenities

which he would not secure for himself as an isolated individual. So in the next great advance of

humanity into Corporate life the individual wins for himself a greater freedom than he has ever

known before, not merely by securing Corporate protection from the forces which today

destroy his individual life, but in winning from his fellows the Corporate service of a mutual

and higher civilisation as the reward of service and fellowship to his fellow men. In

recognising his duties at last he will secure his rights.



Heredity



THE system of British Union provides no place for the parasite. It has neither privilege nor

place for those who seek to live on the efforts of others without giving anything in return. But

the people's state has opportunity and place for all who serve the nation in an infinite variety of

capacity. So British Union system of heredity is accordingly designed on the one hand to

encourage to the utmost the initiative and enterprise of the individual not only in working for

himself but also in deep and human motive in working for his children. On the other hand, it is

devised to eliminate the parasite and to deprive of all hereditary advantage those who prove

unworthy of their forebears' exertions and unworthy of the new nation. Therefore, a man, or

woman, may by energy and enterprise not only enrich themselves but bequeath the result of

their efforts to their children. But the children, either in industrial service or in public service,

must render a service equivalent to the benefit they receive, or in default will lose their

hereditary advantage in whole or in part. Equity Tribunals of People's Justice will be

established to determine on commonsense lines such questions, which will be no more difficult

to settle than many questions of equity that come before the courts today. The system will be

woven quite naturally and easily into a general codification and simplification of the law of the

land, in language which anyone can understand without dependence on a lawyer's racket.



The Land



Opportunities for public service on a far greater scale than exists today will be provided by the

immense development in the social life of the new nation, which will call for leadership and

effort in many spheres now closed. For one example, a real local leadership will again be

required in a revitalised countryside. The original owners of the land in most cases gave such

leadership until death duties and the victory of urbanism broke the system. They will again

have such opportunity in British Union system, which seeks consciously the continuity of a

stock with roots in the soil, and will accordingly lift from the land death duties and other

burdens in return for real service to the land. But the landlord whose time, money, and energy

are not spent among his own people in local leadership but are divided between a London night

club and a continental resort will be ruthlessly dispossessed without any compensation. The

land thus acquired by the State will be used for the development of owner occupier farms, and

a mixed system of local leadership and owner occupier will result which will preserve the best

traditions of the land and afford the maximum stability.



To the urban landlord British Union applies the same principle as to any other monopolist. Any

attempt to exploit a shortage of any commodity by increasing the price to the people will be

rigorously suppressed. So all rents will be controlled by law while any shortage of housing

exists. As for the slum landlord he will simply be dispossessed without compensation and

prosecuted like any other purveyor of commodities which are a danger to health. The landlord

who without effort of his own seeks to take advantage of community effort by increasing the

price of land in the neighbourhood of an expanding town or industry will be confronted by a

simple dilemma. He will be taxed on his own valuation of the land, but the State will have

power to acquire it at that valuation. If he assesses the value at a high figure he will be taxed at

a high figure, and if he assesses it at a low figure he will be bought out at that figure with

increment to the nation.



Thus British Union will solve the ancient problem of "land values" by measures which place

the land in the same category as any other potential monopoly. In practice, however, most

ownership of urban land will pass to the State as that category of landlord is a great deal less

likely than the leader of the countryside to justify his hereditary wealth by public service. It is





Class



Liberal Socialism has ever striven to represent that only one form of hereditary wealth led to

vicious results, namely the land in which their leading figures happened to have no interest. In

fact, the worse vices of the hereditary system which British Union will sweep away arise from

the transmission of hereditary wealth by quickly rich financiers and speculators, whose

children have no sense whatever of hereditary responsibility in return for hereditary wealth. To

such as these the "trustee of the nation" principle of all wealth owners under British Union are

utterly lacking. From them, in particular, has come the disgusting spectacle of flaunting

extravagance and paraded riches in face of poverty, which evoked from British Union the

principle that "none shall stuff while others starve." Above all they have created the fatal

distinctions of social class which British Union is determined to remove for ever. Their class

values are based on money value and on nothing else. The accident of birth and the mere fact

of being their "father's son" is held by these miserable specimens of modern degeneracy to

elevate them without effort of their own above their fellow men. Not only are they given

opportunity by their forebears's exertion, but many of them neglect that opportunity for any

other end than the idle pursuit of pleasure, while they cumber the directorates of their

hereditary businesses which underpaid technicians conduct. Here we see the apotheosis of the

parasite deriving his snobbery from his father's efforts and marking the values of the snob by

the capacity to squander in face of the starving. The snob and the parasite shall go, and with

him shall go his values in the classless state which accords "opportunity to all but privilege to

none."



Function



Class based on social snobbery and the accident of inheritance shall go. But British Union will

not fall into the opposite stupidity of an unworkable equalitarianism which refuses to recognise

between man and man or woman and woman any difference of function. A man shall be valued

by what he is and not by what his father was. If he performs high service to the nation in the

exercise of exceptional capacity he shall have fitting reward and status. To work, not only for

money for self and children, but for position and honour among fellow men is no small and

unworthy motive of mankind, and is a deep mainspring of human conduct which it is folly to

ignore. The award of honour as the reward of money may go to great service and may be

transmitted to children, but like hereditary wealth will be liable to removal if the children are

unworthy.



To argue that all men are the same and that exceptional effort is worthy of no recognition is an

error that robs of motive power important human enterprises. It is true that the great lights of

humanity have illumined the path of mankind from no other motive than the inner light. But it

is folly to ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority who achieve anything are moved by

simple terms of honourable distinction and the winning of security for home and children. It is

still greater folly to presume that ail men are equally gifted in mind, muscle, or spirit; from that

fallacy arises the fatal tendency of the present phase to slow down the pace of the fastest to that

of the slowest. This grotesque assumption, if carried to its logical conclusion, would merely

deprive the nation of the full exertion of exceptional ability by which alone great affairs can be

conducted.



The true solution is to eliminate the parasite of heredity but to give the utmost opportunity to

talent wherever it can be found. Whether a man starts in castle or cottage he shall have equal

opportunity to rise to the top and to use his talent if he possesses the capacity. This principle

involves a complete revision of the present educational system, which largely confines

opportunity to the accident of wealth. In the reconstruction of national education it will be also

the deliberate aim of British Union finally to eliminate the last trace of class and snobbery.



Preliminary education will afford to all the same sound basis of classless and national

education, subject to the right of all parents to secure for their children the religious

atmosphere they desire. But later education will differentiate widely, not on the principle of

wealth but purely on the principle of talent. At present the children of the rich are normally

educated at least until eighteen years of age, altogether irrespective of their capacity for

education. The children of the poor, on the other hand, are largely thrust into industry at the

age of fourteen, irrespective of talent for the higher education which is denied. It will be the

policy of British Union to continue the education of all by varying methods and degree until

eighteen years of age. In the present low standard of life to deprive parents of the small wages

of children who displace their elders from industry would be a hardship. In the higher standard

of life which science will produce within a modern system adults will earn enough to keep the

home together without dependence on the wage pittances of children.



Therefore British Union will render it possible to continue education for all until an age when

they can be regarded as truly adult and ready to enter industrial life. But from the age of fifteen

onwards education will be sharply and progressively differentiated between varying degrees of

talent.



All children of outstanding ability will have open to them by progressive selection a straight

road from cradle to university. The opportunity open to every child will be the same, and the

same path to higher education will be available to all talent. Those on the other hand who

cannot benefit beyond a certain point from the absorption of academic knowledge, as a

preliminary to the practical in life, will undergo different forms of education and training, and

at an earlier age will specialise for some definite avocation. Above all, every child, of whatever

talent or capacity, will receive a sound physical and nutritional basis for the struggle of life.

The care of the child is the special care of British Union, for British Union will be not only the

nation's trustee of today but also of tomorrow. That infinite morrow of British destiny depends

on building a nation with physique and morale adequate to the immense duty of British

leadership. In that high purpose we guard the child.



True Patriotism



The people's state of British Union thus secures the principle of opportunity for all but

privilege to none. Every Briton shall have equal opportunity in the land of his birth, and,

therefore, equal possession and love of that land. Thus shall be born the true patriotism which

is determination to build a land worthy of a patriot's love. This is something very different

from Conservatism's exploitation of that profound emotion to guard the vested interests which

possess Britain today. No wonder that so many of the dispossessed reply to the "Tory patriot"

that "it is your land, not our land, that you ask us to defend." Britain looks different to the

"father's son" arriving at a night club door in a Rolls Royce than to the man of possibly greater

capacity and, in the war at least, of greater service, who is shivering in the rain or fog of a

country that has used him and discarded him. In British Union our land will look the same to

all, for it will afford to all the same opportunity and so will belong to all.









THE Jewish question should receive proper space in relation to national affairs in any book

which deals with the modern problem. This question was no concern of our Movement at the

outset, but the Jews themselves very quickly made it a concern. We advanced for the

consideration of our countrymen the policy which appears in these pages, without raising any

racial question or troubling with any faction. Long before we raised the Jewish question in any

form, however, that question was forced on our attention.



The evidence for this statement can be ascertained by any one from police court records. For

the inquirer will learn that of those convicted for physical attacks on Blackshirts 50 per cent

were undeniably Jewish in the six months which preceded the introduction of this question by

the British Union in October, 1934. Our organisation had then been in existence two years and

we had observed that, in addition to an extraordinary proportion of Jews in the physical

assailants of our members (when out' numbered), the victimisation of our people by Jewish

employers and the pressure of Jewish interests on our supporters was a very distinctive feature

of our struggle. This occurrence forced the Jewish question on the attention of many who had

paid no more attention to Jews or their particular problem and character than to any other

section of the community.



The resultant study revealed a fact not difficult to ascertain, that a remarkable proportion of

Jews were engaged in practices which the system we proposed would bring to an end.

Throughout the ages Jews have taken a leading part in international usury and all forms of

finance and money lending, while smaller exemplars of the method have engaged in such

practices as price cutting, the sweating of labour, and other means of livelihood which any

ordered and regulated economy must bring to an end. So the reason was not far to seek why we

had incurred the bitter and especial enmity of Jewish interests.



Some say that it is a wicked animal that defends itself when attacked, but the response of the

Englishman to a blow in the face is traditional. That response was greeted immediately by all

the organs which Jewish interests control with a loud clamour of racial persecution. It is well,

therefore, to set down exactly what we propose on this question, and the reader may decide for

himself whether this policy is persecution or simple justice which is necessary to the integrity

of our own nation.



Rights of the State



We do not attack Jews on account of their religion, for our principle is complete religious

toleration, and we certainly do not wish to persecute them on account of their race, for we

dedicate ourselves to service of an Empire which contains many different races and any

suggestion of racial persecution would be detrimental to the Empire we serve. Our quarrel with

the Jewish interests is that they have constituted themselves a state within the nation, and have

set the interests of their co-racialists at home and abroad above the interest of the British State.



An outstanding example of this conduct is the persistent attempt of many Jewish interests to

provoke the world disaster of another war between Britain and Germany, not this time in any

British quarrel, but purely in a Jewish quarrel.

None can argue that it is a principle of racial or religious persecution for a State to lay down

the principle that its citizens must own first allegiance to the nation of which they are members

and not to any faction at home or abroad. That many Jews regard themselves first as members

of Jewry and secondly as British citizens is not only a matter of simple observation but of proof

from Jewish literature and statement. British Union, therefore, affirms the simple principle that

Jews who have placed the interests of Jewry before those of Britain must leave Great Britain.





We British have not been in the habit of persecuting foreigners and we shall not in British

Union develop that habit. On the contrary, we have a tradition of according good treatment to

foreigners who have particularly served this nation and any such Jews have certainly no reason

to anticipate any breach of this tradition. But all nations have a right to say that foreigners who

have abused their hospitality shall leave the country, and any State has a right to affirm that all

citizens shall own allegiance to the nation and not to any external power.



It remains to inquire whether in fact it is fair to regard the Jew as a foreigner. The simple

answer is that he comes from the Orient and physically, mentally and spiritually, is more alien

to us than any Western nation. If a community of several hundred thousand Frenchmen,

Germans, Italians or Russians were dumped in our midst they would create a grave national

problem. That problem would be particularly grave if they maintained themselves as a

community in our midst, owning spiritual allegiance to their original nation, and indulging in

methods and practices altogether alien to British character and temperament. Such an event

would create a problem so serious that a solution would have to be found. Yet the Jew is more

remote from British character than any German or Frenchman, for they are Westerners and the

Jews are Orientals.



The Final Solution



This problem has been raised with increasing pressure in most European countries in the

inevitable opportunity presented to Jewish method by the "decline of the West." It has become

a European question of first class magnitude in which Britain must offer leadership in accord

with British tradition. It is not in accord with British character to keep Jews here in order to

bully them -that we will never do. On the contrary, the statesmanship of the future must find a

solution of this question on the lines of the Jews again becoming an integral nation.



There are many waste places of the earth possessing great potential fertility, and the collective

wisdom of a new Europe should be capable of finding territory where the Jews may escape the

curse of no nationality and may again acquire the status and opportunity of nationhood. It is

true that Palestine is not available as a home for the Jewish race throughout the world, for the

simple reason that it is already the home of the Arabs. Whatever wrongs the Jews are alleged to

have suffered will not be righted by the crime of inflicting with violence far greater wrongs on

the Arab ally who trusted the word of Britain in war. The most that the Jews can reasonably

hope from Palestine is respect for their holy places and free access to visit them as the pilgrim

Arab has access to Mecca. Other territory must and can be found for the solution of the Jewish

problem of the world. Is it really persecution of the Jews to suggest that they should again

become a nation in suitable territory? If so, it is persecution which has been acclaimed by the

prophets and seers of Jewry as the final objective of their race for the last two thousand years.

Their leaders have always proclaimed the wish of Jewry to become again a nation. Why is it

persecution to say "very well, you shall become again a nation "? It is not persecution unless it

be true that every protestation of Jewry in this regard was hypocrisy throughout the ages, and

that their real desire was not to reunite their scattered race in national dignity but to become for

ever the parasite of humanity.





In summary of our policy on this question we affirm the right of every nation to deport any

foreigner who has abused its hospitality, and we hold the aim of finding, together with other

European nations, a final solution of this vexed question by the creation of a Jewish National

State, in full accord with the age-long prayers of the prophets and leaders of the Jewish race. Is

this persecution or is it justice?





The International of Finance and Socialism



BRITISH foreign policy should hold two objectives: (1) the maintenance of British interest; (2)

the maintenance of world peace. These two objectives do not conflict but coincide. British

Unions deep quarrel with the virtually unanimous policy of the old parties is that it has

sacrificed both the interests of Britain and of world peace to a political vendetta. Particularly

we denounce the pursuit of that feud to the risk of British lives and world catastrophe because

it is dictated by subservience to the vile international interests which command the old parties.



In this sphere international finance and international Socialism march openly hand in hand.

They are by nature complementary forces of disaster, for the policy of international Socialism

creates the flux and chaos by which finance lives and the producer perishes. Still more, in

foreign policy their community of aim and of method should be clear to all, together with the

reason of their unholy union. Certain countries have at once extirpated the control of

international finance and the hopes of international Socialism. No reason exists in British

interest to quarrel with these countries and every reason of world peace forbids the quarrel. Yet

the feud of international finance and its twin, international Socialism, thrusts the manhood of

Britain toward mortal quarrel with these nations.



Germany and Italy, despite a present poverty of natural resources have, at least, broken the

control of international finance, and Germany in particular has offended this world power by

summary dealing with the Jewish masters of usury. So every force of the money power

throughout the world has been mobilised to crush them, and that power does not stop short at

payment for its vendetta in British blood. Any study of the Press and propaganda organs

controlled by finance power can reach no other conclusion if we ask the simple question, what

single interest of Britain or of world peace is served by their clearly deliberate intention to

provoke war between Britain and the new countries?



The motive of international Socialists is equally clear in their new clamour for war at any price.

International Socialism has always taught the people that any form of national action in

independence of world conditions was futile, and that the success of Socialism in Britain

depended on the universal adoption of their doctrines throughout the world. Now great

countries arise which have uprooted in theory and practice the obsolete doctrines of

international Socialism, and consequently bar to the British Labour Party all hope of the

universal acceptance of their creed, on which they admit alone the success of their cause can

depend. So but one hope of the ultimate triumph of their party remains to the leaders of Labour,

and that is the overthrow of these new systems by the force of world war. Lightly the Labour

leaders appear to be prepared to purchase their political objective in British blood, and to

pursue their political vendetta at the price of every interest of Britain and of world peace.



The party which has been built on cant of pacifism today leads the clamour for war, and the

party which ever refused Britain arms to defend herself now supports rearmament, not for the

defence of Britain, but for the defence by war of international Socialism. Foremost in the van

of the new jingoes is the Socialist conscientious objector of 1914. So is presented an edifying

spectacle which naturally makes but scant appeal to the ex-serviceman of the last war. He

replies with British Union that we have fought Germany once in a British quarrel and we shall

not fight her again either in a Socialist or in a Jewish quarrel.



In result every high aspiration of the war generation has been frustrated and perverted. The

League of Nations, which was the repository of many fine ideals, like the Holy Alliance of the

previous century, has been perverted to perform exactly the opposite purpose to that which it

was intended to fulfill. The League was meant to overcome the division of Europe, and to

eliminate for ever the fatal system of the balance of power, which divided mankind into

opposing and contending camps of highly armed and hostile nations. It has been perverted to

be a new and more vicious instrument of that system by which Britain, France and Russia, in

the name of the League, can mobilise their remaining satellite powers in one balance of a scale,

whose other balance, by force of a common original adversity, now holds the armed power of

Germany, Italy and Japan.



Despite every aspiration of the war generation and every hope of stricken mankind we are back

where we began in a situation which for Britain is more dangerous than before. For the

departure by present Government, in their political vendetta, from the sober British policy of

pursuing the coincident objectives of peace and British interests has resulted in follies of which

British statesman ship has never previously been guilty. Never before in modern times have we

placed ourselves in a strategical position so vulnerable that any child could observe it and also

apprehend the consequence. We face Germany across the North Sea and Japan in the far seas

of our Eastern possessions, while in the Mediterranean route to our Oriental Empire we have

succeeded in antagonising at one end the new Spain, and at the other end the Arabs, with an

alienated Italy in the middle. With Germany and the Arabs we have quarreled for the sake of

the Jews, and with Italy and the new Spain for the sake of international Socialism in an alliance

with Russian Communism. Has British statesmanship ever before perpetrated folly on a scale

so gigantic, in denial so complete of British interest, security and peace?



Conservative Alliance with Communism



The virtual alliance of Conservative Government in Britain with Communist Government in

Russia is at the root of all evil in foreign policy. This curious communion of Conservatism and

Communism in the international sphere will not appear so strange to those familiar at home

with British Union struggle, who have witnessed again and again the deliberate use by

Conservatism of a Communism which, in myopic vision, they do not fear against the creed of

the twentieth century, which has excited both the panic and the fury of reaction. Constantly

Conservatism has condoned, excused, and even supported the crimes of Communism when the

target was fellow Britons who dared to raise against Conservative betrayal of the people the

standard of a new and true patriotism.



Abroad, as at home, Conservatism is willing to use even the vile and bloody instrument of

world Communism against the nations of European renaissance. That a virtual alliance exists

between the Government of Britain and that of Moscow, with the natural and warm approval of

the Socialist opposition, is not today denied. The Franco Soviet Pact has ever been approved by

the Conservative Government and the close association of French and British policy, together

with the close cooperation of British and Russian policy at Geneva and elsewhere, has almost

flaunted in the face of Europe the triple alliance of Britain, France and Russia, to which the

overwhelming majority of the British people are completely opposed.



Arms Race Origin



The full historic error of the Franco Soviet Pact can only be appreciated if the chronology of

these events is recalled. In November, 1933, the leader of Germany made an offer to Europe





That Britain should be fully armed in a troubled world, to defend herself from any possible

assault, has been a basic principle of British Union long before the National Government,

which had criminally neglected our defences, consented to tardy and inefficient rearmament.

Disarmament can only be won by world agreement which proportionately reduces the strength

of all great nations and leaves the relative strength the same and the immunity from attack the

greater. But armament by political parties which have grossly neglected the elementary duty of

Government to put Britain in a position of self-defence, as part of an arms race which their

blunders have precipitated is a very different matter. Arm we must if other nations are armed,

but every effort of statesmanship should seek an end to the menace of arms race, which can

only be achieved by world appeasement.



European Division and Eastern Anarchy



In the fatal sequence of events a divided Europe fell an easy and humiliated prey to Oriental

anarchy. Germany isolated and encircled, like others in similar predicament, sought support

where she could find it, and to the Berlin-Rome axis was added an understanding with Japan.

As a result, in face of a divided Europe, Japan was able to cut loose in the Orient, with Great

Britain an impotent and humiliated spectator.



A united Europe and a rational policy would at any time have averted the disaster by firm

intimation to Japan that north of the Yangtze river, but no further, she was at liberty to do what

Britain did in India, and in bringing order where anarchy and bloodshed ruled to find an outlet

for her population and access to raw materials. Similarly the dignity and strength of a united

Europe could have secured the relatively bloodless suppression of slave trading barbarity in

Abyssinia and legitimate expansion for Italy, in full accord with the civilising mission which

Britain herself undertook throughout the world. But Europe was divided, and from this division

of the mind and spirit a sequence of catastrophe has arisen. Japan, forbidden to expand in

Northern China, exploded throughout the Far East, and Italy, forbidden to expand where her

legitimate interests were affected in the prevention of slave raiding from adjoining territory,

exploded throughout the Near East. The simple lesson of history, and particularly of British

history, is that great nations expand or explode. By denying expansion when no British

interests were affected we have provoked explosion, and by encouraging to resistance primitive

populations whom we had neither the will nor the means to defend, we sacrificed their blood

and our own prestige.



We ask what British interest was served by long encouraging resistance to Japan in Northern

China, except deference to our Governments Soviet ally, who required that territory as a

breeding ground for Oriental Communism, and could exact support in the East against Japan in

return for support in the West against Germany. Again we ask what British interest was served

by partial and ineffective intervention in the Abyssinian dispute in deference to the clamour of





British Union Principles



So with the lesson in mind of past blunders, which we have consistently opposed, British

Union policy in the foreign sphere rests on two principles: (1) to interfere in no quarrels which

are not our concern. Britons shall fight for Britain only, and never again shall conscript armies

leave these shores in foreign quarrel. Britain we will always defend from any attack, and we

will provide the means for that defence, but never again shall British blood be spilt in an alien

quarrel; (2) we will give leadership and make contribution to secure the material and spiritual

union of Europe, on which alone world peace and British interest in world peace can rest. If,

despite that leadership and contribution, the world in madness destroys itself by war we will

"Mind Britain's Business" and thereby save our people from that catastrophe.



The New Germany



In that determination it is natural immediately to seek a solution of present difficulties with

Germany and the establishment of friendship. That such a solution can be found is plain to

anyone who has studied the facts of the new Europe and, therefore, under stands the profound

difference between the old and the new Germany. The Germany of the Kaiser rested on a

system of export capitalism conducted by Judaic finance which challenged us on the markets

of the world, and emphasised that challenge with naval rivalry that threatened our Empire. In

historic survey the internal forces of that Germany, operating within the international system to

which Britain was wedded, made a clash inevitable.



It is, therefore, important to realise that in 15 years of Hitler's struggle a new German

psychology was created which rests on a conception exactly the opposite to that of the Kaiser.

The new German does not desire a world wide Empire, for he believes that racial deterioration

will result from such racial intercourse, and that the new German has another mission in the

world than to elevate savages. These are reasons strange for the Englishman to understand,

because he knows that the foremost achievements of his race have been evoked in the vast

work of Empire building which, in the particular case of his Imperial genius, has led to no such

deleterious results. But these facts are important in that they denote no longer a divergence but

a community of objective. Britain requires in peace to develop her own Empire, and Germany

desires in peace to incorporate within the Reich the Germans of Europe.



The desires of these two powers, therefore, for the first time become not antithetical but

complementary. For a strong British Empire throughout the world can be regarded by the new

German as a world bulwark against Oriental Communism, and a strong Germany in Europe

can be regarded by the new Briton as a European bulwark against the same disruption that

invades from the East the life of Western man. From new conceptions in Germany and in

Britain can arise a new communion of interest to support the communion that should exist in a

common blood.



France and European Solidarity



To this idea the writer, as a friend of the French people, is convinced that France can be

attached once she, too, has won freedom from the vendettas of politicians and can be induced

to realise that the legitimate expansion of Germany, in directions the opposite to any threat to

French interest, is a strength to Europe, and, therefore, a strength to France in securing





Let us put ourselves for a moment in the German position and console ourselves and the

French with the reflection that German affairs are no longer conducted by fools but by a man

of singular intelligence. By recognition of the fact that the new German interests lie in the East

rather than in the West of Europe, British Union does not mean that we seek joint action with

Germany in the waging of war against Russia, although we shall forthwith break the present

alliance with Russia. On the contrary, we seek peace with all countries, including Russia, and

would only join with other powers in action against her if she menaced Great Britain and thus

evoked our resolute principle of self-defence. But even the folly of Russian Communism will

not challenge the might of an united Europe which, if need arose, would deal with her as easily

as with a colonial expedition.



We seek not by war, but by the solidarity of the European spirit and plain commonsense, to

secure that legitimate expansion of great nations which can avert the disaster of another and

greater explosion. That solution will be found without bloodshed for the good and simple

reason that none can resist a combination of the great powers of Europe. Britain, Germany,

France and Italy have in this matter a basic community of interest which the victory of the

modern movement in Britain can weld into an irrefragable instrument of action in the

achievement of peace.



In foreign affairs, as in national life, the leadership principle prevails in reality, and Europe is

lost without the united and effective leadership of the Great Powers. Too long we have suffered

from the post war delusion that a tiny State, possessing a few thousands of backward

population, was not only in theory but in practice the equal of a great nation with millions of

advanced peoples to support material power and moral position.



Colonial Question



The great powers must unite and lead to peace, and this final blessing can only come from the

victory of British Union in the land that is today the key to world peace. But, in giving leader

ship, Britain must also make contribution, and long before the colonial question was raised in

acute and controversial form British Union declared willingness to hand back to Germany the

mandated territories, on simple and clear conditions that they should not be used as naval or air

bases against Britain, and that Britain might preserve such facilities as were necessary to her

naval and air communications. Such a concession would present no difficulty to a Germany

which has already accepted a 35 per cent ratio of our naval strength, and therefore made the

maintenance of her potential colonial communications dependent on friendship with Britain.

We will not surrender one inch of British territory to any power, but these colonies held in

mandate from the League of Nations are not British in law, and in practice we are inhibited

from their development for British purposes, with the result that territory, which in restoration

would be an outlet and opportunity for Germany, is today a burden and expense to us. Yet the

Conservatives, who have betrayed British Empire by throwing open British African

possessions as the dumping ground of the world, are ready to jeopardise world peace in

clinging to territory we do not require, while neglecting the territory which belongs to us at the

expense of infinite sacrifice and heroism of virile generations of the British. So in passing it



Economic Peace



It is clear that the peace of the new world can only rest on material justice and to deny it is to

court war. The access of Germany to raw materials and opportunity for outlet and expansion

will solve the last material problem of the great powers, for the other dispossessed nations,

such as Italy and Japan, have already found a solution by force that the financial democratic

world with characteristic folly refused to reason.



Thus in the solution of the German problem it becomes possible for each great nation to build

that comparatively self contained civilisation which is the surest guarantee of peace. To those

who deny this elementary statement of fact we pose the simple question, what are modern wars

about? The answer is clearly that modern wars are economic in the struggle for raw materials

and for markets. Consequently if each great nation has access to raw materials, and opportunity

to build a market in the purchasing power of their own people, the only effective cause of war

in the world is eliminated. The urge to war will go with the suppression of the international

struggle for raw materials and markets, and the financial parasite that inflames the fever. Then

if the world goes to war the world will indeed be mad, because no reason can exist for war, and

Britain with justice will have no part in that madness.



The New Europe



But in truth no such fear need exist, for the reason of the present malady of Europe is not so

difficult to diagnose. It is a malady and division of the spirit, which transcends all material

differences. Material justice must be done and the new world must be built on the sound reality

of a fair economic basis. But deeper than every division of material things is the division of the

spirit in the modern Europe. The old world and the new world are divided and they cannot

mingle. Either the new world and the old world will collide in disaster or the new world will

emerge as the final system of the modern age. Therefore on the fate of Britain depends the fate

of mankind.



British Union advances with British policy, method and character suited to this nation and to

no other. But we can understand those who in other countries have brought the new world to

triumph by policy, method and character suited to their nations as no "democrat" ever can.

Because, despite every divergence of policy and difference of national character, we have the

same origin in the straggle of our betrayed generation of the war to redeem great nations from

corruption, and in common with these others we have passed through the same ordeals and

faced the same enemies. This origin of a common experience and determination that great

peoples shall not perish from the earth gives us an understanding one of another and a

sympathy in the mutual struggle with the dark enemy of mankind that the old world can neither

comprehend nor disrupt.



We are British and before all else in our national creed we place Britain and our love of

country, but because we love our land we can understand and work with those who love their

land. Thus shall be born not only the material union but the spiritual union of the new world.





SO British Union emerges from the welter of parties and the chaos of the system. To meet an

emergency no less menacing than 1914 because it is not so sudden or so universally apparent,

British Union summons our people to no less an effort in no less a spirit. Gone in the demand

of that hour was the clamour of faction and the strife of section that a great nation might unite

to win salvation. A brotherhood of the British was born that in the strength of union was

invincible and irresistible.



Today the nation faces a foe more dangerous because he dwells within, and a situation no less

grave because to all it is not yet visible. We have been divided and we have been conquered

because by division of the British alone we can be conquered. Class against class, faction

against faction, party against party, interest against interest, man against man, and brother

against brother has been the tactic of the warfare by which the British in the modern age for the

first time in their history have been subdued. We have been defeated, too, at a moment in our

history when the world was at our feet, because the heritage won for us by the heroism of our

fathers affords to the genius of modern science, and the new and unprecedented triumph of the

human mind, an opportunity of material achievement leading, through the gift of economic

freedom, to a higher spiritual civilisation than mankind in the long story of the human race has

yet witnessed. But for the moment the British are defeated and acquiescence in defeat means

the end. On the one hand, continued lethargy can lead only to unlimited chaos, ending in

ultimate destruction, and, on the other, new effort can open before us a vista of unparalleled

and unlimited opportunity.



Humanity can never stand still, and at this moment more than any other in our history the

alternatives before a great nation are heroism or oblivion. Can we recapture the union of 1914

and that rapturous dedication of the individual to a cause that transcends self and faction, or are

we doomed to go down with the Empires of history in the chaos of usury and sectional greed?

That is the question of the hour for which every factor and symptom of the current situation

presses decision. Is it now possible by a supreme effort of the British spirit and the human will

to arrest what in the light of all past history would appear to be the course of destiny itself?

For we have reached the period, by every indication available to the intellect, at which each

civilisation and Empire of the past has begun to traverse that downward path to the dust and

ashes from which their glory never returned. Every fatal symptom of the past is present in the

modern situation, from the uprooting of the people's contact with the soil to the development of

usury and the rule of money power, accompanied by social decadence and vice that flaunts in

the face or civilisation the doctrine of defeat and decline.



Above the European scene towers in menace Spengler's colossal contribution to modern

thought which taught our new generation that a limit is set to the course of civilisations and

Empires, and that the course that once is run is for ever closed. Every indication of decadence

and decline which he observed as a precursor of the downfall of a civilisation is apparent in the

modern scene, and from all history he deduced the sombre conclusion that the effort of

"Faustian" man to renew his youth and to recapture the dawn of a civilisation must ever fail.

History is on the side of the great philosopher and every sign of the period with fatal recurrence

supports his view. His massive pessimism, supported by impressive armoury of fact, rises in

challenge and in menace to our generation and our age. We take up that challenge with the

radiant optimism born of man's achievements in the new realm of science that the philosopher

understood less well than history, and born, above all, of our undying belief in the invincible

spirit of that final product of the ages -the modem man.





It is in immense answer to all past history of human fate that British Union emerges within

British Empire and the modern creed in diverse form emerges in all great nations with the

decisive challenge of the renaissance of the Western man. Underlying every difference in

policy, method, form and character in different nations, the rise of the National Socialist and

Fascist doctrine throughout Europe represents in historic determinism the supreme effort of

modern man to challenge and overcome the human destiny which in every previous civilisation

has ordained irretrievable downfall.



The doctrines of modem disintegration are classic in form and pervade the political parties,

which fade from a flaccid and universal "Liberalism" into the sheer disruption and corruption

of Socialism serving usury. The doctrinaires of the immediate past come to the aid of political

defeatism with the negation of manhood and selfwill and the scientific formulation of surrender

as a faith.



In the sphere of economics Marx portrays humanity as the helpless victim of material

circumstance, and in the sphere of psychology Freud assists the doctrine of human defeatism

with the teaching that selfwill and selfhelp are no longer of any avail, and that man is equally

the helpless toy of childish and even pre-natal influence. Marx's "materialist conception of

history" tells us that man has ever been moved by no higher instinct than the urge of his

stomach, and Freud supports this teaching of man's spiritual futility with the lesson that man

can never escape from the squalid misadventures of childhood.



By a fatal conjunction the materialist doctrines of these two Jews have dominated the modern

"intellectual" world to the rout and destruction of every value of the spirit. This predestination

of materialism has proved in practice even more destructive of the human will and spirit than

the old and discredited "predestination of the soul." It has paralysed the intellectual world into

the acceptance of surrender to circumstance as an article of faith. To these destructive doctrines

of material defeatism our renaissant creed returns a determined answer.



To Marx we say it is true that if we observe the motive of a donkey in jumping a ditch we may

discern a desire to consume a particularly luxuriant thistle that grows on the other side. On the

other hand, if we observe a man jumping a ditch we may legitimately conclude that he

possesses a different and possibly a higher motive.



To Freud we reply that if indeed man has no determination of his own will beyond the idle

chances of childhood then every escape from heredity and environment, not only of genius, but

of every determined spirit in history, is but a figment of historic imagination.



In answer to the fatalistic defeatism of the "intellectual" world our creed summons not only the

whole of history as a witness to the power and motive force of the human spirit, but every

evidence and tendency of recent science. Today the whole front of materialism is on the retreat

and the scene of modern thought is dominated by the triumph of the spirit. In rout are the little





So man emerges for the final struggle of the ages the supreme and conscious master of his fate

to surmount the destiny that has reduced former civilisations to oblivion even from the annals

of time. He advances to the final ordeal armed with weapons of the modern .mind that were

lacking to the hand of any previous generation in the crisis of a civilisation.



The wonders of our new science afford him not only the means with which to conquer material

environment in the ability to wrest wealth in abundance from nature, but, in the final unfolding

of the scientific revelation, probably also the means of controlling even the physical rhythm of

a civilisation. Man for the first time in human history carries to the crisis of his fate weapons

with which he may conquer even destiny. But one compelling necessity remains that he shall

win within himself the will to struggle and to conquer. Our creed and our Movement instill in

man the heroic attitude to life because he needs heroism.



Our new Britons require the virility of the Elizabethan combined with the intellect and method

of the modern technician. The age demands the radiance of the dawn to infuse the wonder of

maturity. We need heroism not just for war, which is a mere stupidity, but heroism to sustain

us through man's sublime attempt to wrestle with nature and to strive with destiny. To this high

purpose we summon from the void of present circumstance the vast spirit of man's heroism.

For this shall be the epic generation whose struggle and whose sacrifice shall decide whether

man again shall know the dust or whether man at last shall grasp the stars.



We know the answer for we have felt this thing within us. In divine purpose the spirit of man

rises above and beyond the welter of chaos and materialism to the conquest of a civilisation

that shall be the sum and the glory of the travail of the ages. In that high fate tomorrow we live.





Tomorrow We Live - British Union Policy 1938