The modernist poet Ezra Pound was another economic loose cannon. Long concerned about the plight of the under-remunerated artist, after the First World War he was attracted to the economic ideas of Major Clifford Hugh Douglas. Douglas, a Scot, had noticed when he was Assistant Director of the Royal Aircraft Works at Farnborough during the First World War that there was always plenty of money available to pay for what was needed, whereas before the war he was always being told that there was no money to do something useful. He came to the conclusion that there was a simple explanation for the persistence of unemployment and poverty in a modern world that was producing more and more goods. Basically, people couldn’t afford to buy the things they produced: it was the persistent problem of under-consumption. So there was widespread poverty ‘when physically all could be living in plenty’. If modern technology was leading to increased productivity, then the state would have to step in to increase people’s ability to pay for those goods, and this could be done by effectively extending wartime controls, which to Douglas’s mind had worked well.
The answer, Douglas argued, was contained in his ‘three demands’: a ‘National Credit Office’ to work out how much credit should be circulating in the economy; a ‘just price’ — a mechanism to absorb profits in times of inflation and return them to the people in the form of subsidised prices when the goods on the market exceeded the money available to buy them; and a ‘national dividend’ (a bit like a Co-op divi) to give a guaranteed basic income to all, regardless of whether they had a job or not.
This may have been an attractive economic argument, but it was a fallacious one, as G.D.H. Cole and Hugh Gaitskell (and many others) pointed out. Another of Douglas’s wackier — though again rather appealing — ideas was reducing the working day of all those who worked in government offices to four hours, but doubling their number, the second shift intended to check the work of the first.
Major Douglas’s economics might have been ‘heresy’ rather than unorthodox, a ‘piece of nonsense’, even a ‘farrago of confusion’, and Douglas might indeed be better regarded as ‘a religious rather than a social reformer’, but he was a hit with ‘the political and social crowd that hangs round Speakers’ Corners and joins in any march or demonstration’ in the early 1930s. He also managed to snag the imagination of the ‘fringes of the left and right’, men like Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, the poet Edwin Muir, the ex-editor of the New Age, a journal of ideas much concerned with modernism in culture, politics, Nietszchean philosophy and spiritualism which had been very influential among the avant garde before the First World War, A.R. Orage (who also published Pound on the pound) and of course Pound himself, who not only penned economic treatises, but incorporated his economic thinking into some of his poems: ‘and the power to purchase can never/(under the present system) catch up with/prices at large/and the light became so bright and so blindin’/in this layer of paradise/that the mind of man was bewildered’. However, in a time of slavish adherence to the Gold Standard, Pound was prescient in seeing that money was nothing more than a token: ‘Money is not a commodity but a measure’. ‘Real credit is a measure of the reserve of energy belonging to the community,’ he maintained, and he proposed a ‘citizen’s income’ given as of right, much like the vote. And, since ‘far from employment bringing riches to a man, employment takes riches away since a person’s riches should be calculated according to their store of time and energy, and are diminished by any encroachment on these’ (a true creative artist’s economics!), working hours should be cut to ‘possibly three hours a day for adults between 18 and 40 … [which] should supply all men’s necessities’.
One of the reasons Ezra Pound found Douglas’s economic theory so appealing was that it was an implicit attack on banks and financiers, since inflation and deflation were controlled in ‘a dark room back of a bank, hung with deep purple curtains’. So, ‘Who my brother controlleth the bank?’ For the virulently anti-Semitic Pound, the answer was obvious: a conspiracy of Jewish financiers.
Another maverick thinker frustrated with orthodox economic theories was the British-domiciled Canadian newspaper magnate, owner of the Daily Express, Lord Beaverbrook. Like Mosley, Beaverbrook, frustrated with the political party he had tried to influence with his radical ideas, set up a new movement. In Beaverbrook’s case it was the Conservative Party that he had lost patience with. And his ‘new wine’ was Imperial Preference (which had been championed by Joseph Chamberlain in 1903), a tariff-protected internal market between Britain and her dominions intended to bind the Empire together and insulate Britain from the buffetings of the world economy.
In the eighteenth century Adam Smith, the principal theorist of Free Trade, had argued that the removal of trade restrictions between nations would encourage the exploitation of natural advantages, producing an efficient international division of labour and world peace. It was a doctrine perfectly attuned to the industrial hegemony that Britain had enjoyed as ‘workshop of the world’, buying raw materials in the cheapest markets and selling its manufactured goods in the most costly. But as foreign competition increased in the nineteenth century and the workshop began to look rickety, there were calls for trade barriers to protect British manufacturing industry and the wages of the workers, which free trade imports could undercut.
By 1930 the pressure to protect the home market was beginning to come from some unexpected quarters. It was a highly sensitive political matter, since Labour relied on the support of the Liberals in government, and for the Liberal Party, political and ideological heirs to Cobden and Bright, free trade flowed through their very veins. Snowden, too, was implacably opposed to the erection of any form of tariff barriers. Yet while the Labour government remained firm in its commitment to free trade, a protectionist movement under the leadership of Sir John Simon was stirring deep in the heart of the Liberal Party. And Stanley Baldwin, leader of a Conservative Party that was no more united in its policies to deal with the economic crisis than Labour or the Liberals, felt the breeze too, noting in April 1930 that ‘The age of free trade is passing … because no new free traders are being born today.’ He grew more confident about reviving old Conservative policies of tariff protection, talking cautiously about safeguarding industry and holding a referendum on what had previously been a vote-loser: food taxes. This however was not enough for those in the party who wanted MacDonald to commit to the pursuit of Empire Free Trade.
In early 1930 Beaverbrook jumped the gun and announced the start of an Empire Crusade, since ‘The old Parties, slaves of tradition — impervious to new ideas — have let us down too, and … out of these old bottles it is no use looking for any new wine.’ Beaverbrook’s plan was to create a single economic unit from the variety of territories within the British Empire: the Empire would provide Britain with its food, while British industry would provide the Empire with the manufactured goods it needed, all behind a protective tariff barrier.
The Crusade, publicised in Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, and Lord Rothermere’s United Empire Party, supported by his Daily Mail (between them these two papers had a circulation of nearly four million), formed an uneasy alliance ‘to save the country … if necessary at the expense of wrecking every political party’ by putting up candidates in every constituency represented by a free trade Conservative (though in fact Rothermere was less concerned about Empire trade than about the loss of British influence in India). In March 1931 the Empire Crusade and the United Empire Party joined together to support an independent, anti-Baldwin Conservative in a by-election in the St George’s division of Westminster, the safest (and without doubt the richest) Conservative seat in the country, where the official Conservative candidate was Duff Cooper. Baldwin, who was being attacked from ‘under the piecrust’ in his own party, was so anxious about the result that he almost considered standing himself. Cooper was a former diplomat and MP, a skilful gentleman-who-lunched, and both the husband of one of the notable beauties of the age, Lady Diana Cooper, and a close friend of the Prince of Wales. In the event, in a campaign in which ‘the gloves were off’ and there had been ‘no baby or butcher-kissing’, the socialite Tory ‘slayed the dragons’, winning a resounding victory despite the ‘power without responsibility’, as Baldwin accused it, of the popular press.
What Mosley and Beaverbrook advocated in extremis — and tainted with their advocacy — also figured in John