The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

CHAPTER XIV AUTOCRACY, TRADITION AND BIAS

THE MOSLEY MANIFESTO

THE Mosley Manifesto, if not inevitable is certainly significant. It is the cry of despair of a group of serious, sincere and unsophisticated Members of Parliament—of despair at the impotence of the Commons to face up to the economic crisis—if crisis it be. And then, believe me or believe me not, they base their proposals on the Parliamentary system of which they despair. They believe that ‘it is impossible to meet the economic crisis with a nineteenth century Parliamentary machine.”’ It is, of course, a twentieth century Parliament. This is no quibble: for Parliament has put in power a Labour Government, a thing undreamt of in the nineteenth century. And it is elected on a universal franchise, including women—also undreamt of in the nineteenth century. Parliamentary practices may reek of the nineteenth, and even the eighteenth centuries, but we have discovered—although the fact seems hidden from the Mosley Group—that the real trouble is the confusion created by the infusion of economics into what is fundamentally a political body. Sir Oswald Mosley merely makes confusion worse confounded by piling upon an emergency Inner

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