Cabinet Totters
Like a mouse squeaking at an elephant, Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley last week gave Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald his worst scare of the year, caused the unstably balanced Labor Cabinet to wobble, totter.
To put the nub of the matter bluntly, Mr. MacDonald and Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden have been driven by overpowering political forces—perhaps by British public opinion itself—almost to abandon their first love: Socialism.
Sir Oswald Mosley, M. P. and his rich wife, also an M. P., are bright, ambitious young people, not over scrupulous. They are frankly out to grab the Prime Ministry for Sir Oswald when he is ten years older (he is now 33). At election times they are busy baby-kissers. And all the time they are busy spending where it will do the most political good the income from millions left to Lady Mosley by her grandfather, the late Chicago department store tycoon, Levi Zeigler Leiter. Last week Sir Oswald saw and fairly snapped up a chance to seize leadership of the disaffected, "pure Socialist" left wing of the Labor Party.
Rising in the House of Commons with an injured air, Snapper Oswald said that he had just felt obliged "as a Socialist" to resign his (minor) Cabinet post: Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He could no longer stomach the Government's "muddling methods" in dealing with Britain's great problem of the day: unemployment.
The House knew, continued Sir Oswald (surprising some of his listeners), the House must surely know that he had been called to advise the Government about unemployment relief. He had drafted a thoroughly Socialist plan—"the Mosley memorandum"—but, at a meeting presided over by Mr. Snowden, the Cabinet had turned this down. As dramatically as possible Sir Oswald proclaimed that this proved that Scot MacDonald would never adopt the true, the right, the Socialist course, the course which the Labor Party (technically Socialist) had a right to demand. Therefore, he had resigned. Whatever the future might hold he and the true Socialists of the party would stand together on giving 25 shillings a week to all workers over 60, raising the school age by a year, a state fund to help industry, a central board to buy food and raw material not obtainable in England.
"Private Party." As sometimes happens, the mouse's squeak stampeded the elephants. Mr. MacDonald was reported to have offered Sir Oswald the Ministry of Mines to shut him up, but he and Lady Mosley only opened wider.
The future lay largely in a debate posted for the following week, on the politically relevant, but imperially trivial matter of reducing Mr. J. H. Thomas' salary. But the question made Premier MacDonald queazy. Two former premiers were to heckle him—Conservative Stanley Baldwin leading the attack, Liberal David Lloyd George reverberating behind, and ambitious Sir Oswald Hooting in consonance.