Oswald Mosley’s Qualified Support for the State of Israel

Okay, it’s been a few days since I put up anything critical of the Israel lobby and their libellous mouthpieces in this country and the Labour Party, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement, previously Paole Zion. So here goes.

The fanatics in the Israel lobby have a very simple metric for determining who is and who isn’t an anti-Semite: support for Israel. Or at least silence over its 70 year long campaign of violence, massacre and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Palestinians. Within limits, a European politician can be as anti-Semitic as they like, provided that they support Israel. Concerns have been raised about the increasingly anti-Semitic and racist policies of the current Polish government. This has recently outlawed blaming Poles for the crimes of the Nazis, and the Polish authorities have also given their backing to a campaign to whitewash the village of Jedwabne of its part in an anti-Semitic pogrom during the Second World War. This was when the villagers rounded up the local Jewish community, and burned them alive in a barn. But there is now a campaign ‘to preserve the good name of Jedwabne’ that denies this occurred, which is receiving official backing.

Despite this, Andrew Pollard, the head of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, stuck his head up and appeared in the pages of the Groaniad a little while ago to declare that the current Polish president was not an anti-Semite, because ‘he is a good friend of Israel’.

What Pollard and his chums overlook, and desperately hope everyone forgets, is that anti-Semites and Fascists did back initially Jewish emigration abroad and a separate homeland for the Jews as way of removing them from this country. But they want this covered up. When anyone mentions the Ha’avara Agreement between Nazi Germany and the embryonic Jewish state in Palestine to send Jews there, as Ken Livingstone did, the CAA and JLM go bug-eyed with rage and start libelling them as ‘anti-Semites’. Just as they’ve done to Mike, for daring to point out that Livingstone and the others were historically correct on this issue.

So where did the British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, stand on the issue of Israel and Palestine? Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists, which later in the 1930s under the influence of the rise of the Nazis renamed itself the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. Mosley was interned during the War, but attempted to return to British politics as head of a new Fascist movement called British Union during the 1950s and ’60s. His opinion on Israel in this later phase of his political career can be found on pages 137-8 of his 1961 book Mosley-Right or Wrong (London: Lion Books). This reads

Question 136. What is your attitude to Israel?

Answer. I adhere to the policy of a Jewish national home, which I suggested in The Alternative (published in 1947) as follows: –

” For over two thousand years the Jews have asked for a national home, and sought again to become a nation … To this end I propose the partition of Palestine and the placing of Jerusalem under a super-national authority which will afford Christian, Arab and Jew impartial access to their Holy Places. It is plain that even the whole of Palestine would not afford an adequate home to the Jewish population, even if it all were available without outrage of justice in the treatment of the Arabs. Such statesmanship would, therefore, in any case, be confronted with the problem of finding additional living room for the Jews. It is, naturally, desirable to provide such accommodation as near as possible to the Home Land of Palestine. But this consideration is not now so pressing in view of the rapid facilities for travel provided by modern transport… No insuperable difficulty should be encountered, therefore, even if the main bulk of the Jewish population had to live at some distance from the traditional national home. Palestine would remain a home to them in the same sense that the Dominions regard England as home.”

And I have emphasised repeatedly that this entire problem must be solved in a manner that humanity, as a whole, will approve.

Unfortunately, comprehensive settlements, which combine morality with foresight, are not customary in the world of the old parties, and the Jewish state of Israel was born amid the savage brutality which occurs when such governments yield to force what they refuse to reason. The consequence has been a legacy of cumulative hatred, perpetuated by western incompetence and aggravated by Soviet arms-dealing. But we still seek a progressive and peaceful solution for the future.

First, we must eliminate all possibility of another armed conflict in that area, especially in view of the increasing availability of atomic weapons. We should make it clear that we shall not permit any Arabs to cut two million Jewish throats. And equally we cannot allow aggressive expansion of the Israelis into neighbouring lands; they already have a million dispossessed Arabs on their conscience and our hands. it is quite possible to keep order in these easily accessible regions, without plunging about in the minor military operations that have previously disgraced a British government, slow to defend the interests of our own people but hysterically eager to act on behalf of others.

A united Europe-co-operating with a friendly and helpful America- would have little difficulty in developing new lands and organising any required sorting out of populations. Large-scale migration may well be inevitable, if friction between various unsuitable peoples is not to degenerate into chaos and bloodshed; this has become pressing in Africa. As I wrote in The European in December 1953: “There is plenty of room for both Jews and Arabs in the great area of the middle-East, all that is lacking is union, will and energy to accomplish the task. Whatever policy emerges must be based on reason, justice and the consent of the leading minds in both the Jewish and Arab peoples; all parties and opinions have behind them errors in this sphere which must never be repeated. Let us never again clash with the conscience of the world.”

Mosley by this time was trying to deny that he’d ever been an anti-Semite, and the first part of the chapter containing this passage contains his denials. Richard Thurlow, in his Fascism in Britain 1918-1985 argued that Mosley himself had originally not been an anti-Semite, and was genuine puzzled by the Jewish community’s hostility to his movement. He gave the issue over to one of his lieutenants to explain. This Nazi came to the BUF from one of the smaller, anti-Semitic Fascist groups, and so eagerly explained it to Mosley as part of the supposed Jewish conspiracy theories flying around in those groups. This then caused Mosley to make anti-Semitism an integral part of BUF policy. In fact Stephen Dorril, in his biography of Mosley, Blackshirt, has shown that Mosley was an anti-Semite from the start.

And a few years ago I remember reading an article in the Heil by a Jewish journalist, who had interviewed Mosley in Nice in the 1970s. He stated that the wannabe British Fuhrer was still very anti-Semitic, with deeply abhorrent views about the Holocaust.

Mosley’s own views in the 1930s on the ‘Jewish problem’ were expressed in his pamphlet Tomorrow We Live. In it, he stated that under his Fascist regime, the majority of the Jewish population would be deported. A few Jews would remain after being carefully examined to make sure they conformed to British values and civilisation, but would be kept away from gentile Brits through a system of apartheid.

Regarding his later views on Israel, this largely follows the UN recommendations at the time. The only exception is his statement that the Middle East could be developed as a home for both Jews and Arabs. This seems to follow his general plans to develop the world’s resources through careful planning. Which included developing East Africa for White Europeans.

Mosley was the leader of the largest, and most infamous of the British Fascist groups before the Second World War, and despite ‘Mosleyite’ being used as a term of abuse within Fascist circles today, his influence in the British Far Right is still extremely strong. But after the War he gave his qualified support to the creation of the Jewish state, at least in his rhetoric and published statements.

This is a fact of history. And the question is, do the CAA, JLM and the Israel Advocacy Movement want people to know about this? Or would they scream and libel as anti-Semitic anyone who dared to point this out?

Answers on a postcard please.

As you can guess, it’s almost certainly the latter.

Joe Rogan on Conspiracy Theories and Alex Jones’ Comments on Charlottesville

It seems that Alex Jones just keeps going lower and lower in his statements and mouthings about stupid and poisonous conspiracy theories.

In this clip, Joe Rogan, the host of an internet radio show in the US, and his co-presenter talk about conspiracies and conspiracy theories. They discuss the problem of credibility and the refusal of people to accept when they genuinely don’t know anything. They also contrast real conspiracies with the wild, bogus theories spouted by Alex Jones.

Rogan gives as an example of a real conspiracy the plan by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1960s to shoot down an American passenger aircraft and blame it on Cuba. There were also other strategies to arm Cuban friendlies to attack Guantanamo Bay, thus allowing them to blame it on Castro and start a war. These are genuine conspiracies, which have been revealed by documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

He contrasts these with the bizarre, deep conspiracies, such as Kennedy being assassinated by his driver, and the rubbish pushed by Alex Jones.

Alex Jones is the main man behind Infowars, and I’ve blogged many times about his insane and dangerous theories. Jones is a 9/11 truther, but has gone on to claim that the ‘globalists’ who run the world really are demonic entities, either literally so, or are extra-dimensional aliens. The global elite sacrifice children to Satan, and perform black magic orgies. Barak Obama was possessed by demons. So is Hillary Clinton, though she may also be a robot or cyborg. The Clintons were also involved in a paedophile ring running out of a Boston pizza parlour. Gay rights activists are a ‘transhumanist space cult intent on producing genderless humans’.

And the global elite, including Obama, are just waiting to incarcerate true, freedom-loving Americans in concentration camps. They also manufacture emergencies, including gun crime and mass shootings, in order to pass legislation to deprive Americans further of the rights and liberties. Of which, the most important is the right to carry guns.

Hence he declared that the Sandy Hook school shooting was entirely fake, and that the victims were all ‘crisis actors’. Apart from being massively wrong and offensive, this has led to the nutters, who believe this nonsense approaching the bereaved parents to challenge them about the deaths of their children.

And now it appears Jones has done something similar following the events at Charlottesville. He has claimed that the violence there was staged by ‘Jewish actors’, at least according to Rogan. If this is true, then it’s a new low. The mob marching to defend the statue definitely included real Klan members and Nazis. These stormtroopers really did try to beat up and kill the counterdemonstrators, and the anti-racists inside a meeting hall, attended an inter-racial, interfaith meeting, in which the participants included Dr. Cornell West and Rev. Traci Blackmon, two Christian ministers committed to social justice. West and Blackmon have stated that it was the anarchists and the Antifa, who rescued them when it looked like the Nazis were going to beat them to death.

And the Nazis also marched on a local synagogue, surrounded it, and chanted ‘Sieg heil’, terrorizing those gathered for the evening service. The rabbi and staff were so frightened, that they smuggled the Torah scroll out of the backdoor in case the Nazis should try to damage it.

Rogan and his fellow presenter also state that these daft conspiracy theories are a distraction from what the authorities really are covertly doing.

This is all absolutely correct. Parapolitical writers, like Robin Ramsay, the editor of Lobster, draw a distinction between real conspiracies, such as those discussed by Rogan and his fellow host, which they sometimes term ‘parapolitics’ or ‘Deep Politics’, and the bogus conspiracy theories, such as Jones’ rants about the coming one world Satanic state, the various anti-Semitic theories about the Jewish bankers, and contact with shape-changing alien lizards.

As for Jones and his nonsense about ‘Jewish actors’, this is stuff of which the Nazis would have been proud. The Nazis and fellow Fascist parties in the rest of Europe, like Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, blamed just about every misfortune on the Jews, including their own negative image. Mosley devotes an entire chapter in his autobiography, My Life, to what he calls ‘Jewish opposition’, claiming that he was unfairly maligned by his Jewish opponents. Needless to say, he wasn’t. His biographer, Skidelsky, claimed that Mosley wasn’t originally anti-Semitic, but only became so after he was attacked as such by the Jews. He supposedly ordered one of his lieutenants, who came from the Britons or another of the anti-Semitic societies, to look into it. And this officer then duly came up with the daft conspiracy theories and libels blaming everything on them. More recent studies, such as by Stephen Dorrill and his biography of Mosley, Blackshirt, have shown Mosley was anti-Semitic from the start.

Jones, and those figures on the right like him, are going down a very dangerous path when they repeat the same type of lies that the Nazis used to try and fool people into believing that they weren’t a collection of violent thugs intent on mass murder.

It’s questionable how much of this bilge Jones really believes. Jones has tried to defend himself in the court case involving custody of his children by having his lawyer release a statement that he doesn’t believe any of it, and that he just a ‘performance artist’, like a ‘rodeo clown’. If true, it means he’s consciously lying, which makes him even more similar to Goebbels in this matter.

I admit, I’ve got a lot of pleasure before now from watching Jones’ insane rants and antics. But this is rapidly coming to an end. When he starts lying about real Nazis, who act like Nazis attacking Blacks, Jews, gays and anti-racist Whites, he’s crossed a line.

Even looking at him to get a laugh out of his ravings is dangerous. Karl Dietrich Bracher, a German historian of Nazism, describes in one of his books how some Germans turned up at Hitler’s rallies and his denunciation of the Jews and others simply as a bit of fun, without taking it seriously.

After Charlottesville, a number of internet servers are refusing to host Nazi and White supremacist sites. After Jones’ comments about the violence in Charlottesville being the fault of ‘Jewish actors’, his show should be treated the same way as well.

The Countries that Voted ‘No’ to UN Ban on Glorification of the Nazis

One of the most frightening developments in contemporary international politics is the rise of extreme Right-wing, nationalist and indeed, explicitly neo-Nazi movements across Europe – from Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, PEGIDA and the Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany, and similar regimes in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine. Germany has some legal protection against extremist radicalism in the Basic Law. Under the Grundgesetz, the only political organisations that are tolerated are those which recognise democracy. It was introduced after the War as part of the denazification process, and has been used against the extreme Right and Left. It was invoked in the 1970s to ban the NPD, or National Democratic Party, a neo-Nazi outfit, and earlier in the 1950s it was invoked against the KPD, the German Communist Party. They survived by reforming, and inserting a clause into their constitution stating that they recognised a period of democracy in the development towards Socialism. I also wonder if some of the Islamist firebrands that were thrown out of the Federal Republic a few years ago weren’t also deported because their preaching violated the Basic Law. After all, if anything violates a law protecting democracy, it’s the preachers’ violent denunciation of it and demands for the establishment of an absolute caliphate.

There have been attempts by the UN to pass laws against the glorification of the Nazis and the Third Reich. Michelle, one of the commenters on this blog, posted this comment about them, and the countries that either voted against the motion or abstained.

Countries at the UN vote on fighting the forces of international Nazism “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”

In 2014 3 countries voted ‘NO’ Canada, USA and the Ukraine!: http://www.un.org/en/ga/third/69/docs/voting_sheets/L56.Rev1.pdf then in 2015 the same countries votes ‘No’ plus one more Palau, hard to believe, here’s the document: http://www.un.org/en/ga/third/70/docs/voting_sheets/L.59_Rev.1.pdf

And if that is still hard to believe the 2015 UN voting sheet is listed here fourth from the bottom: http://www.un.org/en/ga/third/70/votingsheets.shtml

Interestingly the UK abstained both times…

For most people and nations, passing laws against the glamorisation of the Nazis and everything they stood for really isn’t a problem. The horrors committed by the Third Reich are widely known, at least in the West, and the regime has been consistently condemned by mainstream media and politicians since the War and its attendant horrors, particularly the Holocaust.

In the case of Ukraine, it’s not hard to see why the country voted against the ban. Modern Ukraine’s national hero is Stepan Bandera, who led the campaign against what he viewed as the Russian/ Soviet occupation of his country during the Second World War. Ukraine had broken away and tried to seek independence after the First World War, but was then annexed by the emerging Soviet Union under Lenin. Unfortunately, Bandera attempted to gain Ukraine’s independence by allying and collaborating with the invading Nazis, though he was briefly interned in a concentration camp. See this documentary.

It’s less obvious why supposedly democratic nations, like America and Canada, that have never had to make a terrible choice between occupying totalitarian governments, should vote against the motion. Or why Britain should have abstained. One solution to the problem is that since before the Second World War, the British and American security agencies have recruited extreme Right-wing eastern European nationalists as part of their strategy to contain the Soviet Union and the rise of Communism. John Burns in his review of Stephen Dorril’s MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (Fourth Estate: London 2000) in Lobster 40 notes the involvement of both the British and French intelligence services in the Intermarium movement. This was a Roman Catholic lay organisation, formed in Paris in the mid-1930s, which had as its goal the creation of a federation of stretching from Lithuania in the north to Croatia in the Adriatic, with Poland at its centre. The organisation’s chief, Otto von Habsburg, was given a subsidy of £50,000 a month by the head of MI6, Menzies. Habsburg later moved to the US, and the British tried to get the Americans to take over its funding. It officially died the death when Molotov rejected it on the grounds that it was anti-Soviet, a view which was then conceded by the US.

The scheme was supported after the War by the Vatican, where many senior priests and clergy took the leadership of the organisation. It became one of the first organisations that openly campaigned for the release of Waffen-SS Prisoners of War. The movement’s headquarters moved to Rome after the French lost interest in 1946. They then moved to the US, where they were heavily involved in CIA anti-Communist front organisations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation. The article states that these became the bases for the liberation movements in those countries sponsored by the CIA and MI6.

The article also discusses the involvement of the British and American intelligence services in the Promethean League. This was formed shortly after the Russian Revolution, and was a conspiratorial independence movement for all of the minorities in the Soviet Union. However, the most prominent members were the Ukrainians and Georgians. By 1925 it was also receiving financial support from MI6’s Menzies. Kim Philby and Guy Burgess were also involved in this, and duly kept their Soviet masters well informed. It ceased to exist by 1949, but supplied many of the personnel for later, anti-Soviet eastern European nationalist groups, most notably the Belorussians and Ukrainians. These formed another organisation, INTEGRAL. This, according to Dorril, was a deliberate attempt to invoke the memory of the ‘integral nationalists’ of 1930s Europe, who held Fascistic views about race and culture. Stephen Dorril himself, writing in Lobster 15, states that MI6 used former collaborators with the Nazis in its anti-Communist operations in Latvia and Albania. See his review of Anthony Cavendish’s Inside Intelligence (Palu Publishing Ltd 1987), pp. 1-3, (p.1). Lobster’s long term editor, Robin Ramsay, also discusses the very strong Nazi element in WACL – the World Anti-Communist League, which includes Conservatives, anti-Semites, Nazis and the leaders of South American death squads. He states that CIA involvement in the organisation has always been strong, and that every now and then there are hints that the dividing line between it and the Agency has now ceased to exist. Ramsay also notes that Radio Liberty, one of the CIA financed stations broadcasting to the Soviet Union, was transmitting increasingly anti-Semitic material from Ukrainian emigres.

Ramsay also states that it the Ukrainian community in Britain, which formed the backbone of the World Anti-Communist League. It was led here by Yaroslav Stetso. Stetso styled himself the former Ukrainian Prime Minister. He was also the head of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, or ABN, which was formed after the War and financied by the British and US intelligence agencies. In Ukraine itself, Stetso had been part of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, which had collaborated with the Nazis and took part in pogroms and atrocities against the Jews. At WACL’s AGM in 1986, General Singlaub told the assembled Rightists that Stetso’s widow had received a personal message of condolence from Ronald Reagan praising her husband’s contribution to the struggle against tyranny.

The same issue of Lobster also carries a review of Scott and Jon Lee Anderson’s Inside the League (Dodd, Mead and Co., New York 1986), on WACL. This again notes that in this country, the League was headed by Stetso and the ABN ‘a bunch of Nazi-collaborators, murderers and anti-Semites funded after WW2 by the US and British governments’. It also is very pessimistic about Britain actually doing anything about the remaining former Nazis living in the UK, as to do so would risk exposing their links to MI5, MI6 and the mandarins at Whitehall.

There is also a review of ‘Date-Line Washington: Anti-Semitism and the Airwaves’, by Lars-Erik Nelson in Foreign Policy 65, Winter 1986. That also discusses the way the involvement of Ukrainian ex-pats in Radio Liberty under Reagan has also resulted in the broadcaster becoming anti-Semitic, while at the same time these groups are whitewashing history, claiming that they didn’t collaborate with Nazis, form a Ukrainian division in the SS, or assist in the persecution of the Jews and the pogroms.

From this, it looks very much like ‘No’ vote by the US and Canada, and Britain’s abstention, was due to a desire to preserve the links between the intelligence services and extreme Right-wing groups in countries like Ukraine. As well as to avoid anyone starting to do anything dodgy, such as invoking such a law to examine such links.

Lloyd George, Keynsianism, Mosley and the Tory Privatisation of Government Job Creation

British Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George, used government work creation schemes to combat unemployment.

A few weeks ago, Alittleecon on his blog suggested that unemployment could be combatted through a government programme of public works. The unemployed could be retrained as the workers and professionals the economy needs, and the scheme would itself stimulate further economic growth. The money spent by the government would thus pay for itself several times over. See his post, ‘If the Private Sector’s Not Doing It, Doesn’t Mean Its Not Worth Doing’ at http://alittleecon.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/if-the-private-sectors-not-doing-it-doesnt-mean-its-not-worth-doing/

Alittleecon is very definitely a person of the left, and governments across the political spectrum under the influence of Keynsian economic have adopted similar public works programmes to stimulate the economy. The Japanese government, for example, has embarked on a massive campaign of road construction, as well as building airports and other parts of the transport infrastructure in order to counter the massive depression their economy experienced in the late 1990s and noughties.

Oswald Mosley and Government Public Works for Creating Employment

The British would-be Fascist dictator, Oswald Mosley, also recommended using a programme of public works and employee retraining to tackle unemployment in his 1968 autobiography, My Life (London: Thomas Nelson). He wrote:

The other sphere in which the government must give a decisive lead is in the organisation of public works on a great scale. In an island or even a continental economy overheating, with the result of inflation, can occur in a condition of full employment. On the other hand, to maintain a large pool of unemployment is inhuman and disastrous to the general morale. The answer to this dilemma of the present system is to avoid overheating and inflation by the restraints of credit policy, while taking up the consequent slack of unemployment in public works. No man should be unemployed, and work should be available to all on a reasonable standard of life in a large public works programme, but there should be sufficient differential to provide incentive to return as soon as possible to normal employment; re-training and re-deployment of labour schemes should always accompany of public works system.

Public works should now be in active preparation in all Western countries to replace in due time the distortions of the economy of the Western world, which are initially caused by the semi-wartime basis of America. When peace finally breaks out, we should be ready with the constructive works of peace to replace the destructive works of America’s small wars and the concomitant arms race. The inflationary movement, resting largely on America’s deficit financing of its wars and arms, can at any time come abruptly to an end, either through peace of the objections of other nations to this financial process. So far, armament race and minor wars have taken up the slack of unemployment which would normally represent the difference between modern industrial potential and effective market demand. This has only been done by distorting the economy and aggravating the eventual problem of peace. To maintain full employment in a real period of peace only two methods are available – inflation, or public works on a great scale. We have already seen the results of inflation in an overheated economy leading to over-full employment, and wages chasing prices in a vicious spiral whose end must be a crash.

The only alternative is a stable price level maintained by a strong credit policy, with the resultant unemployment taken up in public works. The economic effect of public works in dealing with unemployment can be the same as the armament boom, without the disastrous exaggeration of deficit financing. Yet the difference in national, or I hope continental, well-being can be vital. The public works of peace can be integrated in general economic policy and can serve it rather than distort it. State action can prepare the way in works too large for private enterprise, and can thus assist rather than impede it. Such public works of peace in terms of unemployment policy can replace abnormal armament demand, can build rather than damage the economy, can benefit the nation and reduce the menace to mankind. (pp. 493-4).

He also recommended that the government public works programme should be used to replenish and upgrade the housing stock in a campaign of slum clearance and house building to provide homes for young people unable to get on the property ladder.

There is no such waste of wealth and the human spirit as unemployment. It is avoidable, and in a continental economy easily avoidable; it is simply a question of the mechanics of economics which mind and will can master. When demand flags, the market falters and unemployment follows, but we should remember there is no ‘natural’ limit to demand; the only limitation is the failure of our intelligence and will. It sounded fantastic long ago in the House of Commons when a wise Labour leader of clear mind and calm character, J.R. Clynes, said there is no limit to real demand until every street in our cities looks like the front of the Doge’s Palace at Venice; and not even then. He was quite right, there is no limit to demand, only to our power to produce, and then to organise distribution. Certainly, there is no limit to demand while the slums disgrace our main cities and young married couples have to live with their parents for lack of accommodation. for years I have urged a national housing programme like an operation of war; the phrase was picked up and used long after as what is called a gimmick in contemporary politics; yet nothing was done about it. I meant it, and it can be done. (p. 495).

There is nothing uniquely Fascist about this programme. Mosley was an early convert to Keynsianism, and took his idea of using public works to combat unemployment from Lloyd George. In the ‘Mosley Memorandum’ he issued in 1929 when he was a member of the Labour party, he recommended using a mixture of public works and purchasing credits issued to the population as a means of stimulating the economy. Economists looking at this policy since then have given their approval, and believed that it would have worked. This does not, of course, justify anything else Mosley advocated, such as the megalomania that saw him as the future British dictator, the hatred of democracy and liberal British institutions, the violence, the bizarre ideas of using evolution to create a new, higher human type, and the poisonous and vicious racism and anti-Semitism that would have led Mosley in power to create an apartheid state. Despite Mosley’s claims to the contrary, his biographer, Stephen Dorril, has stated that if he had come to power and allied with Nazi Germany, then he would have become an accomplice in Hitler’s genocide of the Jews.

Louis Blanc and 19th Century National Workshops in France

In fact, the use of public works as a means of lowering unemployment was used as early as 1848 in France. The pioneering French Socialist, Louis Blanc, had recommended setting up a system of ‘National Workshops’ to provide jobs for unemployed workers, who would be paid at the rate of two Francs a day. The profits made from these jobs would be used to purchase more workshops until the economy was completely socialised. This met with very strong opposition from the French government, including the minister charged with implementing the policy. Blanc was not included on the five-man Executive Commission which replaced the provisional government. the Comte de Falloux, the leading spokesman for the Conservative right, attacked the Workshops because he believed they constituted the threat of working class, Socialist revolution. The jobs created were thus pointless, miserably paid tasks like digging ditches, only to fill them in at the end of the day and the Workshops themselves were later closed down in June 1848.

A proper policy today of creating new jobs through public works and retraining, such as that recommended by Mosley, would almost certainly be strongly opposed by the current political class. It contradicts Neoliberal dogma that private enterprise is always better for the economy and society, and that state interference should be as limited as possible. Obama’s bail-out of the American banks and his policies designed to combat the recession that followed, have been strongly attacked by Libertarians. Following von Hayek and Mises, they see government policies as making the crisis worse and prolonging it. It would also be attacked for contradicting the government’s austerity programme, and the automatic assumption that the only fiscally responsible course of action to adopt in a recession is to cut public expenditure. I also have no doubt that some of the arguments used against such a policy would be that it was recommended and used by Fascist dictators and leaders like Mussolini, Hitler and Mosley.

Workfare Not Programme to Create Jobs, but Supply Cheap Labour to Industry

Nevertheless, there is the expectation that the government should act positively to combat unemployment, rather than leave the economy to correct itself automatically. The various job creation schemes like the Youth Opportunities Programme in the 1980s, and the Work Programme, as well as various internships and trainee schemes launched by private industry in partnership with the government are proof of this. So also are the various retraining schemes that have also been launched by successive administrations, like the computer courses Blair set up for the unemployed. The Coalition has, however, tried to avoid actually creating any real jobs directly through the use of private contractors. Instead of unemployment being created through the economy and the structure of society, the Tories and Tory Democrats instead have adopted the old Victorian view that it is caused by the idleness or moral weakness of the jobless themselves. Hence the bullying and humiliation by jobcentre staff and the system of sanctions, ostensibly intended to motivate the unemployed to look harder for work. Neoliberal economics recommends a constant unemployment rate of 6 per cent to keep wages low, and the Work Programme, internships and trainee schemes, as well as various apprenticeship programmes are structured not to create work, but to keep the contracting business supplied with cheap labour. They are intended to present the illusion that the government is seriously tackling the problem of unemployment, while really doing as little as possible to tackle it seriously.

These highly exploitative schemes should be discontinued, and the government instead should embark on a genuine programme of state job creation following the interventionist ideas of Louis Blanc, Lloyd George and Keynes. But I doubt this will ever occur. It would contradict decades-old Thatcherite notions of what constitutes government expenditure, as well as outrage the Conservatives and big business with the prospect of a revived, working class, which would not have to depend on private industry for the privilege of obtaining unpaid or low paid jobs.