Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Agricultural Marketing Act of 1931, as modified in 1933, provided centralized control of the distribution of certain crops with minimum prices and government subsidies.

The police of London, with jurisdiction over one-sixth the population of England, were reorganized in 1933 to destroy their obvious sympathy with the working classes. This was done by restricting all ranks above inspector to persons with an upper-class education, by training them in a newly created police college, and by forbidding them to join the Police Federation (a kind of union). The results of this were immediately apparent in the contrast between the leniency of the police attitude toward Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (which beat up British subjects with relative impunity) and the violence of police action toward even peaceful anti-Fascist activities. This tolerant attitude toward Fascism was reflected in both the radio and the cinema.

A severe Incitement to Disaffection Act in 1934 threatened to destroy many of the personal guarantees built up over the centuries by making police search of homes less restricted and by making the simple possession of material likely to disaffect the armed forces a crime. It was passed after severe criticism and a Lords’ debate which continued until 4:00 a.m. For the first time in three generations, personal freedom and civil rights were restricted in time of peace. This was done by new laws, by the use of old laws like the Official Secrets Acts, and by such ominous innovations as “voluntary” censorship of the press and by judicial extension of the scope of the libel laws. This development reached its most dangerous stage with the Prevention of Violence Act of 1939, which empowers a secretary of state to arrest without warrant and to deport without trial any person, even a British subject, who has not been ordinarily resident in England, if he believes such a person is concerned in the preparation or instigation of acts of violence or is harboring persons so concerned. Fortunately, these new strictions were administered with a certain residue of the old English good-humored tolerances, and were, for political reasons, rarely applied to any persons with strong trade-union support.

The reactionary tendencies of the National government were most evident in its fiscal policies. For these, Neville Chamberlain was chiefly responsible. For the first time in almost a century, there was an increase in the proportion of the total tax paid by the working classes. For the first time since the repeal of the corn laws in 1846, there was a tax on food. For the first time in two generations, there was a reversal in the trend toward more education for the people. The budget was kept balanced, but at a considerable price in human suffering and in wastage of Britain’s irreplaceable human resources. By 1939 in the so-called “depressed areas” of Scotland, of South Wales, and of the northeast coast, hundreds of thousands had been unemployed for years, and, as the Pilgrim Fund pointed out, had had their moral fiber completely destroyed by years of living on an inadequate dole. The capitalists of these areas were supported either by government subsidy (as the Runciman family lined their pockets from shipping subsidies) or were bought out by cartels and trade associations from funds assessed on the more active members of the industry (as was done in coal mining, steel, cement, shipbuilding, and so on).

The Derating Act of 1929 of Neville Chamberlain exempted industry from payment of three-quarters of its taxes under certain conditions. In the period 1930-1937 this saved industry £ 170 million, while many unemployed were allowed to starve. This law was worth about £ 200,000 a year to Imperial Chemical Industries. On the other hand Chamberlain, as chancellor of the Exchequer, insisted on those appropriations for the air force which ultimately made it possible for the RAF to overcome Göring’s attack in the Battle of Britain in 1940.

The General Election of 1935, which gave the Conservatives ten more years in office, was the most shameful of modern times. It was perfectly clear that the English people were wholeheartedly for collective security. In the period November 1934 to June 1935, the League of Nations Union cooperated with other organizations to hold a “Peace Ballot.” Five questions were asked, of which the most important were the first (Should Britain remain in the League?) and the fifth (Should Britain use economic or military sanctions against aggressors?). On the first question the answers gave 11,090,387 affirmative and 355,883 negative votes. On the use of economic sanctions, the vote was 10,027,608 affirmative and 635,074 negative. On the use of military sanctions, the vote was 6,784,368 affirmative and 2,351,981 negative.

To add to this, a by-election at East Fulham in the spring of 1935 saw a Labour supporter of collective security defeat a Conservative. The Conservatives resolved to fight a General Election in support of collective security. Baldwin replaced MacDonald as prime minister, and Samuel Hoare replaced the Liberal, Sir John Simon, at the Foreign Office, to make people believe that the past program of appeasement would be reversed. In September, Hoare made a vigorous speech at Geneva in which he pledged Britain’s support of collective security to stop the Italian aggression against Ethiopia. The public did not know that he had stopped off in Paris en route to Geneva to arrange a secret deal by which Italy would be given two-thirds of Ethiopia.

The Royal Jubilee was used during the spring of 1935 to build up popular enthusiasm for the Conservative cause. Late in October, a week before the local elections on which Labour had already spent most of its available funds, the Conservatives announced a General Election for November 14th, and asked a popular mandate to support collective security and rearmament. The Labour Party was left without either an issue or funds to support it, and in addition was split on the issue of pacifism, the party leaders in both Lords and Commons refusing to go along with the rest of the party on the issue of rearmament as a support for collective security.

In the election the government lost 83 seats, but the Conservatives still had a majority, with 387 seats to Labour’s 154. The Liberal Party was reduced from 34 to 21. This new government was in office for ten years, and had its attention devoted, almost exclusively to foreign affairs. In these, until 1940 as we shall see, it showed the same incapacity and the same bias it had been revealing in its domestic program.

XI CHANGING ECONOMIC PATTERNS

Introduction

Great Britain

Germany

France

The United States of America

The Economic Factors

The Results of Economic Depression

The Pluralist Economy and World Blocs

Introduction

AN economic system does not have to be expansive—that is, constantly increasing its production of wealth—and it might well be possible for people to be completely happy in a nonexpansive economic system if they were accustomed to it. In the twentieth century, however, the people of our culture have been living under expansive conditions for generations. Their minds are psychologically adjusted to expansion, and they feel deeply frustrated unless they are better off each year than they were the preceding year. The economic system itself has become organized for expansion, and if it does not expand it tends to collapse.

The basic reason for this maladjustment is that investment has become an essential part of the system, and if investment falls off, consumers have insufficient incomes to buy the consumers’ goods which are being produced in another part of the system because part of the flow of purchasing power created by the production of goods was diverted from purchasing the goods it had produced into savings, and all the goods produced could not be sold until those savings came back into the market by being invested. In the system as a whole, everyone sought to improve his own position in the short run, but this jeopardized the functioning of the system in the long run. The contrast here is not merely between the individual and the system, but also between the long run and the short run.