After Oswald Mosley, the leading intellectual of British Union and Union Movement was Alexander Raven Thomson. In his most important book The Coming Corporate State (1938), he set out in clear and precise terms the economic infrastructure that would be put in place once power was given by the British people.
Unlike National Socialist Germany which remained essentially capitalist, the British Socialism of British Union would transfer ownership of all industrial and commercial organisations above a certain size to one of eighteen Corporations covering every business activity. These would include a Coal Miners Corporation, Shipbuilders Corporation, Shop Workers Corporation, Health Workers Corporation and an Agricultural Corporation. They would be run by representatives of the managers, workers and consumers in equal partnership and all profits would be divided between those who worked within the Corporation.
This was seen as a practical and realistic interpretation of worker ownership sometimes known as syndicalism or guild socialism.
Members of Parliament would be elected on a vocational franchise rather than the present geographical basis. Thus transport workers would vote for transport worker candidates, engineers for engineering candidates and teachers for teacher candidates. In this way, a government of experts elected by experts would be created.
Alexander Raven Thomson has been described as the intellectual who left the comfort of the study and went out onto the streets of Britain to fight for his ideas acquitting himself courageously in the face of violent opposition. Thus he earned Mosley’s highest term of praise of ‘Warrior-Poet’: a person who not only thinks but can also act.
Raven, as he was universally known, was a Scotsman who had studied philosophy and economics at Scottish, American and German universities. Whilst impressed by the ideas of Oswald Spengler, he rejected his conclusions. The decline of civilisations, Raven argued in ‘Civilisation as Divine Superman’ (1932), could be avoided by embracing a form of collectivism and rejecting the individualism of capitalism. This led him first into the Communist Party but his disbelief in the materialistic view of history and his overtly Corporatist ideas meant the alliance was short lived.
His collectivist goal could only be achieved through charismatic leadership and this Raven soon found in the person of Oswald Mosley. He joined British Union in 1933 aged 34 and soon became Director of Policy and the movement’s main theorist of the Corporate State. All who heard him agreed that Raven was a very able orator and he maintained a busy speaking programme of public meetings throughout Great Britain. At the same time, he produced a vast number of policy booklets on all subjects of government – including the outline for a vast network of motorways linking the whole country.
In March 1937, Raven’s radical oratory and popularity among the working people of east London gained him almost 25% of the vote in Bethnal Green North East during local elections.
When the Second World War was declared in September 1939, Raven backed Mosley’s call for ‘Peace with Honour, British People Safe and Empire Intact’. This was a policy that could have prevented the deaths of 60,595 British civilians and 264,443 British servicemen and women (plus another 41,327 who were listed as ‘missing’) during the Brothers War.
Following his detention in May 1940 without charge or trial under Regulation 18B, Raven was sent to the notorious Latchmere House on Ham Common. This was a special MI5 intensive interrogation centre where he and many other British Blackshirts were subjected to food and sleep deprivation; the use of bright lights during questioning; and constant verbal threats of impending execution. Although Mosley was himself detained elsewhere at the time, he was still able to bring pressure to bear on the authorities to ensure his Blackshirts were transferred to the relative comfort of Brixton Prison. Raven wrote in detail of the Gestapo-like regime at Latchmere House in a long article in ‘Union’ after the war.
As a ‘leader of British Union’, Raven was imprisoned until 1944. This period was spent entirely within the grim, grey walls of Brixton Prison rather than the ‘more pleasant’ surroundings of the Isle of Man Internment Camp where at least you could work on the land, see the leaves of trees change colour with the seasons and hear the song of birds.
As soon as the war was over, Raven began to organise a network of ‘Mosley Book Clubs’ across Britain and became a founding member of Union Movement in February 1948. He immediately embraced Mosley’s policy of ‘Europe a Nation’; became Editor of the post-War Mosleyite newspaper ‘Union’; and held the post of General Secretary of Union Movement.
Alexander Raven Thomson continued to serve the new European idea right up until his death from Cancer in 1955. He was even writing editorials for ‘Union’ despite excruciating pain a few days before he died.
There are two open British Government files on Raven available for viewing at the National Archive at Kew. Both have been heavily censored. Sadly, they have been deliberately weeded in such a way that the reader only learns two things about this gifted intellectual. The first is that there were difficulties in his marriage. The second is that during his long detention in Brixton Prison he suffered from periods of nervous exhaustion. Everything that he had fought for was being destroyed by a war he was powerless prevent. Obviously orthodoxy fears him so much that even half a century after his death they find it necessary to present him only in the most unfavourable light possible.
So let the last word on Raven be those of the Leader he served so faithfully for 22 years:
“He died young, and we his friends will always feel that the prison years and the decline of his country combined to curtail a life which would have been of brilliant service to the nation.” – Oswald Mosley, ‘My Life’ 1966.
Gordon Beckwell.
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