|
Jeffrey Hamm
Robert Row
Raven Thomson
Francis Hawkins
Jorian Jenks
A.V.Roe
Bob Saunders OBE
Sir J.A. Chamier
Dennis Lucan DFM
F.J.P. Veale
J.F.C. Fuller.
Lord Errol
Lucillia Reeve
D.M.K. Marendaz
Olive Hawks |
Philosophy | Artists & Writers | Notable Members | Candidates
Alexander
Raven Thomson
 After
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.
|
