Arthur Salter, 1st Baron Salter
Douglas Glover | |
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Member of Parliament for Oxford University | |
In office 27 February 1937 – 23 February 1950 | |
Preceded by | Hugh Cecil |
Succeeded by | Constituency abolished |
Personal details | |
Born | James Arthur Salter 15 March 1881 |
Died | 27 June 1975 (aged 94) |
Alma mater | Brasenose College, Oxford |
James Arthur Salter, 1st Baron Salter,
Background and education
Salter was the eldest son of James Edward Salter (1857–1937) of the
Career
This section needs additional citations for verification. (December 2022) |
Salter joined the
In 1917–18 he was a colleague of Jean Monnet in the Chartering Committee of the Allied Maritime Transport Council, and in 1919 appointed secretary of the Supreme Economic Council in Paris. In 1920 he was appointed the first Secretary General to the Reparation Commission established by the Treaty of Versailles,[2] a position he held from 1920 to 1922.[3] Salter then joined Monnet at the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva, as head of the Economic and Financial Section, where he was involved in the stabilization of currencies of Austria and Hungary and resettlement of refugees in Greece and Bulgaria.
He returned to London in 1930, and worked as journalist and author. In 1932, he presided over a Conference on Road and Rail Transport tasked with looking at the true costs and benefits of transport, and whose results were known as the Salter Report. It recommended changes to the way that public roads were funded to account for the growing demands of the motor car and road freight, and to ensure that road and rail were evenly regulated and competed fairly.
Salter was part of the World Conference for International Peace through Religion, which produced a report in 1932 on the
In 1933, he had published the book The United States of Europe[5] in which he included an essay first published on 2 September 1929, entitled "The 'United States of Europe' Idea", in which he set out the arguments for a Europe-wide Zollverein, stating that this could only be achieved "under the conditions of an overwhelmingly political motive and an extremely close political association between the countries concerned".
In his book, he also set out a template remarkably similar to that adopted by his former colleague Jean Monnet for the structure of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957. To that extent, Salter is regarded by some as co-author, with Jean Monnet, of the supranational structure of what became the European Union.
In 1934, he was appointed Gladstone professor of political theory and institutions at
On outbreak of war in 1939, he resumed his role in shipping, being appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Shipping.
In June 1940, he once more supported Jean Monnet on the short-lived Franco-British Union proposal to politically unify Britain and France as a bastion against Nazism. Later, Salter headed the British shipping mission to Washington from 1941 to 1943, where he employed Monnet and they worked together on what would become the Victory Program of military industrial buildup.
He was appointed a
He was elected as Conservative MP for Ormskirk in 1951. Churchill offered him a new economic department in the Conservative Government formed that November, but he decided to join the Treasury provided he had access to the Cabinet.[6] He served as Minister of State for Economic Affairs at the Treasury, and as Minister of Materials in 1952. Rab Butler, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, claimed in his 1971 memoirs that Churchill called Salter "the greatest economist since Jesus Christ" and drily recorded that “for thirteen months Salter wrote me numberless minutes in green ink with which I did not always agree”.[7] Butler's biographer Anthony Howard writes that Salter was "never more than a minor, and sometimes visible, irritant to the new Chancellor".[8] Butler called him "Micawber Salter" because of his opposition to Butler's proposal to let the pound float ("Operation ROBOT").[9] However, Edmund Dell wrote that Salter was "not the figure of fun of Butler’s memoirs".[10]
In the mid-1950s he was invited by Nuri al-Said to be one of the external members of the Iraqi government's Development Board; while working with this board, he produced what came to be known as the "Salter Report" on industrial development of the Iraqi economy. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Salter, of Kidlington in the County of Oxford, on 16 October 1953.[11] He had received many honours during his career, being first appointed a Companion of the Bath in 1918, a Knight Commander of the Bath in 1922, and a GBE in 1944. His peerage became extinct when he died in 1975, aged 94.
Bibliography
References
- ^ "A Brief History of Salter's". Archived from the original on 9 May 2008.
- ^ Money, Leon Chiozza (1920). The Triumph of Nationalization. London: Cassell & Co.
- ^ "Arthur Salter (1881–1975)". Dumbarton Oaks.
- ISSN 0002-9602.
- ^ Europe, Sir Arthur Salter (1933). The United States of Europe. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
- ^ Dell 1997, pp. 160-1
- ^ Butler 1971, p.156
- ^ Howard 1987, p. 181
- ^ Howard 1987, p. 187
- ^ Dell 1997, pp. 160-1
- ^ "No. 39988". The London Gazette. 16 October 1953. p. 5498.
- ^ Salter, Arthur (1934). Toward a Planned Economy. New York: John Day.
Sources
Further reading
- ISBN 9781517179502.
- Butler, Rab (1971). The Art of the Possible. London: Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 978-0241020074.
- Dell, Edmund. The Chancellors: A History of the Chancellors of the Exchequer, 1945–90 (HarperCollins, 1997)
- ISBN 978-0224018623.
- Le Dréau, Christophe, Arthur Salter face à la construction européenne (1929–1951), Mémoire de DEA de l'Université Paris I Sorbonne, sous la direction de Robert Frank, 1999, 232p.
- James Arthur Salter, Allied Shipping Control. Oxford, 1921.
- James Arthur Salter, Slave of the Lamp: a Public Servant's Notebook. London, 1967.