James Arthur Salter, 1st Baron Salter, GBE, KCB, PC (15 March 1881 – 27 June 1975) was a British civil servant, politician, and academic who was a significant politician behind the concept of European political union, often in conjunction with his close friend and colleague Jean Monnet.
Salter joined the Civil Service in 1904 and worked in the transport department of the Admiralty, on national insurance, and as private secretary, being promoted to Assistant Secretary grade in 1913. On the outbreak of war, he was recalled to the Admiralty, and became director of ship requisitioning. He was sent to Washington D.C. to press for a US programme of new construction.
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 causes of war.[4]
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 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 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
Sir Arthur Salter, Toward a Planned Economy. John Day 1934.[12]
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.
