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. 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, a position he held from 1920 to 1922. 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
causes of war. In 1933, he had published the book
The United States of Europe 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
Oxford University, and a fellow of
All Souls College, Oxford. He was Independent
Member of Parliament (MP) for
Oxford University from 1937 to 1950. 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
Privy Councillor in 1941. In 1944 he was appointed deputy director-general of the
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He served as
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the short-lived
Churchill caretaker ministry (May–July 1945). 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. 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”. Butler's biographer
Anthony Howard writes that Salter was "never more than a minor, and sometimes visible, irritant to the new Chancellor". Butler called him "
Micawber Salter" because of his opposition to Butler's proposal to let the pound float ("
Operation ROBOT"). However,
Edmund Dell wrote that Salter was "not the figure of fun of Butler’s memoirs". 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. 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==