of Britain’s social and economic difficulties.
Indeed, it is difficult to think of any two decades of
British history where there was such unanimity.
The Liberal Party never recovered sufficiently to
provide an alternative government. The role was
taken over by the Labour Party. Labour had briefly
formed a minority government in 1924, and then
again from 1929 to 1931. Just three years after the
conclusion of the General Strike, Baldwin in May
1929 went to the country confident of electoral
victory. The total Labour vote (8.4 million) was
slightly lower than the Conservative (8.7 million),
but the constituency electoral system gave Labour
more seats, 289 against the Conservatives’ 260,
while lack of proportional representation penalised
the Liberals who, despite their 5.3 million votes,
gained only 59 seats. There was less practical
difference between Ramsay MacDonald’s brand of
Labour policies and the policies of the Con-
servatives than between the policies of either party
and those of the Liberals. It was the Liberals who
put forward a radically different economic strategy
masterminded by the most famous economic
thinker of the age, John Maynard Keynes. He and
others produced the pre-election plan Britain’s
Industrial Future, which advocated government
spending as the spearhead to industrial revival.
‘We Can Conquer Unemployment’ was Lloyd
George’s more popular election version of this
plan. Lloyd George, with his own ‘brains trust’
behind him, was ready to provide the British
people with their ‘New Deal’. But there was to be
no political comeback for Lloyd George.
Labour became the alternative to the Con-
servatives. Its leadership was anxious not to
present the party as too socialist, let alone as rev-
olutionary, as the communists had no electoral
appeal. The left wing of the Labour movement
found itself isolated, shunned both by the com-
munists who were following the Comintern line
of fighting the ‘social fascists’ and by the bulk of
the trade unions and the moderate Labour right.
Despite Ramsay MacDonald’s commitment to a
Labour Party whose theoretical aim was to trans-
form capitalism into socialism, as leader of the
party he saw this as some very distant objective,
certainly not practical politics in 1929. The pre-
dominant majority of the Labour Party has stood
behind leaders who warned that to embrace far-
reaching socialist measures, such as bringing the
greater part of industry under state control,
would alienate the electorate and condemn the
party to permanent opposition. The move to the
left needed to be gradual and pragmatic.
The Labour minority government which Mac-
Donald formed in June 1929 largely excluded the
Labour left. The electoral programme had soft-
pedalled socialism and the whole issue of public
ownership, except for the coal industry (and even
the Conservatives were to move eventually towards
some form of state supervision over the coal indus-
try); Labour owed its electoral success to this
stance of ‘respectability’. Philip Snowden, chan-
cellor of the exchequer, was as orthodox, as sternly
opposed to unbalanced budgets and as fearful of
inflation as any Conservative chancellor.
The most serious problem facing Britain at
home throughout the 1920s was unemployment,
which persisted at over 1 million, more than 10
per cent of the labour force. This average for the
whole country does not reveal its full seriousness,
since unemployment was far more severe in
Clydeside in Scotland and Tyneside in north-east
England where shipbuilding was in the doldrums,
in the coal-mining valleys of south Wales,
in Ulster and in the textile region of south Lanca-
shire. Whole regions were blighted, sunk in
poverty with unemployment persisting year after
year. The famous hunger marches to London in
the 1930s helped to draw the ‘forgotten’ regions
to the attention of the more prosperous Midlands
and southern England. It brought home to the
man in the street the desperate and seemingly
hopeless plight of the unemployed. The coming
to power of the Labour government was followed
within a few weeks by the Wall Street Crash.
The effects of the American depression soon
spread to Britain. Unemployment rapidly rose.
The government attempted nothing that might
have stemmed this rise. Within the government
Oswald Mosley, taking his cue from Keynes,
recommended radical measures to deal with
unemployment. He resigned from the govern-
ment in May 1930 having failed to persuade his
colleagues, and eventually left the party after
his motion against government unemployment