ABSTRACT
When it came to power in June 1929 economic fortune looked as if it might smile on the incoming minority Labour government. That year proved the best for exports since 1918; in the spring unemployment was on a downward trend; 192829 saw industrial production and GDP growing at a rate of 5.1 and 2.4 per cent per annum. If such trends had continued the government might have acquitted itself satisfactorily. It might have set about the gradual, piecemeal extension of public ownership and rationalization of industry that it proposed; it might have financed public works on a sufficient scale to accelerate the prevailing tendency for unemployment to fall; and it might, in a climate of growing prosperity, have acquired the increasing revenue necessary to effect a significant increase in social welfare expenditure. All this could also have proceeded in a general climate of growing domestic and international confidence, which would have diminished business anxiety about any adverse impact of such policies on the level of profitability and mitigated any City concern over the maintenance of the exchange rate. In short, even within the policy constraints it had established for itself, there would have been some freedom of manoeuvre and some likelihood of success.
