ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the effect of unemployment on the British political system: its impact on parties, votes and access to power. The years 1917–20 were a period of intense social crisis in Britain, with a real danger of revolutionary activity. The labour movement had been strengthened and radicalized by the war, full employment, inflation and the socialist revolutions in Europe. The economic crisis of 1920–1 had much greater significance, since it helped to shape the political agenda for the entire interwar period. Labour had been using the unemployment question to make inroads into the Liberal working class vote. Even before the First World War, the Labour Party had fought vigorously for ‘work or maintenance’, and this demand was renewed at the end of the war. The failure of the 1929–31 government to make any impression on unemployment exposed to the social democrats the lack of economic understanding within the party.
