ABSTRACT
Plans for unemployment and the great crisis By the end of the 1920s the volume of unemployment seemed to have been stabilized at about 1o-u per cent of the insured population, a figure which was much too high but was something of a constant, and in the election of 1929 the Liberal Party had produced a plan to deal with it. This was the result of a series of investigations1 instigated secretly by Lloyd George, and resulting in a document entitled 'We can conquer unemployment'. This was a programme of relief works, but on the grand scale, and something like the Minority Report scheme of 1909; it was, however, more than this, for it was the beginning of the breakaway from classical economics. But Keynes was not yet ready to give a respectable imprimatur to the line of thought that led to deficit finance, and more orthodox thought held the day. The Liberal policy was the only possible one, but it was not taken up by either of the other parties; and though Liberals gained a few more seats in the general election of 1929 the other two parties were way ahead of them, with Labour twenty-eight seats ahead of the Conservatives. The election produced another Labour
government without an overall majority. The Liberal policy broke away from the piecemeal
approach to unemployment that had characterized the previous eight years, and it would probably have solved the problem with which it was faced at the time of the election. Whether or not it would have been equal to the next few years is another question, for the stabilization at I<H I per cent did not remain. The 1929 figure was I,2I6,ooo2 or II·2 per cent of the working population, but that for 1930 was I,917,000: in 1931 it was 2,630,000, 21 per cent and the figure did not fall below 2,ooo,ooo till 1936; the worst year was 1932 when 2,745,000, or 22·5 per cent were unemployed-nearly a quarter of the total working population.
