ABSTRACT
The COS wanted the Royal Commission of 1905 to avoid discussion of the causes of poverty and to think only of its treatment, and this was, in a way, what the inter-war governments were doing. Government policy, moreover, was dominated by the method by which relief should be given, rather than by a serious effort to seek the cause of unemployment. The Labour government formed in June 1929 had been elected largely on the unemployment issue. In spite of the fact that the need of the unemployed for financial relief dominated the thirties, their needs in other fields were not entirely forgotten. The most successful activities of the Special Areas commissioners lay in the system of grants which they built up in support of the voluntary organizations. The party's policy on unemployment was somewhat empirical, and it was kept pretty tightly within the strict limits of orthodox economics by the stern Chancellor of the Exchequer-Philip Snowden.
