ABSTRACT
Between the constitutional clash between the Lords and the Commons which provoked two general elections in 1910 and the General Strike which split the nation in 1926, class society in Britain underwent a profound crisis. The crisis was essentially to decide whether Britain was to continue along the path of increasing class conflict culminating in social breakdown or revolution or whether there was to be, not merely an accommodation between the classes of the kind which gave mid-Victorian Britain its viable class society, but something more far-reaching: a tacit copartnership between the representatives of capital and labour in which the state would find itself increasingly involved, to the point where it became itself a partner in a relationship which transcended class society altogether.
