ABSTRACT
Neville Chamberlain’s second term as Chancellor of the Exchequer between November 1931 and May 1937 is the fourth longest of any of the 40 men who have held that post since 1902. Of all the various phases in his ministerial career, however, this period, during which he presided over Britain’s recovery from economic depression, remains unquestionably the most neglected and the most in need of reassessment. Indeed, for at least 30 years after his death in 1940, Chamberlain’s reputation was doubly damned. Not only was he the most culpable of the ‘Guilty Men’ of Munich, but the post-war triumph of Keynesian economics (with its promise of prosperity and full employment) appeared to be an equally devastating condemnation of his supposedly complacent and unimaginative economic response to the challenge of the Great Depression. In this intellectual climate, in which Churchillians and Keynesians reigned supreme, the avenging march of his victorious opponents thus ensured that Chamberlain was robustly denounced for merely ‘tinkering with the cancer of massive unemployment’ with policies which were ‘all small, haphazard, essentially palliative, and unrelated to any long-term constructive economic policy’.1 Yet in reality, the underlying indictment of Chamberlain’s Chancellorship always went much further. As Robert Skidelsky later put it, the failure to tackle unemployment in the early 1930s ‘helped to create and confirm a mood of national self-doubt, of pessimism regarding the future, in which appeasement could flourish. The refusal to stand up to the dictators was part of the refusal to stand up to unemployment; the mood of resignation, of fatalism almost, which supported it was the same in one case as the other.’2
