General elections were held in 1929, 1931, and 1935. From a Labour government (second) to two National Governments (the first labour dominated and the second Conservative dominated).
Concentrated unemployment, especially worse in South Wales, North England and Scotland, where the older staple industries were located. William Beveridge calculated that 84.9% of long-term unemployment was to be found in these areas.
The underlying issue was structural unemployment which results from a mismatch between the sufficiently skilled workers seeking employment and demand in the labour market. The number of vacancies may be equal to, or greater than, the number of the unemployed, the unemployed workers may lack the skills needed for the jobs — or may not live in the part of the country where the jobs are available.
It is hard to be precise with extent of unemployment because most statistics refer to those covered by the National Insurance Scheme.
One effect of the slump was therefore to accentuate and to sharpen the differences between the prosperous Midlands and South and the rest of the country.
By the end of 1930 unemployment had more than doubled from 1 million to 2.5 million (20% of the insured workforce), and exports had fallen in value by 50%. In 1933, 30% of people in Glasgow, largest city in Scotland were unemployed due to the severe decline in heavy industry. In some towns and cities in the north east, unemployment reached as high as 70% as ship production fell 90%. The National Hunger March of September–October 1932 was the largest of a series of hunger marches in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. About 200,000 unemployed men were sent to the work camps, which continued in operation until 1939.
The debt that many European countries had accumulated to pay for their involvement in the First World War destabilised many European economies as they tried to rebuild during the 1920s.
J.B Priestley’s three England’s:
1. ‘Old England’, a place of picturesque countryside, inns and historic cathedral cities.
2. Smoky, depressed world of 19th century heavy industry, typified by slum housing, mills, railway stations and Victorian Town halls – made up the larger part of the Midlands and the North – but it was not being added to and has no new life poured into it.
3. Vibrant suburban world of arterial and bypass roads, halls and cafes. A consumer culture had developed.
J.B’s view of the dole:
‘…It is all wrong. Nobody is getting any substantial benefit, any reasonable satisfaction out of it. Nothing is encouraged by it except a shambling dull-eyed, poor imitation of life. The labour exchanges stink of defeated humanity. The whole thing is unworthy of a great country that has in its time given the world some nobly creative ideas. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. ‘
It should not be suggested that the 1930’s were not a time or hardships but there was never less than three quarters of the population in work.
FPTP (First Past The post) is the system when the “winner takes all”. This system rewards only winners. It also produces strong single party governments. The winner in each constituency (seat) is the candidate with the most votes; the number of seats gained is the most important factor. Thus, the party with the most seats (or MPs) in parliament becomes the government.
Proportional representation would however produce permanent coalitions, because the percentage of votes obtained is the percentage of seats allocated. It rewards the 2nd, 3rd … placed candidates.
J.B Priestly said in 1923, about the unemployed, “They looked like prisoners of war”
1/5th of the working population was unemployed in 1933.
The Depression caused a collapse in demand for ships, and the closure of Palmers shipyard in Jarrow, leading to 80% unemployment in the town. Jarvis, High Sherriff of Surrey launched an appeal named the “Surrey Fund” sending food and buying materials enabling men in Jarrow to continue working, buying the decommissioned liner RMS Olympic (a sistership of the Titanic), and Berengaria to be broken up in the new Jarrow Shipbreaking Company (based on the former Palmers shipyard), while the metal was to be used in Jarvis’s new metal industries in the area, which employed several hundred people.
With the competition from Japan, China and other nations, dole queues grew longer. There was nothing to do, nothing to spend.
Starting with the fall of Lloyd George as Prime Minister in 1922, the years that followed up to 1940, were describe by Charles Mowat in his book ‘Britain Between the wars’ published in 1955 as ‘the rule of the pygmies, of the “second-class brains”’ who allowed the country to ‘sink in the hopeless morass of depression and unemployment’, the ‘lesser men’ who had ’frittered away Britain’s power in the world’. The National Government which had governed Britain in the 1930s had been ‘one long diminuendo’ which ‘from its triumph in 1931 shambled it’s unimaginative way to its fall in 1940’.
Some think the Conservative party had achieved political dominance largely through trickery. The Labour party had been kept out of office by this and by the failings of its own leaders, most notably the treacherous Ramsay MacDonald.