Depression and Integration, 1926–45

Abstract

Labour’s alienation from the state did not end with the General Strike. It continued through the depression years of the 1930s and was arrested only by the changes in society and the economy that occurred in the Second World War. Even during the lifetime of the second Labour government of 1929–31 there was no fundamental reversal of attitudes; indeed, the crisis of 1931 which led to the formation of the National Government produced a confrontation between the political and trade union leaderships of the Labour movement more extreme, in its way, than that between the unions and the Baldwin government in 1926. Yet while on the surface the story of government-labour relations seems to be one of conflict and estrangement, in the 1920s and 1930s underlying trends were at work which laid the foundations for the more successful partnership between Labour and the state after 1939. This chapter accordingly examines the course of industrial politics in the late 1920s, the history of the Labour question in the 1930s and the forging of the wartime consensus of 1940–5, symbolised by the participation of the Labour party in Churchill’s coalition government and the presence of Ernest Bevin, one of the leaders of the General Strike, as Churchill’s Minister of Labour and National Service, with a seat in the War Cabinet.