Abstract
The circumstances surrounding the formation of the National government on 24 August 1931 have been much debated. But the event, while registering the disintegration of Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government, did not in itself effect a restructuring of British politics. That took place over the next ten weeks. At its inception, the National government was announced as being a temporary measure, formed to ‘save the pound’ and restore business and international confidence. Presented as a sort of ‘emergency Committee of Public Safety’,1 its brief was to produce that balanced budget which the late Labour government had failed to do. That achieved, it was to wither away as suddenly as it had been formed, with the various parties ‘resuming their respective positions’.2 Any successor government, it was universally attested, would be of the single-party type only a general election could produce.
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Notes
See N. Smart, ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’, Twentieth Century British History, 3, 3 (1992), pp. 298–303.
P. Williamson, National Crisis and. National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926–32 (Cambridge, CUP, 1992), p. 350.
Cunliffe-Lister to his wife, 24 August 1931. In J. A. Cross, Lord Swinton (Oxford, Clarendon, 1982), p. 99.
K. Middlemas and J. Barnes, Baldwin (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 633.
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V. Bodganor, ‘1931 Revisited: the Constitutional Aspects’, Twentieth Century British History, 2, 1 (1991), p. 16.
Lord Croft, My Life of Strife (London, Hutchinson, 1949), p. 192
J. Barnes and D. Nicholson (eds), The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries, 1929–1945, (London, Hutchinson, 1988), p. 195. Hereafter abbreviated to LSA, II.
Cited in D. Wrench, ‘The Parties and the National Government, August 1931–September 1932, Journal of British Studies, 23, 2 (1984), p. 137.
D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, Jonathan Cape, 1977), p. 655.
A. Thorpe, ‘Arthur Henderson and the British Political Crisis of 1931’, Historical Journal, 31, 1 (1983), p. 138.
R. Bernays, Special Correspondent (London, Victor Gollancz, 1934), p. 23.
Walter Elliot to his wife-to-be, 28 Aug. 1931. Cited in C. Coote, Companion of Honour: The Story of Walter Elliot (London, Collins, 1965), p. 124.
B. Wasserstein, Herbert Samuel: A Political Life (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992). p. 321.
C. Cross (ed.), Life with Lloyd George, (London, Macmillan, 1975), p. 37, entry for 24 August 1931. Hereafter Sylvester Diary.
AC to Ida Chamberlain, 31 Aug. 1931. In R. Self (ed.), The Austen Chamberlain Diary Letters (Cambridge, CUP, 1995), p. 384.
A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1985), p. 61.
See R. Boyce, British Capitalism at the Crossroads, 1919–1932 (Cambridge, CUP, 1987), p. 356.
R. Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump (London, Papermac, 1994), p. 384
M. Cole (ed.), Beatrice Webb Diaries, 1924–1932, (London, Longman, 1956), p. 289. Entry for 21 Sept. 1931.
B. Pimlott (ed.), The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton, vol. I, 1918–1940(London, Jonathan Cape, 1986), pp. 152–3, entries for 26 and 27 Aug. 1931.
D. Dutton, Simon: A Political Biography (London, Aurum Press, 1992), p. 108.
C. Cross, Philip Snowden (London, Barrie and Rockliff, 1966), p. 305.
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Cited in R. Bassett, Nineteen Thirty One (London, Macmillan, 1958), p. 253.
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See, for example, H. Berkeley, The Myth That Will Not Die (London, Groom Helm, 1978), p. 115.
R. Self, Tories and Tariffs: The Conservative Party and the Politics of Tariff Reform, 1922–1932 (New York, Garland, 1986), p. 627.
F. Owen, Tempestuous Journey: Lloyd George his Life and Times (London, Hutchinson, 1954) p. 720. Also NC to Hilda, 12 Oct. 1931. NC 18/1/758.
T. Stannage, Baldwin Thwarts the Opposition: The British General Election of 1935 (London, Croom Helm, 1980) pp. 16 and 25.
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J. Ramsden (ed.), Real Old Tory Politics: The Political Diaries of Robert Sanders, Lord Bayford 1910–1935 (London, Historians’ Press, 1984), p. 247.
On Grigg withdrawing his candidature in Leeds Central, see Sir Richard Denman, Political Sketches (Carlisle, Charles Thurnam, 1948), pp. 9–13.
Cited in I. Macleod, Neville Chamberlain (London, Frederick Muller, 1961) p. 154.
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© 1999 Nick Smart
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Smart, N. (1999). The 1931 Settlement. In: The National Government, 1931–40. British Studies Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27582-3_2
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