A number of people have made comments regarding British actions, during the Great Depression, and rearmament in subsequent years. Yes Britain followed classic economic theory, imposing hard austerity, tight money control, and an attempt to balance the budget. Note this was while retaining what was for its time a generous welfare state. Yes there was the means test, which to our eyes was an unwarranted intrusion into family life, and the requirement for the claimant to attend the Labour Exchange every day. However what is often missed, are the factors that to an extent mitigated, the worst effects for the government stringiness. If the claimant didn’t smoke, drink or gamble, and gave all his Dole to his wife, and moved into the family home one or other of his or hers parent’s. Remember the parents State Pension, didn’t count towards the family income, when calculating the means test. Plus the depression saw a reduction in food prices, while there was no reduction in the amount of the state pension, which made the pension more valuable than it had been. Such that meany families, who didn’t move granny or grandpa into the home, but sent one or more of the children round to their house for dinner. Yes times were hard, but in comparison to the USA, no were near as hard. The principal effect of the New Deal, and other American policies, was to prolong the depression, until British and French armament spending in 1939, ended it.
In Britain as others have pointed out the worst of the depression was over by 1932, and unemployment was by 1937, back at the level it had been prior to 1929. Yes there were areas that it took until the war for the depression to end, in fact even the war didn’t see some areas recover. But they were mostly areas that had been in decline, with old inefficient industries pre 1929. Other areas were there were new modern industries saw growth, as did the building trade, especially in the south and around major industrial cities. As for military spending, it’s no good looking at the Army, the British Army was historically the poor relation, always getting the scraps from the table. And the formation of the RAF, another highly technical force like the RN, meant that there was even less to spare for the Army. Given the prevailing government attitude, of no involvement in a continental war, the Armies job was colonial policing. It had even lost to a large extent the job of supporting the civil power at home, that role had passed to the police. Other than for a short time immediately after the Wall Street crash, the British government spent significant monies on the RN. Constructing new ships within the restrictions of the Washington/London treaties, and refurbishing/refitting older ships. It also spent significant money on research for both the RN and RAF, along with training via apprenticeships of highly skilled tradesmen. It managed by the outbreak of war to have established the worlds only integrated air defence system, and the fighters to equip it. The RN, had started to equip its ships with both air search, surface search and gunnery control Radar. While even the poor relation the Army had its first mobile air search sets, not very good or integrated with the command system. And remember the best tank of the early war years was British, nothing could stand up to the Matilda, until the Germans equipped their tanks with a 50mm gun in late 1940.
RR.
