During the present century the British political system has undergone three periods of severe stress - of strains so serious that the leaders of all the major parties felt obliged to suspend party politics and to combine in coalition governments. The first and third periods of crisis are obvious: the world wars. Here the nature of the threat is evident, and the domestic consequences are familiar - in each case a major advance for the Labour movement and substantial increases in state responsibility for and expenditure upon social and economic reform. The second period of crisis, from 1929 to 1931, is less well-known, perhaps because it was more complex in its causation and because its immediate outcome was by contrast a defeat for the 'forces of progress'. Yet contemporaries compared the gravity of this situation to that of the Great War, and its consequence was, in Stuart Ball's words, 'a reshaping of the party system, and a new basis in the pattern of issues, which was to hold sway for the following fifty years'.

LRB 13 October 1988 | PDF Download