The impact of the First World War

Britain suffered 722,000 dead and 1,676,000 wounded in the First World War. These losses were unprecedented and created a widespread feeling that carnage on such a scale should never be allowed to happen again. The war inspired a flood of literature that graphically described its horrors and reinforced public perceptions that the sacrifices of trench warfare had been futile. Modern warfare, it seemed, was so shattering and terrible that no nation could benefit from it. When the novelist H.G. Wells called it 'the war to end all wars', he believed that no-one could possibly contemplate such destruction again.

The outbreak of the war was blamed on the alliance system and the arms race. It was widely believed to have been an accidental and avoidable conflict, not the product of aggression and malevolence. This implied that future wars could be averted by disarmament and open diplomacy conducted in the League of Nations. Many therefore looked to the League of Nations to resolve the problem of Abyssinia.

The political impact of the Depression

In Britain, economic problems destroyed the Labour government in 1931. A National Government was formed with sufficient electoral support to ride out the storm. But the crisis made the governments of the 1930s reluctant to spend money on rearmament in case the problems of 1931 returned.

Popular opinion

The Franchise Act of 1918 increased the electorate from just under eight million to over 21 million, and gave women over 30 the vote for the first time. After 1928 Britain could be described as truly democratic because all men and women over the age of 21 could vote. This meant that politicians were much more conscious of public opinion in shaping their policies.

Hostility to rearmament

Finding out exactly what the public felt about foreign policy issues was difficult because the first opinion polls in Britain were not established until 1937. However, there did appear to be some widespread assumptions that politicians were reluctant to challenge. The first and most important of these was the belief that another conflict like the First World War could be avoided if the nations of Europe cut down their armaments. Spectacular evidence of this seemed to be provided by the East Fulham by-election of October 1933. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulham_East_by-election,_1933) The Conservative candidate (the party of government), defending a majority of more than 14,000 votes, advocated rearmament. He was defeated by nearly 5,000 votes by his Labour opponent, who supported disarmament. The result had a considerable influence on the Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, who became convinced that rapid rearmament would mean defeat at the polls in the next general election. Faith that the League of Nations could settle international disputes without recourse to war was another widely-held belief. At its peak in 1931 its British supporters' club - the League of Nations Union - could boast more than 400,000 members. In 1935 the Union published the result of its 'Peace Ballot' of more than 11 million people, which appeared to give a ringing endorsement of the League and its principles, including international disarmament. The rapturous reception given to Chamberlain when he returned from Munich suggests that, even as late as September 1938, many people in Britain were anxious to avoid war and actively supported the policy of appeasement.

British domestic politics

The political landscape in Britain had been altered by the First World War. By 1922 the Labour Party had emerged to challenge the Liberals as the principal opposition to the Conservatives. The rise of the Labour Party - which had adopted an explicitly socialist constitution in 1918-worried the Conservatives Tory leaders believed that only moderate, unadventurous policies would be sufficiently popular to win over former Liberal voters and keep themselves in power. Defeat might deliver the nation into the hands of the wild men of the left thought to be lurking behind the leadership of the Labour Party.  As it happened, similar calculations were being made by the Labour leaders, who were convinced that they could only achieve power and pick up their share of former

Liberal votes if their party adopted responsible and cautious policies. The result was a political consensus in which both main parties aimed to control the middle ground of British politics and avoid policies, particularly concerning foreign and defence issues that courted electoral unpopularity. Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s, summed up this thinking when he opposed more money for the Navy because he could not conceive of any course more certain to result in a Socialist victory.'

Spending priorities

The First World War and the advent of democracy altered government spending priorities. Expenditure on welfare took a much higher proportion of the government's budget in the 1930s than it had done in the days before the First World War After the sacrifice of the war, the demands for extensions to the welfare responsibilities of government were irresistible War pensions, more generous dole payments and extensions of the scope of National Insurance all added to the demands on the Exchequer in the post-war years, and no government, much less one striving to hold the middle ground, could contemplate irreversible cuts in these benefits in order-to finance rearmament