“they could show a ‘reasonable expectation’ of obtaining insurable work, and that their chances were not impaired by the fact of marriage. Thus if in a Lancashire town the only local mill closed down, married women workers lost entitlement to benefit, and between 1931 and 1933 nearly a quarter of a million claims were disallowed under this regulation. Under such a disincentive it is probable that many married women declined to register as unemployed, and were therefore not counted.” (Burnett, 1994, p. 206)
In what can only be described as dark irony, the unemployment levels in the interwar years was somewhat reduced by the huge number of fatalities in the First World War. This meant that despite men becoming a minority gender in the population, their employment levels were still very low. What flourished in this interesting new milieu of war widows, economic distress and unemployed men is the institution of marriage and remarriage. Indeed, “they began to marry at a younger age regardless of their financial insecurity. The trend was symptomatic of a wider move towards respectability and domesticity in interwar behaviour.” (Pugh, 2008). Several social and cultural changes took place. As mass unemployment left large numbers of young men at a loose end,
“there was an increase in minor, opportunistic crime against property. But the trends were largely in the other direction. The great Victorian offences such as drunkenness and prostitution went into major decline, and there were also fewer murders between the wars. As a result, by 1930 the prison population of England and Wales stood at just over 11,000 compared with 21,000 in 1910, and local prisons were being closed down.” (Pugh, 2008)
It was a disappointing feature of the National Governments that rather than welcoming these positive trends they actually misrepresented them for narrow political gains. The government twisted these figures to actually give the impression that crime was on the rise. The agenda behind this move was to apparition blame for the ‘crime wave’ on a small ‘criminal class’, comprising of foreign recruits and obscure alien influences. The politics of ’us against them’ is an age old trick and the National government of the 1930’s Britain was also trying to exploit it. Left unattended in its preoccupation with power is creating opportunities for job creation in the war-battered country.
In assessing the National Government’s response to the unemployment crisis, it is important to consider broader geo-economic factors. In particular, the high unemployment rate in Britain was correlated to the Great Depression that was devastating the American economy. In this respect the National government can only do so much in stimulating the economy. What did not help the British cause are the series of policies issued by the Federal Reserve between 1929 and 1933, whereby it “intensified the recessionary forces by cutting the money supply by one-third, converting a fairly serious but by no means unusual slowdown into a catastrophic recession.” (Ormerod, 1998) It should be borne in mind that the kind of economic slump experienced in the 1930s is as yet unmatched by any subsequent financial market crash. Between 1929 and 1932 “the output of the western economies fell by no less than 16 per cent; though the UK economy shrank by only 6 per cent, America shrank by almost one-third, and US output did not return to its 1929 level until a full decade later.” (Ormerod, 1998) But all said and done the mass unemployment of the 1930s was in good measure due to the government’s failure to insulate domestic economy from the vagaries of global financial markets.