Labour in Crisis: The Second Labour Government, 1929-31

The second Labour Government has long been a source of both popular and historical controversy. Formed with high hopes in June 1929, it was unable to deal with the mounting unemployment and in August 1931 collapsed in dramatic circumstances when its Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, formed a National Government to carry through measures he believed necessary to save the country from financial disaster. Shunning the "high politics" approach of much of the existing historiography, Neil Riddell seeks to understand the second Labour Government not primarily in relation to the 1931 crisis, or to the economic debates of the period, but in the context of "the wider Labour movement": the trade unions, the local Labour parties, the Parliamentary Labour Party and the party's intellectuals. In so doing, he provides a new history of both the second Labour Government and of the Labour movement of the years 1929-31, and is able to provide fresh answers to pivotal questions.