Faltering postwar reconstruction. During World War I, the British government made many idealistic promises to the populace about postwar social improvements—plans for health programs, expanded educational programs, universal unemployment insurance, and major homebuilding projects. These commitments were viewed as necessary to keep the population motivated to sustain the war effort, and also to forestall a socialist uprising like the Bolshevik Revolution that overthrew Tsarist Russia in 1917. But in the years following the end of the war in 1918, political and economic realities made fulfilling these promises extremely difficult for the British government.
In 1917, the government’s Reconstruction Committee predicted that the most crucial issue the government would confront after the war would be minimizing the disruptions caused by demobilization of the men in the military and the shutting down of wartime industries, such as the manufacture of arms and ammunition. The committee accurately predicted that unemployment would be the most serious problem the British government would face. Although there was a short postwar boom between 1918-19, by 1920 rising inflation, high taxes (necessary to pay off the nation’s large war debt), and a weak market for the export of manufactured goods all combined to create an economic slump that drove unemployment up rapidly.
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