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This chapter considers how the General Strike (and wider coal strike) was instrumental in the development of William Temple's ideas on national community, and his rejection of pluralism. It examines why Temple became disillusioned with the Labour Party during the General Strike, and what made him abandon the party while his friend R. H. Tawney, also brought up in the Christian socialist and Idealist traditions, remained within the fold. It compares Temple's rhetoric after the strike with that of another national leader, Stanley Baldwin. It argues that Baldwin and Temple shared a fear that democracy would be destroyed by class selfishness. Like Temple, Baldwin sought to avert this by projecting an idea of a cohesive national community based on common culture and civic duty, and underpinned by religion, and like Temple, Baldwin drew on the language of T. H. Green. Finally, the chapter compares Temple's irenic response to the class politics of the late 1920s with the vitriolic reactions of Hensley Henson and Ralph Inge, men who repudiated the language of community and common values.

The success of the League was widely seen as depending on its formulating a scheme for international disarmament. Lloyd George had this in the back of his mind when offering a security treaty to Paris. Lord Esher, his man on the League's Temporary Mixed Commission, was pushed aside by Cecil, whose appointment had been arranged by H. A. L. Fisher, the British representative on the Council. Cecil hoped to repair Anglo‐French relations, which had rapidly deteriorated after Poincaré came to power, by agreeing with the French representatives a plan which would formally link security and disarmament. Once this had been adopted at Geneva, Cecil hoped to impose it on the British government, which he had himself joined when Stanley Baldwin became Prime Minister in May 1923. However, he was on bad terms with Curzon, who remained Foreign Secretary. The league did not endorse the Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance, and the consensus in the Conservative Cabinet was strongly against it.

Stanley Baldwin’s leadership is generally portrayed as being integral to the Conservative party’s success between the wars, unifying the disparate factions within the party, and creating a Conservative middle ground. Baldwin promoted an anti-socialist politics which identified the party with constitutionalism, moderate social reform and the national interest. The discourse of ‘Baldwinite Conservatism’ offered a brand of constructive anti-socialism which had a significantly wider appeal than the Edwardian tariff reform campaign or the press-led anti-waste agitation of the early 1920s. Nonetheless, the symbiotic relationship between the party’s national leadership and grassroots organisations has arguably been underestimated. Baldwin’s rhetoric was effectively mediated and disseminated through conversations with groups like the Women’s Unionist Organisation.

Baldwin is a central figure in the emergence of modern Conservative and British politics. Despite denying being an orator, Baldwin’s public utterances are often cited as critical in developing and articulating a ‘tone’ appropriate to the new post-1918 mass democracy and responsible in part for transforming the Conservatives into a mass party. Baldwin was acutely conscious of the power of words and saw oratory as vital in both educating the new democracy and his own party. He therefore took great care to develop a ‘rhetorical strategy’, whose central rhetorical device was the sophisticated use of commonplaces (topoi, knowledge or sentiments shared by an audience as part of a community) to structure his appeal and fix it in the mind of the new electorate through the innovative exploitation of the new technologies of mass communication. This chapter focuses on Baldwin’s rhetoric in the 1920s, a time when the Conservative Party was coming to terms with the post-1918 electorate and the nature of the ‘new’ democracy which, Baldwin argued, required a ‘new’ conservatism.

Manifestos became increasingly central to the electoral campaign and the parties’ efforts to develop a ‘national’ rather than purely sectional appeal after 1918. The party leader’s address-as-manifesto did persist, but it became a rarity. Labour was at the forefront of the development of programmatic politics, producing more substantive and heavyweight manifestos than their more slogan-based pre-1914 equivalents. While the other parties eventually followed Labour’s lead in providing more detailed manifestos outlining proposed legislation, distrust of programmatic politics still lingered. Some politicians, most notably Stanley Baldwin, criticized the apparent escalation of election promises. Although election addresses remained vital to the local campaign, in part as a result of the introduction of the free postal communication in 1918, their relative importance declined in relation to manifestos. Addresses became increasingly uniform documents, designed to complement manifestos, as a result of increasing use of material from party press services.

This chapter narrates the moment in which T.S. Eliot came to identify the Russian Revolution as the main event of the war and the motive for a re-evaluation of Europe’s position in the world. Eliot’s review of Trotsky in the Criterion introduces an account of the extensive and prominent publication of Trotsky’s works in Britain and responses to them by such figures as Maynard Keynes and even Stanley Baldwin, and the chapter concludes with an account of Valéry’s role in shaping Eliot’s thought on Europe, in the famous essay which he wrote for Middleton Murry’s Athenaeum.

‘The volunteers’ farewell: closing rituals, genteel ironies’ recounts the activities and perspectives of volunteers, Government officials, the Church, strikers, and various media at the end of the General Strike. The Liberal press, the King, and the Church took a neutral position and called for a binding up of the wounds. Most newspapers, however, blamed one side or the other, depending upon their political perspective. The strike ended with the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress more isolated than ever from Prime Minister Baldwin's Conservative Government, the mine owners, and the majority of public opinion.

The novels of Mary Webb were relatively unknown until they were the subject of a speech by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. He praised their qualities as something uniquely English in their close relation between characters and nature. One result was an illustrated edition of Webb’s novels, most strikingly Seven for a Secret, illustrated by Norman Hepple and Precious Bane, with those by Rowland Hilder. Both stress the unity with nature, and reflect the books’ setting in an invented eighteenth century. The relationship with Baldwin continues in his later speech ‘On England’, which stresses the importance of nature to the English people. His particular emphasis on horse-drawn ploughing is reflected again in Webb’s novels and illustrations, building on aspects of Thomas Hardy’s poetry. Both these writings, and the sense of melancholy they often generate, are shown in the novels and their illustrators.

The inability of British policy-makers in the 1930s to sustain the benign international system which contributed so much to the security of the British Empire in the 1920s was only partly because the powers challenging that system in the 1930s, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and imperial Japan, were much more powerful than those which challenged it in the 1920s, Weimar Germany, Soviet Russia, and Kemalist Turkey. But it is not the complete explanation. In the 1920s British policy-makers believed that they could construct a peaceful and stable world resting on two pillars: a carefully managed process of multilateral disarmament would leave Britain with sufficient hard power to maintain the security of their empire, while British, and international, prosperity would be built on the restoration of peace and stable international exchange rates. But between 1930 and 1933, at the very moment when policy-makers most needed to feel confident of their power, that confidence evaporated. The Great Depression threatened to undermine the economic basis of the post-war world order, and the failure of the World Disarmament Conference destroyed the belief that future peace could be ensured if sensible men of goodwill could be brought together to settle their differences by discussion and compromise. The emergence of Japan as a threat to stability in the Far East and the advent to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany compelled British policy-makers, for the first time since 1918, to contemplate the possibility that they might soon be involved in a great power war.

The Stresa front was intended to be the lynchpin of a strategy to contain Hitler and eventually persuade him to return to the conference table and settle all outstanding questions by peaceful negotiations. But the British themselves then began the process that led to its unravelling. The accelerating pace of German rearmament, and the pressing need to ensure that the fleet would not be tied down in European waters if it was needed at Singapore, persuaded them to grab at Hitler’s offer of an Anglo-German naval arms limitation agreement. This was a blunder which represented the first nail in the coffin of the Stresa front. The second, and far more decisive, blow to that agreement came in October 1935, when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. The central premise of the grand strategy that the Cabinet had adopted in July 1934, that Britain faced only two potential enemies, was now redundant and policy-makers had to decide how to confront not only Germany in Western Europe, and Japan in the Far East, but Italy in the Mediterranean. The manifold difficulties of creating a new grand strategy to replace the DRC’s blueprint were quickly made apparent when the German remilitarized the Rhineland, when a major revolt against British rule broke out in Palestine, and when Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union began to fish in the troubled waters created by the Spanish civil war.

This chapter traces the story of Ashridge College, founded as a monastery in the 13^th century and purchased in 1928 by J.C.C. Davidson, then Conservative party Chairman, who transformed it into a Conservative College in 1929. However the Trust did not mention the Conservative party by name and the content of the courses at Ashridge was by no means explicitly Conservative. The purpose of Ashridge was to provide political education, as opposed to propaganda, and thus to be non-partisan. It was part of the controversial ‘unpolitical politics’ of the Baldwinian party. Important themes that emerge from this chapter are the College’s constant financial difficulties and the ongoing tensions with the Conservative party about the proper balance between disinterested teaching and party propaganda.

Chapter 1 considers how the idea of using referendums came onto the political agenda, and how on a number of occasions its imminent entry into use seemed plausible but did not take place. Important figures such as Albert Venn Dicey, Joseph Chamberlain, Arthur Balfour, Stanley Baldwin, Herbert Henry Asquith, and Winston Churchill played a part in events. Even without being held, the prospect of referendums had an impact on British political thought, words, and actions. There was also practical use of the device: at local level, and as part of external initiatives in which Britain played a part. The referendum could come to the forefront of political attention, recede and then return to it again. Though the extent of its prominence varied, once it appeared on the political landscape the referendum was, in some form, a continual presence.