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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.

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.

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.