This may indeed have been an underlying cause of the revival of Baldwin’s own fortunes. The lively hope of success is always a good healer for a political party and a prop to the position of its leader. Unemployment, reacting to the world slump and concentrated in the export trades, had risen steadily throughout 1930. By the end of the year it passed the two and a half million mark, just over double the figure when the Government had taken office. For some time MacDonald managed to ride this deterioration with remarkable aplomb. ‘It is not our crisis, it is the crisis of capitalism,’ he had successfully if unconstructively assured the 1930 Labour Party Conference. But as the figure mounted still further, as it became abundantly clear that the Cabinet was barren of remedy, as the harsh eloquence of Oswald Mosley’s attacks damaged without moving the Government from which he had recently resigned, so comforting oratory became less of a substitute for action. The Labour Party began to lose by-elections, and the performance of the Conservative Party improved substantially even in those seats which did not change hands. In March 1931 Snowden, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, referred to ‘the national position [as being] so grave that drastic and disagreeable measures will have to be taken’, and accepted a Liberal amendment to set up an Economy Committee.
