During the war 745,000 Britons had been killed and an influenza epidemic killed another 150,000 people. The war had produced over investment in staples industries such as iron, steel and shipbuilding which were no longer needed in huge quantities after the war. There was a small boom at the end of the war, with spiraling inflation, but interest rates were then raised with gave way to economic depression. In late 1920 unemployment rose to 700,000 and by June 1921 it stood at 2million. Due to a weak economy people said that the government should be spending less so at the end of 1921 the Chancellor of the Exchequer wanted to reduce minister’s budgets by £175m but in the end they only managed to cut their budget by £64m. In 1922 the government budget was cut by 22% and the school leaving age was raised to 15, the main victims of the budget cuts were farmers, although the government’s budget was cut it raised benefits which were important measures to keep the economy stable.
In Britain there was an estimated 400,000 homes unfit to live in so there was a huge housing development program in which regional commissioners persuaded local authorities to build new houses and knock down old slums to gain new land to build on, which was subsidized by the government. Although there was shortage of bricklayers 170,000 homes were still built in the life of the government which was seen as a success by the government but did not live up to peoples expectations as the new homes built cost nearly three times more than they did three years later and only certain people would agree to live in those homes.
Industrial relations were weakened when Lloyd George refused to nationalise coal mines. In 1919 he set up the “Sankey Commission” to stop a national miners’ strike. Nationalisation was not politically good, so Lloyd George made Mines and the railways privatised. In 1921 a strike of railwaymen, miners and transport workers looked inevitable but when Lloyd George intervened personally he managed to calm tensions down, in the end it was only miners that went on strike.
Probably the most important and troublesome political problem which faced the coalition government was Ireland in which Irish nationalists wanted independence and unionist which wanted to remain part of Britain. After the violence on “Bloody Sunday” he Lloyd George took the blame which tarnished his reputation even more in Ireland.
Foreign was a very important part of Lloyd George’s coalition government, in 1919 the victorious powers met at the Paris peace conference to draw up the terms of the treaty of Versailles, whilst Clemenceau wanted a harsh treaty on Germany and Lloyd George wanted a more moderate treaty he had a hard time trying to persuade Clemenceau not to make the treaty harsh. One of Lloyd George’s errors in foreign policy and a factor which led to his downfall was the Chanak crisis in 1922, in 1922 the Turks massacred 100,000 Greeks in which the British supported, as the Turks marched towards Chanak, and a war seemed possible between Turkey and Britain. Chanak did Lloyd George and the coalition much harm, his pro-Greek policy offended many conservatives who supported the Turks, but more importantly Lloyd George seem reckless in risking another war just four years after World War One when everyone was still very weary about war.
Lloyd George’s coalition was heavily criticised, I think that the government failed to fulfil its election promises, but conditions in Britain after the war were not very good. All countries from the war suffered greatly and I think that there were more successes made by the coalition government that what is usually said about it, it is probably harder to find successes in peace time government than in a wartime government. The coalition lasted longer than any one thought; Lloyd George had so many problems which he tried to sort out but was probably inevitable that he would not be able to sort all of them out. Lloyd George resigned as Prime Minister in 1922 and never served in government again, although he was leader of the Liberals from 1926-1931. During that time, support for the Liberals in the country dwindled and the Labour party had taken over from the Liberals as the party of opposition to the Conservatives.
