The British Unemployment Assistance Crisis of 1935

Abstract

At the beginning of 1935 massive protest demonstrations in Wales, Scotland and Northern England forced the National Government to abandon its new scales for the relief of the unemployed. These events and their significance have never been examined in detail, having been overshadowed by the more organized (and London centred) Hunger Marches of the same period. Yet the Unemployment Assistance Board crisis, which Michael Foot described as 'the biggest explosion of popular anger in the whole inter-war period, second only to the General Strike itself',' certainly deserves our attention, for it illuminated characteristics of social policy formation which were in their earliest stages of development and others which were very soon to disappear. The basic outline of the crisis is well known. The Unemployment Act of 1934 created a centralized bureaucracy, the Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB), which was to administer means tested relief to the unemployed who had exhausted their insurance benefit.2 It thus took over the work of the local Public Assistance Committees (PACs), successor to the Poor Law Guardians, which had been running the means test since 1931. The Board established a national scale to replace the various local scales of the PACs. The new scale, the Government claimed, would increase payments to the majority of the unemployed. But when it went into effect in January 1935, it actually caused hundreds of thousands of reductions, concentrated in the areas of the heaviest long term unemployment. The subsequent disturbances led to all-party pro-