Unemployment, Training and Manpower Policy in Inter‐War Britain

Abstract

Abstract The development of public training policy in Britain between the 1880s and 1930s was profoundly shaped by three continuing preoccupations. The first was political, and related specifically to unemployment: governments were required to respond to unemployment in the interests of survival, and at times it was believed that agitation amongst the unemployed endangered the socio‐political order. Second, training programmes were developed, at first out of the poor relief system and subsequently out of the ministry of Labour, in response to fears that human capital was deteriorating through protracted disuse and required ‘reconditioning’ if it was to remain active and mobile in the labour market. Third, there was a subsidiary but significant concern with renewal of the white population of Britain's dominions; governments sporadically sought to fit, through training, an urban, industrial labour force for migration to agrarian societies. Despite repeated concern between 1880 and 1939 for the competitiveness of British industry, governments were reluctant during peacetime to intervene in industrial training for fear of seeming to support socialist solutions to the problems of private enterprise. The First World War brought about short‐lived changes in emphasis, but post‐war Reconstruction measures renewed the division between liberal education (bound up with debates over ‘citizenship') and vocational training policies. By 1939, public training policy in Britain was characterised by (1) an exclusive preoccupation with training or retraining the unemployed, more to keep the work ethic alive than encourage the acquisition of new skills; (2) a considerably stronger orientation towards social and regional policy objectives than to labour market planning; and (3) growth through disjointed incrementalism, enjoying substantial bipartisan support, rather than throughopen debate and strategic change.