A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars by Alwyn Turner

This review appears in the latest issue of Liberator – no. 434. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars

Alwyn Turner

Profile Books, 2026, £25

The most startling thing about Britain in the inter-war years is what didn’t happen. Across Europe, Communist and Fascist regimes took power, but neither force ever came close to it here. George V’s verdict on the General Strike was “That was a rotten way to run a revolution, I could have done it better myself,” but few on the left had revolutionary ambitions and the aims of the unsuccessful strike were modest. Meanwhile on the right, Alwyn Turner argues, Oswald Mosley and his New Party were in decline after 1934: 

After that early boom, the party never really amounted to anything. The momentum rapidly dissipated, and no candidates were fielded in the 1935 general election. It wasn’t entirely clear what the movement was supposed to do, save to provide a dramatic backdrop to Mosley’s speeches, and it failed at that: the thuggery and anti-Semitism ensured that no one paid attention to what its leader was saying.

Other factors Turner points to enhance this impression of stability. The murder rate, for instance, was lower than it had been in Victoria’s day and a tenth of what it was in the United States.

What is particularly enjoyable about Turner’s approach to history is the way he combines high politics with the concerns and the entertainments of the masses. This prevents us from viewing the period as one of unrelenting grimness – think of the absurd view of the Seventies as wholly taken up by strikes and power cuts that pertains on social media and in popular podcasts. 

Sometimes the two streams turn out to be related. The inter-war years saw the decline of music hall and the rise of the cinema and radio. 

Some politicians adapted to these changes better than others. When first invited to address the nation live on BBC radio, both Asquith and Ramsay MacDonald found it natural to opt for a relay of a platform speech at a public meeting; it was Stanley Baldwin, who sat down with a studio microphone and spoke in conversational tones, who was adjudged to be more effective.

Modern readers, familiar with the concept of posttraumatic stress, will not be surprised to learn there was a high male suicide rate after the first world war. And for all the fun Turner brings to light, I remember that my mother used to quote her own mother as saying: “We hadn’t got over the last war when the next one came along.”

Lloyd George’s oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall

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In 1992 the journalist Edward Pearce published a diary of that year's general election campaign. It was reviewed for the London Review of Books by Peter Clarke.

Here is Clarke on Lloyd George:

Lloyd George, too, did his bit to lower the tone of politics once secularisation had made the pulpit an obsolescent model. 

As A.J.P. Taylor liked to point out, Lloyd George's platform oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall. He could control an audience with the inspired timing of a stand-up comic. His one-liner about the House of Lords – "five hundred men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed" – was fit to bring the house down. 

He was the politician as entertainer, subordinating reason to emotion as much as any party political broadcast in the last campaign. He could pirouette, like Chaplin, from the broadest belly-laugh to tear-jerking pathos without having to say: "but to be serious for a moment, ladies and gentlemen ..." 

Yet, as the last of the great pre-electronic politicians, Lloyd George became a hapless victim of technological advance in the Twenties. While, like Archie Rice, he was still having a go on the public stage, Stanley Baldwin stole into the sitting-room of anyone lucky enough to have a new wireless. 

His avoidance of histrionics in favour of the fireside manner was pitched perfectly for his middle-brow, middle-class constituency, and showed that the public meeting, in its classic form, was doomed. Baldwin could be relied upon to rise to the small occasion.