Unemployment remained a matter of prime concern between the wars because it was no longer a minority issue of ‘surplus labour’ affecting the sub-stratum of the industrial workforce; it emerged instead as a major blemish on the economic and moral face of society, an endemic disease of the industrial heartlands of the country but one obstinately immune to the supposed curative powers of market forces. Yet however serious the problem, the reduction of unemployment in the immediate term never became the overriding determinant of economic policy, primarily because of the lingering belief within government that orthodox responses in other spheres of activity would lay a path towards fuller employment with less long-term damage to the health and stability of the economy. One lesson which successive administrations learned in earnest between the wars, however, was that it was much easier to treat the symptoms of persistent unemployment than it was to overcome its causes. Neither major political party ever had much faith in its ability to solve the problem and in consequence fashioned responses which were characteristically ameliorative, pragmatic and gradualist.

Driven by an intense desire to restore Britain's economic, financial and trading pre-eminence, governments in the 1920s worked assiduously to forestall inflation, sustain sound budgetary practice and protect the value of the currency, even if the concomitant policies of deflation, retrenchment and minimum intervention in the workings of the free-market system afforded little opportunity for the adoption of a deliberate anti-unemployment strategy.