Conservative Party Disagreements During the Interwar Period: A Look at State Intervention

During the interwar period, major disagreements arose within the Conservative Party over the role of the state. On the one hand, the mainstream of the party, such as Baldwin, clearly began to wrestle the values of individualism and laissez-faire from the Liberals. Immediately after the war ended, the Conservative government removed wartime controls on prices, transport, investment, and food distribution (Blaxland, 2019). On the other hand, the global capitalist economic crisis of the late 1920s led to a belief in the principle of state intervention led by Harold Macmillan and R.A. Butler. They tried to devise some sort of coherent system between a purely private enterprise system and collectivism (Peter, 2021).