Healthy or hungry thirties?

Abstract

With more than a sideways glance at Engels, Harry Pollitt proclaimed: 'The stark reality is that in 1933, for the mass of the population, Britain is a hungry Britain, badly fed, clothed and housed'. Evidence for this dramatic contention was strong enough to support a volume explicitly modelled on Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England, and assembling data to refute the widely publicised tenet that the march of capitalism had entailed ever-increasing benefits to the living standards of the working classes as a whole. I The Secretary General of the Communist Party of Great Britain thus unleashed a fierce debate among contemporaries, and even now the issue remains unresolved and contentious. Were the '30s characterised by severe social deprivation, or was this idea a myth assiduously cultivated by a mischievous minority for the sake of political advantage? There is a growing tendency to cast serious doubt on the constructions of Pollitt and his confederates. While it is accepted that poverty, poor housing, and ill-health constituted meaningful problems during the depression, we are warned that colourful detail relating to residual pockets of depression should not detract from recognition of a secular trend towards improvement in the social and economic condition of the population as a whole. The '30s are regarded as marking an irreversible shift towards the standards of the modern welfare state.2 The assessment by Aldcroft is representative of much current thinking: