Years of Towers and Lolly
Under Asquith's and then John Simon's Liberal governments of the 1910s and 1920s, Britain staggered out from the post-war recession and became a rich country. Nominally. While the cities boomed and became glittering edifices of the Jazz Age, with tall fluting super-towers and mass consumption, there was very high inequality. The Liberals did nothing to combat the highly unionised countryside, where membership rarely fell below 50% and could be as high as 90% in the Country Party heartlands. Red Lincolnshire was particularly notorious, as a den of quasi-Marxists.
The post-war global order was volatile. China was divided into British, German and Japanese sphere of influence with concessions to other countries like the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc. while the interior remained dominated by warlords. A shaky republic nominally ruled the whole country. Japan had conquered French bits and bobs in East Asia and the Pacific and had bitten off a good section of Pacific Russia during its civil war from which a rather authoritarian republic had emerged. Europe was dominated by Germany, via her direct vassals in the Baltic and her puppetisation of Austria-Hungary and the Balkan states, while the extended a more informal economic sphere over the Latin countries. Germany and Italy had both expanded their empires in Africa at French expense, and in the Middle East, a tired Ottoman Empire lives on, an Anglo-German (tm) production. The Americas are dominated by the ol' US of A, but business remains very much America's business. Neither the US or Germany was interested in founding a League of Nations, and a kind of global Congress system dominated the 20s, with Britain, Germany, Japan and the United States forming the principle powers of the world.
The Liberals didn't do away with the Imperial Tariff system but instead used it to fund tax reductions and lower the national debt. Sensible decisions which led to an economic boom. The infrastructure investment of the Churchill years allowed Britain to take full advantage of the Second Industrial Revolution and while she continued to lag behind the US and Germany economically, she was a heavy global hitter in her own right. The Liberals also withdrew much of their involvement in private business (outside the rural co-operatives, which competed with one another in their own way). Expanding businesses often played the stock market to increase their value, and high growth seemed to deliver returns as credit expanded.
Some consider the 1910s and 20s a Golden Age of culture, and point to the music, art and architecture of the age. While these were all valuable, and there is no doubt the time is legendary for producing the sexual permissive attitudes which contrasted sharply with the buttoned up Victorian Age. Sexual and racial discrimination came under a scrutinising eye as non-white people became more visible in every day society. One of the consequences of Churchill's Elysian Fields was that many cities suffered a labour shortage, and men and women from the colonies of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean came to the semi-mythical motherland to answer the call for workers.
But at the same time, the cities became very stratified socially and racially. The glamourous individuals of the age were the minority and while the middle classes also enjoyed great opulence and unemployment was low, the very rich were those who gained most, and the urban workers clashed considerably with their non-white counterparts who were often employed for a much lower wage by bosses who could get away with it. The union movement in the cities weakened as solidarity broke down, and the ability of bosses to call on workers from overseas gave them the ability to bypass strikes and carry on work.
The first sign of weakness in the booming economy of Britain was the sudden revelation of how much the big cities relied on the pit villages. These small colliery communities had been socialised alongside the farming unions, and had taken a while longer than the farming unions to affiliate to the Country Party due to their inherent distrust of the old Conservative party. Coal prices had become depressed due to the influx of French and Russian coal as reparations, and these communities had gotten the short end of the stick. While the Russians had mostly recovered, and reparations now came in the form of cash, the price of coal had remained artificially low.
The coal-miner's strike began in 1925, and was followed by the Farmer's Strike in solidarity. The farmers of the shires refused to bus their food into the cities. A chilling mirror image of the French blockade of Britain took place. Within weeks, the price of coal was readjusted to a higher price. The Liberal government had taken a thrashing, and the coal-miners now swung behind the Country Party. The economy of the shires was developing a service sector of its own, with many small farmers diversifying their business and new co-operatives being set up to deal with other services.
The killer blow came in 1928 when the German stock market crashed and all economic dominance over Europe came down. The French Kingdom collapsed into a new republic, Austria-Hungary finally disintegrated. The ripple effects spread out across the world, plunging the world into a repeat of the economic trials and tribulations of the Long Depression.
A deflating economy was bad for the commodity producers as the value of money rose and the value of their product fell. Simon's government tried to fill the gap with some kind of state interventionism. It was too little too late. In 1930, they fell below a majority and a vote of confidence brought in a general election. The almost two decades of dominance by the Liberals was at an end. The Blue Primrose was to have its turn, under a radical new leader, a synthesis of the kind of men the Country Party was born from and the ideals of the voters of the co-operatives. The man they called the Red Bull.