Coalition and Conservative Cabinet reactions to the Communist threat to Britain, 1917-1927

Despite plenty of fine research on the inter-war period there has, of yet, been no detailed study of the reaction in Whitehall and Westminster to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia during the Lloyd George Coalition and Conservative Governments in this period. This thesis fills that gap by tackling the bitter clashes between moderates and hardliners in the Coalition and Conservative Cabinets over how, where and when Britain should handle the threat posed by Communism. It looks at the extraordinary circumstances of the age, a time of radical and profoundly uncertain political and social change, seen by many at the time as a point of potential rupture from the existing representative institutions and traditions. Starting with the Russian revolution and debate over military intervention in the Russian Civil War, it explores key flashpoints over the next ten years, including mass soldiers' strikes, rebellion on the Clyde and the General Strike of 1926. Using source material obtained fr om the Baldwin Archives, the Cabinet Archives, Hansard, the Chamberlain Papers and Churchill Archive, among others, the thesis maps and analyses the fluid changes in the factions within the Cabinet and the factors that influenced key political figures. Loo king at the leadership of Lloyd George and Baldwin, it asks how governance was maintained over such an emotive issue and how the divides in Cabinet and the Conservative Party impacted the policy of government. This thesis argues that both premiers were able to forge a path which suited their own moderate approach but which was tempered by the views of the hardliners a middle way that, by stretching cabinet collective responsibility to its limits helps account for the durability of both coalition and single party government in the decade following the First World War.