The country was £900 million in debt to the US for war loans, which were to be repaid immediately. Britain's enviable worldwide investments were wiped out, its coal and cotton export markets had collapsed. This was a period of retraction abroad (by the late 1920s the white 'dominions' determined their own foreign policies) and social reform at home. A limited number of women were allowed to vote in 1918, but by 1927 all women over the age of 21 could vote and Britain had universal suffrage for the first time in history. The electorate trebled, bringing in the first government under the Labour party to represent the views of the working class.
Britain escaped the extremist totalitarian movements that gained a stranglehold on much of the continent in the 1920s and 1930s. Few Britons, for example, joined Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Britain's long traditions of consultation and belief in parliamentary democracy helped it to weather the storms of post-war life, though it was dogged by slumps and strikes.
Depression
Two of the questions that bedeviled British politics before 1914 - women's suffrage and Irish home rule - were no longer at issue. Women got the vote without difficulty in 1918 after four years of doing the civilian work of three million men who had been away fighting in the army - in munitions factories, on the land and as nurses on the Western Front.
Meanwhile Prime Minister Lloyd George had decided Britain could not win southern Ireland's war of independence, begun in 1919 by the revolutionary Irish party Sinn Fein. The period saw southern Ireland become a independent republic in all but name.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 brought worldwide economic collapse.
The real concern was the economy. The European economic system had still not properly recovered 11 years after the war had ended. This problem had been masked by America's generous willingness to bail Europe out.
But in 1929, a financial meltdown in New York, known as the Wall Street Crash, began a worldwide economic depression.
Germany's tottering economy completely collapsed, which in turn brought Hitler to power.
In Britain in the 1930s, unemployment soared to levels the country had never experienced before. In 1931, proposed benefit cuts saw most ministers resigning from the Labour government.
Ramsay Macdonald was left as prime minister of what was known as the National Government, for it was a cross-party coalition containing members of the Conservative and Liberal parties.
Going off the 'gold standard' in September 1931 made the pound cheap and British goods cheaper, and the export trade began to revive. But Macdonald was despised as a 'class traitor' by many Labour voters.
In November 1935 he was replaced as prime minister by the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, for the National Government now had a majority of Conservative MPs.
Appeasement
In India, 100,000 people were imprisoned for taking part in the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns for Indian independence. Nevertheless, Britain was reluctant to lose the centre of her imperial trade. A major problem was also brewing in the Mandate of Palestine, which Britain administered as part of the post-World War One peace. The 1917 Balfour Declaration that Palestine should become a Jewish homeland had to be reconciled with the rights of the indigenous Arab peoples, for the country had become a magnet for German Jews escaping Nazi persecution.
But the greatest cloud on the horizon was Nazi Germany, which in 1938 seized Austria and Czechoslovakia. The late 1930s are often known as the 'age of appeasement', for Britain found any excuse not to fight a war, though it had reluctantly begun to re-arm. It was not until 3 September 1939 that Britain and France went to war with Germany in response to its invasion of Poland two days earlier. The rest of Europe remained neutral.
During the Second World War, the ‘Special Relationship’ between the United Kingdom and the United States developed into a complex coalition employing diplomatic, military, economic and scientific means to defeat the Axis Powers. The personal diplomacy of its two primary leaders—Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt—exemplified the relationship, as both nations worked toward the common goal of ending the war while negotiating sometimes conflicting national aims. The Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ during the Second World War: A Selective Guide to Materials in the British Library concerns the period from September 1939, when the United Kingdom and Germany went to war in Europe, to August 1945, when the surrender of Japan ended the global conflict. Although the United States did not officially become a belligerent until Japan attacked its Pacific bases in December 1941, the country had already provided vital aid to the United Kingdom and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and had participated in naval actions against German vessels in the Atlantic. The alliance between the United Kingdom and the United States continued into the postwar period, by which time the Cold War with the Soviet Union, their wartime ally, had begun.
Тэтчери́зм — политика консервативного правительства Великобритании под руководством Маргарет Тэтчер (1981—1990), сопровождавшаяся приватизацией ранее национализированных предприятий и отраслей экономики, монетаризмом в финансово-экономической сфере, сворачиванием социальных программ, приватизацией социальных сфер образования и здравоохранения[ источник не указан 1215 дней ].
Концепция тэтчеризма тесно связана с социально-экономическими понятиями и категориями неолиберализма и «шоковой терапии»[ источник не указан 1215 дней ].
It consists of Lords Temporal and Lords Spiritual and includes more than 1,000 members. Lords Temporal are 830 Lords by the right of inheritance (hereditary peers), 270 members are given life peerage (life peers). Lords Spiritual are 26 members of the House of Lordsand they are spiritual peers (bishops and archbishops).
Two major issues have emerged during the campaign - oil and currency.
Oil
North Sea oil and gas reserves (or more precisely the tax take from Scotland's share) are vital to the Scottish government's case for independence.
Mr Salmond says earmarking a tenth of revenues - about £1bn a year - could form an oil fund similar to the one operated in Norway, creating a £30bn sovereign wealth pot over a generation.
Mr Cameron says the North Sea has been a British success story - and now the oil and gas is getting harder to recover, it's more important than ever to back the industry with the "broad shoulders" of the UK.
The SNP's opponents also argue they're pinning future hopes on something that's eventually going to run out.