<P> The industrial areas spent the rest of the 1920s in recession, and these industries received little investment or modernisation . Throughout the 1920s, unemployment stayed at a steady one million . </P> <P> In May 1929, a minority Labour government headed by Ramsay MacDonald came to office with Liberal support . This was only the second time a Labour government had been in office (they had briefly been in office in 1924), and few of the government's members had any deep knowledge of economics or experience of running the economy . MacDonald's Labour Party was not radical in economic thinking, and was wedded to the orthodoxy of classical economics with its emphasis on maintaining a balanced budget at any cost . </P> <P> In October 1929, the Stock Market Crash in New York heralded the worldwide Great Depression . John Maynard Keynes, who had not predicted the slump, said, "' There will be no serious direct consequences in London . We find the look ahead decidedly encouraging ." </P> <P> Doomsayers on the left such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, J.A. Hobson, and G.D.H. Cole repeated the dire warnings they had been making for years about the imminent death of capitalism, only now far more people paid attention . Starting in 1935 the Left Book Club provided a new warning every month, and built up the credibility of Soviet - style socialism as an alternative . </P>

What happened in 1940 during the great depression