1929, guldmyntfoten och myteriet i den engelska flottan

 When Labour took power in 1929, it was determined to stem capital flight and prove itself a safe pair of hands with the economy. Chancellor Philip Snowden would show them all that he was not a Bolshevik. 

He cleaved to Treasury orthodoxy. He accepted all the constraints of the dysfunctional interwar gold standard. He became the enforcer of austerity in his unflinching effort to keep Britain on gold, until even the Royal Navy mutinied at Invergordon in 1931.

Two months later a Tory government did what was then deemed unthinkable. It broke free of the gold standard, devalued sterling and reflated, while the US, France and Germany slid deeper into the Great Depression. 

The British cure worked. 

 “No one ever told us we could do that,” said the Labour statesman Sidney Webb.

The question for Rachel Reeves is whether she will stick rigidly to Britain’s destructive fiscal regime and become the Snowden of our time; or whether she has the courage to grasp the nettle and restore sane economic government.

It is widely accepted today that the global economic fraternity got the multipliers horribly wrong for a decade and that this pushed governments into self-defeating contractionary policies that held back recovery, worsened debt dynamics and did enormous damage to our democracies. 

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has upgraded its multipliers. But the OBR has not recognised any error.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 16 July 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/07/16/rachel-reeves-must-go-big-and-rein-in-the-obr/

Hur det kom sig att England övergav guldmyntfoten 1931

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2013/10/hur-det-kom-sig-att-england-overgav.html