Explain Why State Control Over Society Increased..

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a) Explain why state control over society increased in the years 1914-1916. (12 marks) When Britain first entered World War 1 in August 1914, no one envisaged what lay ahead- the predictions were a short, sharp, victorious war that would be over by Christmas, and so the Liberals operated a “business as normal” policy at first. However, it soon became apparent that the war was going to be much longer, and consequently a “business as normal” policy simply wasn’t possible. So, state control over almost every aspect of people’s lives increased in 1914-1916 due to political, economic and military reasons. The first and foremost reason as to why state control over society increased in the years 1914-1916 is because the war was the closest to global proportions anyone had ever seen. It quickly became known as a ‘total war’, meaning there were immense consequences for everyone in society. This led to the government creating the Defence Of the Realm Act, or DORA, so as to act early in order to establish their control. DORA led to changes in state control over everything, from transport to censorship, and it was all in order to protect Britain and ensure a victorious end to the war. There were many political reasons which influenced the increase of state control over society, for example the shell scandal. The nature of this total war left Britain unprepared, as it was nothing like expected, which left them ill-equipped in terms of ammunition supplies. The “shell scandal” of 1915 emerged due to a newspaper article suggesting that British troops had a lack of shells and so were unable to make headway. This called for greater control of labour and industrial war production rather than relying on private enterprise and the market economy to determine production, as this was clearly not working. This scandal also led to Asquith setting up a coalition government with the
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