The outbreak of war in September 1939 created mixed feelings of moral relief and terrified apprehension. An end had come at last to the National government's policy of appeasing Germany, so recently hugely popular with the public, but now widely seen as a miserable sequence of betrayals. But the horrors of the great war seemed, if anything, likely to be exceeded, given the ‘progress’ of military technology. Stanley Baldwin's famous phrase, ‘the bomber will always get through’, continued to resonate. A typical view from within the Labour Party was recorded by Barbara Betts (later Castle) in her memoirs: ‘We were immensely relieved that our timorous government had at last been forced to stand up to Hitler, and we prepared to play our part in the anti-fascist war. But I was under no illusions about what war would mean, and I dreaded it.’

Yet the phoney war that followed was eerily uneventful, creating an unease that was reflected in the political peculiarity of the period. Labour remained outside the government, believing, as Dalton argued, that in entering an administration headed by Neville Chamberlain and John Simon, the party would not only be uninfluential from within, but would lose its power to influence from without. The spirit of national unity had not yet taken over. Although the Labour movement was fully pledged to the war effort, and in spite of the electoral truce, relations between the unions and the government were still mired in mutual suspicion.