I saw a loyalist Labour MP on the BBC news channel a few weeks back defending Gordon Brown (no really). I don't recall his name but he looked a little like mad-eye Moody in one of the Harry Potter films. Anyway he siad something about the depression in Britain being caused by Churchill's decision to go back onto the gold standard. I couldn't swear to it but I think the term 'knee jerk reaction' was used.
The decision to return to the gold standard after the debts and inflation of WWI is a rare example of a government attempting to honour its debts. What should have happened was that wage rates should have fallen back towards their pre war inflation nominal levels while maintaining their real value. That didn't happen because the British labour market at the time was not a free market where wages were allowed to reflect the results of supply and demand.
The more powerful unions insisted in no cuts in the face value of their members pay packets. This put the real cost of labour up well above the would be market level, so increasing unemployment.The Unions used their monopoly power of labour supply to keep their working members standard of living at an artificially high level, at the expense of the total number of jobs available.
Meanwhile the employers were forced to spend their wage bill to employ a smaller number of workers than they would like, and so total output fell.
The apparent Keynesian solution to this problem after WWII with its trade off between some inflation in order to increase total output and employment was in part successful by inflation reducing the real value of the nominal wage rates the unions were so determined to maintain, back down to the actual market rate.