Speeches That Changed Britain by Reekes Andrew;

Author:Reekes, Andrew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain
ISBN: 6384887
Publisher: West Midlands History Limited
Published: 2015-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chamberlain had spoken before about binding the Empire more closely, but this speech drew all the strands of his evolving thinking together. His very real fear of national decline, of imperial dissolution, and of future international conflict, are here, as is an open challenge to the rigid orthodoxies of Free Trade. At this stage that challenge takes the form of imperial preference but, soon enough, other fronts against Free Trade were to be opened up, as the implications sank in. Within a fortnight he was conceding in a Commons debate that there was an inevitable corollary to colonial preference – food taxes on foreign, non-colonial produce. In a defiant tone he said: ‘there, I make the honourable gentlemen opposite a present of it’; however, he would come to rue the ceding of this gift, as he admitted to the King in September 1903.212 ‘The unscrupulous use which has been made of the Big Loaf cry (the accusation was that imperial preference would inevitably mean less bread for one’s money) has prejudiced this policy so greatly that for the moment it is politically impossible.’213

In that Commons debate he had tied tariffs to social reform; taxes could be used to fund his old pet project of Old Age Pensions. By late June he had recognised working-class indifference to this offer and promised instead that to compensate for higher bread prices, ‘they may be fully relieved by a reduction of a similar amount in the cost of their tea, their sugar, their tobacco. There is no working man in the kingdom who need fear under the system I propose.’214 As the year advanced, Tariff Reform, as it became known, expanded to embrace protection for embattled farmers, and for manufacturers; it was to be, for converts, a cure for all evils, and by 1910 it was, once again, seen as a means of raising money from the foreigner (who imported to Britain) to pay for social reform, an alternative to Lloyd George’s confiscatory tax plans on the rich. What it shows is that Chamberlain embarked on this campaign without thinking through all the consequences and the possibilities; it evolved as others saw its potential.

He was quick to see the logic of protecting British industry from unfair competition. Given his industrial background, formerly the dynamic director of the leading screw manufacturing business, he intuitively sympathised with manufacturers and judged the country’s health by the success of its industries. He had little truck with those who argued that, because Britain’s invisible exports (insurance, shipping, profits and dividends from foreign investments) outweighed deficits in balance of trade in manufactured goods, consequently all was well with the economy. He conceded Britain might continue to become richer through these invisible earnings, but he worried about jobs if industry succumbed to foreign competition.215

At Bingley Hall in Birmingham on 4 November – usually remembered for his theatrical production of two identical loaves of bread which he dubbed the Big and the Little Loaves to show how exaggerated were the fears of

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