ABSTRACT
Tariff reform has been described as ‘a multi-faceted policy structure [which] seemed to the bulk of the Conservative party to offer solutions to a set of difficulties which reached their peak in the Edwardian period’.1 Difficulties there certainly appeared to be, although not everyone saw them as such. In the long late-Victorian depression, Britain’s share in world trade declined as its industries failed to keep pace with growing foreign competition; much of British agriculture was ruined and the bulk of its food was imported, especially that of the working classes,2 and over 70 per cent of the population lived in towns; unemployed riots in the mid-1880s and industrial confrontation in the 1890s, raised doubts about future social stability; social investigations uncovered widespread poverty and deprivation which recruiting for the Boer War confirmed.
