ABSTRACT
The Conservative party has long had an ambiguous relationship to competition as a feature of economic organisation. On one, liberal, wing the encouragement of competition has been seen as central to the whole approach to economic issues. However, other strands in Conservative thinking have put more weight on sustaining social stability, and seen ‘excessive’ competition as a threat to this goal. As suggested in Chapter 1, the inter-war slump strengthened the hand of those who feared the impact of de-stabilising competition on employment and economic activity, and who believed that policy should encourage the private ‘organisation’ of the market. Along with tariffs, such policies had indeed been central to the Conservative agenda pursued in the 1930s.
