ABSTRACT
The tariff campaign’s proposals for the defence of British industry were wholly in keeping with its analysis of industrial ‘decline’ and its emphasis on economic nationalism and production. The Tariff Commission sought to establish that the ‘decline’ of British industry was largely a relative slippage in relation to the achievements of rival nations in terms of output and world market share. The root of British industry’s export problem was discerned through a close examination of Britain’s trade figures. Britain’s unilateral free trade policy, so it was argued, presented competitors with an open door to the British market. A more prosaic, but more realistic appraisal of the industrial side of the tariff argument is that it was shaped by the very particular historical problem of constructing a tariff-based Conservative appeal to Britain’s industrial constituency. There were two central features in the tariff campaign’s construction of a general industrial interest. The first was economic nationalism, the second was an ideology of ‘producerism’.
