Ross McKibbin on Joseph Chamberlain

“Chamberlain...specifically advocated tariff reform as an employment policy: "Tariff reform means jobs for all." As a political device it was aimed directly at the working-class electorate... Tariff reform...proposed to reunite the political and economic systems and, despite Chamberlain's personal disavowals, threatened the enforcement of a new social discipline. It was the closest to a continental political strategy Britain had ever reached; its failure meant the failure not only of a policy that would have subordinated the working class under a new fiscal–industrial order but the failure of any working-class ideologies—Marxism, for instance—which also argued that the country's political and economic systems should be reunited.”

“The other model was the Australian one: a system of industrial relations dependent upon compulsory arbitration and judicially established wage minima for both skilled and unskilled workers within a protected economy... That was not a subsistence but a "living" wage of the kind that the British unions never actually got. This was the bargain of Australian tariffs: employers got protected markets and employees got protected wages. It was the kind of system that might have emerged from Joseph Chamberlain's campaign for tariffs had he a clearer and more limited idea of what he wanted; had he not tried to bundle up in one policy proposals both to save the Empire and provide guaranteed employment for British workers—proposals either of which could have worked separately but not together.”

“The collapse of employment in the great "staple" industries after 1920 provided protection with its historic opportunity. In effect what happened was what Joseph Chamberlain always said would happen; though before 1914 it never did.”