The Laboratory of Safeguarding

Abstract By 1921 the McKenna duties had been supplemented by a Safeguarding of Industries Act and a separate measure for protecting the dyestuffs industry. The proportion of British imports covered by the safeguarding legislation was small, and the labour and capital employed in producing many of the items included insignificant-there was indeed a conscious hypocrisy in the criterion, written into the legislation, that the applying industry should be of ‘substantial importance’.2 Nevertheless, there is a tendency to regard safeguarding as a step on the road to protection, following the inexorable march to 1932 that had been set in train by McKenna. To Forrest Capie, the importance of the measures of the 1920s lay in ‘their inroads on free trade ideology’, and there can be no doubt that, if safeguarding was not always a vehicle of conversion, it did provide a sort of attitudinal preparation for the erosion of economic liberalism.