British patriots must reject Racism and embrace Geo-Politics.
Geopolitics attempts to explain why some countries have power and other countries do not. The connection between spatial qualities of countries and international relations has been observed since the Greeks (Spencer 42). However, the formal links between geography and political science began about 100 years ago.
In 1890 Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote The Influence of Sea Power upon Hisory, Sea power was necessary to facilitate trade and peaceful commerce, therefore Mahan believed that the country that possessed power would be one that could control the seas. Thus, the development of a strong navy was an essential ingredient to a powerful state as was the country's location. He believed that the country with the most power would be one whose relative location was accessible and connected with a long coastline and good harbours. Mahan saw power as belonging north of the Suez and Panama Canals.
Sir Halford Mackinder proposed what would become the most widely discussed concept of geopolitical studies. Mackinder was interested in political motion and he observed that the spatial distribution of strategic opportunities in the world was unequal. Mackinder's thesis, developed in his 1904 book Democratic ideals and Reality, disregarded Mahan's theory. Advances in technology were forcing a reevaluation of spatial concepts and military strategies. With the advent of railroads, countries no longer depended on the navy to move large armies. Thus, Mackinder believed that the focus of warfare would be shifted from the sea to the hinterland (interiors). Mackinder developed a "pivot area" which was the northern and interior parts of the Eurasian continent where the rivers flow to the Arctic or to salt seas and lakes. He believed that with the advent of railroads, this area would be pivotal as it would be easy to defend and hard to conquer. Later, he called the pivot area the "Heartland" and devised his famous Heartland Theory: "He who controls the Heartland controls the World Island (Eurasia and Africa); He who controls the World Island, controls the world." Mackinder anticipated that Germany would be a threat to controlling the resources of Eastern Europe and the Heartland.
General Karl Hauschofer was a leading proponent of Mackinder's Heartland Theory and he developed a theory of pan regions. Hauschofer divided the world into three pan regions which were blocs of power based on complementarily between the North and South. The Northern core region was connected to a Southern periphery. The three pan regions were Anglo America and its periphery, Latin America; Europe (controlled by Germany) and its periphery, Africa and India; and Japan and its periphery, Southeast Asia. Hauschofer began teaching in Munich during World War I and it was here that Rudolf Hess heard Hauschofer's lectures and later introduced him to Adolph Hitler Hitler, ignoring the subtleties of Hauschofer's teaching, used these theories to advance the Nazi cause of world domination. The Nazi's,used quasi-scientific justification based on the works of Hauschofer and Ratzel as justification for territorial expansion.
The idea of pan-regions appears a superior development on Mackinder’s Heartland idea, but Haushoffer’s theory had two great flaws. The first was to classify Britain and America as one and the same, the second was naming Africa as the periphery of Europe (Germany) rather than that of Britain. As the interface between European civilisation and the maritime world, Britain uniquely has had the mission of creating a trans-continental maritime order. America could never hope to truly assume this position, a colony that cut itself off from the motherland, for all its resources never able to achieve the depth of greatness that can only be borne of a high culture. And so it has swung between isolationism and continental adventurism ( against Thayer’s advice), driven by the money power that has dominated America in the absence of monarchy.
Africa is Britain’s periphery, but the relationship does not have to be exploitative. Mutual advantage is possible and the sea is the key to this advantage. Mackinder was wrong to classify Africa as part of the World Island, sub-Saharan Africa is as surely dis-joined from this geo-political concept as is Britain. Yet both regions, Britain and Africa, are linked by the dynamic of this maritime civilisation putting to sea and and dominating the Atlantic seaways.
Monday 30 March 2009
Saturday 28 March 2009
Ulster Says No- Abdassamad Clarke
“Usury I put down, as the great pivot of all their (the Irish people’s) disasters - the main and primary spring that sets on motion the whole machinery of Ireland’s calamities.” (Jeremiah O’Callaghan 1780 -1861)
Seeing Ulster hit the headlines again, one is revolted that the only thing offered its Catholics and Protestants is the severely over-rated virtue of ‘tolerance’ for each other. How about some facts that would make sense of their history, our history? For the truth is that Ulster straddles the fault-line whose recent shifts caused such tectonic shudders around the world: the great banking collapses of 2008 whose end we have by no means seen yet.
For the Northern Irish Protestant the date 1690 has an almost mythical status. At the Battle of the Boyne the Protestant King – William of Orange to history, King Billy to us – defeated the Catholic King James II, from which event stem many but not all of that province’s subsequent divisions. Never mind that the Vatican was lit in celebration of Billy’s victory and other inconvenient facts.
However, this date is certainly one of the most grave moments for all the world, even for people who have never heard of it. For prior to it the British throne and its people had been shaken by the Tudors’ (and all Europe’s) to-and-fro between Protestantism and Catholicism one of the main consequences of which was legislation governing interest rates, not only whether they went up or down but whether interest was charged at all, and the events of 1690 set the issue in stone. A major undercurrent of the Reformation had been the legalisation, in a Christian sense, of what had been the mortal sin of usury, a sin whose perpetrator would be refused the last rites and a Christian burial unless he repented and paid back all his ill-gotten gains. In essence Calvin legalised that sin in a modest sort of fashion, i.e. 4%, and subsequent controversy largely amounted to exactly what was the legal level of usury – sorry, I mean interest – to be?
Now we would have to be utterly naïve to interpret that event as Protestant usury fighting valiant and stalwart usury-free Catholicism, for under the Popes usury was illegal but widespread, and the interest-rate could be between 200% and 300%. The Medicis were bankers to the pope up to the point when they supplied the incumbent themselves. Well did Strathearn subtitle his magisterial history of the Medicis, “The Godfathers of the Renaissance,” for a very congenial bunch of thugs they were, but that seemed to be what the age required and supplied, and it was their uneasy consciences which led to their philanthropy which gave us the Renaissance and its dubious benefits.
Nevertheless, the transition from a basically underworld criminal usury to a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-the-mouth Christian banking system was a staggering one, whose price we are still paying, and 1690 and the Battle of the Boyne were right there at the fulcrum of this event.
The extraordinary thing is that if you find an average history of William of Orange, it will not contain any of the following information:
1. He licensed the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, which has had an incredible impact on the world’s history, and which was the first ‘national’ bank in history, even though a private bank for most of its life.
2. He secured the first ‘national debt’ in history, i.e. rather than securing a loan for himself and undertaking to pay it off, the loan contract recognised that it might never be repaid, and that only the interest had to be serviced.
3. During his reign the first really significant paper money of modern history was issued by the Bank. I qualify it in that way, because a Swedish king temporarily issued paper money to fund a war, but withdrew it as soon as the war was over, and of course the Chinese had experimented with it at some point. The British experiment in paper money has never been withdrawn and indeed has gone on to spread paper all over the world.
What were the forces at work in this event? William was invited in by the British mercantile class who were appalled at the idea of any revocation of their recent privileges among which were the right to lend money at interest.
Perhaps the case has not been made fully for regarding this as a matter of some significance. So let us take a modest interest rate of say 6% and consider the circumstance of a single 1p invested at the birth of the Christian era, 2000 years ago, invested at compound interest. After two years it has become 1.12p. After 20 years 3.27p. After 200 years £1,151.26. After 2000 years it is :
£4,090,068,009,880,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
This is what mathematicians call an exponential curve, i.e. one that shoots off the top edge of the paper very rapidly, and that is precisely where we are in history at the present. (Do not imagine that because compound interest is so dramatic we are endorsing interest per se. Interest is usury.)
So you can see that this process has the potential for making some people incalculably wealthy just as conversely it has the potential for impoverishing people, nations and the planet in ways previously never thought possible, since negative numbers, i.e. debts, grow at precisely the same exponential rate.
This is the issue that was fought over for so many centuries in Europe’s past. Not just the issue of Catholic and Protestant, but very fundamental matters of life beyond dogma and doctrine but which, nevertheless, grew out of that dogma and its becoming corrupted or ignored. Protestant banking grew directly out of Catholic banking, but whereas Cosimo de Medici had the good grace to have a guilty conscience the modern banker has no conscience whatsoever and doesn’t even know that he ought to have one or that he ever had one.
That battle of the Boyne was won by Billy, the bankers’ cipher. The Bank of England was established with a loan to the nation, not the King, of £1,200,000 at 6% interest. That was lent in REAL money, i.e. gold. But that loan to the nation was regarded as an asset, and thus the Bank was allowed to lend precisely the same sum to the nation again, i.e. to individuals, at the same rate of interest, but this time as the new paper money.
But why did Billy agree to this deal? He was over a barrel. The British are islanders with a longstanding antipathy to people on the ‘continent’. The British have never been ‘Europeans’ in any acceptable sense of the term, or at least have never included themselves among them. The traditional dislike for a usurper of the throne fighting the rightful monarch was thus made all the stronger by the fact that he was extremely foreign. The merchants tried to get around this by making his wife, James’s daughter Mary, co-monarch: William and Mary.
However, in order to fight a costly war against James and his powerful French backers, William would ordinarily have had to have raised a usurious loan (that was a given at most epochs in history), fought his war and repaid the loan from the spoils of war and the taxes extorted from the conquered and, if necessary, from his subjects. But this war was not going to have much in the way of spoils, and there was nothing more to extort from the Irish, and his subjects were not going to look more kindly on a foreigner who took them off to war to fight the rightful king, if he subsequently taxed them heavily. The deal with the bank was very simple: don’t bother to repay the loan. Simply service the interest on it. For ever. Therefore, rather than the repayment with interest ordinarily demanded, there was the much more reasonable 6% service charge. No one really liked it, but it was bearable.
It would grow from that £1,200,000 to somewhere between £697.5 billion at the end of 2008 or £4 trillion (according to John Redwood1) or an in-between figure of an “unprecedented £2.2 trillion – just under 150% of gross domestic product”2. What is staggering is not the size of the debt but that we consider such matters normal. It is said that Japan’s situation is much worse, which ought, in their thinking, to make ours bearable.
And the interest: “The cost of paying interest on the government’s debt is very high. In 2008 debt interest payments will be £31 billion a year (est. 2.5% of GDP). In 2009, they will be £35 billion (similar to defence budget).”3
But there is a real danger in all of this that we consider the scale of the matter the issue, the very size of the national debt the matter to hand, rather than the fact of the national debt. The truth is that we are in the situation we are because we have accepted the fact of the national debt,4 and thus we are facing a national debt of the size we are, because, as we have indicated with our compound interest example, that is the nature of the usurious loan. It has nowhere to go but up. It is impossible for it not to increase. And history has borne this out in every age and in every country on the planet. This trend has never been reversed except for short periods of time after which it has resumed its inevitable upwards climb. This is the nature of the beast we have unleashed.
The beast cannot be tamed, and like any vicious mad dog, it must be put down, for this current crisis is not just one in a cycle, so that we can compare it to the 30’s and finally admit that it is as bad as or possibly even worse than the 30’s. It is nothing to do with mismanagement and corruption and bonuses, for that would imply that there is such a thing as well managed banking and honest banking, something which all of the establishment commentators are desperately trying to establish. The fact is that as peoples we have been taken for a ride by what is little more than a mafia, something that is actually much more sinister and ruthless than the mafia, and we refuse to see it, because they have grown so effective at imitating elderly bishops or fuddy-duddy members of the aristocracy, because they can buy anything and anybody since we are so simple minded that we will accept a bit of paper with numbers and lots of zeros on it and because they own the ‘printing presses‘ (of course money is now largely digital).
Now, in all the quite substantial critique that exists in literature and around the Internet of this matter, the dominant response is that we should ourselves – or the state as our surrogate – take this dreadful power of interest-yielding and interest-demanding credit from the bankers. But a tremendously sharp blade is going to kill someone no matter in whose hand it lies, and we have seen that this mechanism is inexorable. We have no choice but to put an end to it. For that to happen, we must see that it is much deeper than a simple economic matter.
The great poet Ezra Pound who fought over the matter of usury all his life, memorably said at the end of his life, “re USURY: I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE.”5 This is far from being an acceptance of interest-banking, but rather Pound’s profound perception of the deep deep roots of this matter: the sickness of avarice or greed, a two dimensional condition the least of which is the desire for stuff, and the more serious and intractable aspect of which is the need for rank, social standing and all the paraphernalia of status. To that we would add another motor sickness: anxiety over provision. These twin psychological illnesses are the motors that drive this insane economic system which, in Cobbett’s memorable words, “…has produced what the world never saw before; starvation in the midst of abundance,”6 and we are blind to see it because we are driven by the same sicknesses as the bankers. That is the root cause of the entire affair, because a clique of psychotic bankers have no power to do anything whatsoever without our complicity. We are the criminals and we are the usurers who are destroying the planet.
-Abdassamad Clarke
Seeing Ulster hit the headlines again, one is revolted that the only thing offered its Catholics and Protestants is the severely over-rated virtue of ‘tolerance’ for each other. How about some facts that would make sense of their history, our history? For the truth is that Ulster straddles the fault-line whose recent shifts caused such tectonic shudders around the world: the great banking collapses of 2008 whose end we have by no means seen yet.
For the Northern Irish Protestant the date 1690 has an almost mythical status. At the Battle of the Boyne the Protestant King – William of Orange to history, King Billy to us – defeated the Catholic King James II, from which event stem many but not all of that province’s subsequent divisions. Never mind that the Vatican was lit in celebration of Billy’s victory and other inconvenient facts.
However, this date is certainly one of the most grave moments for all the world, even for people who have never heard of it. For prior to it the British throne and its people had been shaken by the Tudors’ (and all Europe’s) to-and-fro between Protestantism and Catholicism one of the main consequences of which was legislation governing interest rates, not only whether they went up or down but whether interest was charged at all, and the events of 1690 set the issue in stone. A major undercurrent of the Reformation had been the legalisation, in a Christian sense, of what had been the mortal sin of usury, a sin whose perpetrator would be refused the last rites and a Christian burial unless he repented and paid back all his ill-gotten gains. In essence Calvin legalised that sin in a modest sort of fashion, i.e. 4%, and subsequent controversy largely amounted to exactly what was the legal level of usury – sorry, I mean interest – to be?
Now we would have to be utterly naïve to interpret that event as Protestant usury fighting valiant and stalwart usury-free Catholicism, for under the Popes usury was illegal but widespread, and the interest-rate could be between 200% and 300%. The Medicis were bankers to the pope up to the point when they supplied the incumbent themselves. Well did Strathearn subtitle his magisterial history of the Medicis, “The Godfathers of the Renaissance,” for a very congenial bunch of thugs they were, but that seemed to be what the age required and supplied, and it was their uneasy consciences which led to their philanthropy which gave us the Renaissance and its dubious benefits.
Nevertheless, the transition from a basically underworld criminal usury to a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-the-mouth Christian banking system was a staggering one, whose price we are still paying, and 1690 and the Battle of the Boyne were right there at the fulcrum of this event.
The extraordinary thing is that if you find an average history of William of Orange, it will not contain any of the following information:
1. He licensed the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, which has had an incredible impact on the world’s history, and which was the first ‘national’ bank in history, even though a private bank for most of its life.
2. He secured the first ‘national debt’ in history, i.e. rather than securing a loan for himself and undertaking to pay it off, the loan contract recognised that it might never be repaid, and that only the interest had to be serviced.
3. During his reign the first really significant paper money of modern history was issued by the Bank. I qualify it in that way, because a Swedish king temporarily issued paper money to fund a war, but withdrew it as soon as the war was over, and of course the Chinese had experimented with it at some point. The British experiment in paper money has never been withdrawn and indeed has gone on to spread paper all over the world.
What were the forces at work in this event? William was invited in by the British mercantile class who were appalled at the idea of any revocation of their recent privileges among which were the right to lend money at interest.
Perhaps the case has not been made fully for regarding this as a matter of some significance. So let us take a modest interest rate of say 6% and consider the circumstance of a single 1p invested at the birth of the Christian era, 2000 years ago, invested at compound interest. After two years it has become 1.12p. After 20 years 3.27p. After 200 years £1,151.26. After 2000 years it is :
£4,090,068,009,880,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
This is what mathematicians call an exponential curve, i.e. one that shoots off the top edge of the paper very rapidly, and that is precisely where we are in history at the present. (Do not imagine that because compound interest is so dramatic we are endorsing interest per se. Interest is usury.)
So you can see that this process has the potential for making some people incalculably wealthy just as conversely it has the potential for impoverishing people, nations and the planet in ways previously never thought possible, since negative numbers, i.e. debts, grow at precisely the same exponential rate.
This is the issue that was fought over for so many centuries in Europe’s past. Not just the issue of Catholic and Protestant, but very fundamental matters of life beyond dogma and doctrine but which, nevertheless, grew out of that dogma and its becoming corrupted or ignored. Protestant banking grew directly out of Catholic banking, but whereas Cosimo de Medici had the good grace to have a guilty conscience the modern banker has no conscience whatsoever and doesn’t even know that he ought to have one or that he ever had one.
That battle of the Boyne was won by Billy, the bankers’ cipher. The Bank of England was established with a loan to the nation, not the King, of £1,200,000 at 6% interest. That was lent in REAL money, i.e. gold. But that loan to the nation was regarded as an asset, and thus the Bank was allowed to lend precisely the same sum to the nation again, i.e. to individuals, at the same rate of interest, but this time as the new paper money.
But why did Billy agree to this deal? He was over a barrel. The British are islanders with a longstanding antipathy to people on the ‘continent’. The British have never been ‘Europeans’ in any acceptable sense of the term, or at least have never included themselves among them. The traditional dislike for a usurper of the throne fighting the rightful monarch was thus made all the stronger by the fact that he was extremely foreign. The merchants tried to get around this by making his wife, James’s daughter Mary, co-monarch: William and Mary.
However, in order to fight a costly war against James and his powerful French backers, William would ordinarily have had to have raised a usurious loan (that was a given at most epochs in history), fought his war and repaid the loan from the spoils of war and the taxes extorted from the conquered and, if necessary, from his subjects. But this war was not going to have much in the way of spoils, and there was nothing more to extort from the Irish, and his subjects were not going to look more kindly on a foreigner who took them off to war to fight the rightful king, if he subsequently taxed them heavily. The deal with the bank was very simple: don’t bother to repay the loan. Simply service the interest on it. For ever. Therefore, rather than the repayment with interest ordinarily demanded, there was the much more reasonable 6% service charge. No one really liked it, but it was bearable.
It would grow from that £1,200,000 to somewhere between £697.5 billion at the end of 2008 or £4 trillion (according to John Redwood1) or an in-between figure of an “unprecedented £2.2 trillion – just under 150% of gross domestic product”2. What is staggering is not the size of the debt but that we consider such matters normal. It is said that Japan’s situation is much worse, which ought, in their thinking, to make ours bearable.
And the interest: “The cost of paying interest on the government’s debt is very high. In 2008 debt interest payments will be £31 billion a year (est. 2.5% of GDP). In 2009, they will be £35 billion (similar to defence budget).”3
But there is a real danger in all of this that we consider the scale of the matter the issue, the very size of the national debt the matter to hand, rather than the fact of the national debt. The truth is that we are in the situation we are because we have accepted the fact of the national debt,4 and thus we are facing a national debt of the size we are, because, as we have indicated with our compound interest example, that is the nature of the usurious loan. It has nowhere to go but up. It is impossible for it not to increase. And history has borne this out in every age and in every country on the planet. This trend has never been reversed except for short periods of time after which it has resumed its inevitable upwards climb. This is the nature of the beast we have unleashed.
The beast cannot be tamed, and like any vicious mad dog, it must be put down, for this current crisis is not just one in a cycle, so that we can compare it to the 30’s and finally admit that it is as bad as or possibly even worse than the 30’s. It is nothing to do with mismanagement and corruption and bonuses, for that would imply that there is such a thing as well managed banking and honest banking, something which all of the establishment commentators are desperately trying to establish. The fact is that as peoples we have been taken for a ride by what is little more than a mafia, something that is actually much more sinister and ruthless than the mafia, and we refuse to see it, because they have grown so effective at imitating elderly bishops or fuddy-duddy members of the aristocracy, because they can buy anything and anybody since we are so simple minded that we will accept a bit of paper with numbers and lots of zeros on it and because they own the ‘printing presses‘ (of course money is now largely digital).
Now, in all the quite substantial critique that exists in literature and around the Internet of this matter, the dominant response is that we should ourselves – or the state as our surrogate – take this dreadful power of interest-yielding and interest-demanding credit from the bankers. But a tremendously sharp blade is going to kill someone no matter in whose hand it lies, and we have seen that this mechanism is inexorable. We have no choice but to put an end to it. For that to happen, we must see that it is much deeper than a simple economic matter.
The great poet Ezra Pound who fought over the matter of usury all his life, memorably said at the end of his life, “re USURY: I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE.”5 This is far from being an acceptance of interest-banking, but rather Pound’s profound perception of the deep deep roots of this matter: the sickness of avarice or greed, a two dimensional condition the least of which is the desire for stuff, and the more serious and intractable aspect of which is the need for rank, social standing and all the paraphernalia of status. To that we would add another motor sickness: anxiety over provision. These twin psychological illnesses are the motors that drive this insane economic system which, in Cobbett’s memorable words, “…has produced what the world never saw before; starvation in the midst of abundance,”6 and we are blind to see it because we are driven by the same sicknesses as the bankers. That is the root cause of the entire affair, because a clique of psychotic bankers have no power to do anything whatsoever without our complicity. We are the criminals and we are the usurers who are destroying the planet.
-Abdassamad Clarke
Friday 20 March 2009
Saturday 14 March 2009
The Maritime Spirit
Anyone wanting to understand the essence of Britain must understand the sea. It was because of this relationship with the sea that Britain organized the biggest maritime empire the world has ever seen. While accepting that mistakes were made, sometimes dreadful mistakes, the empire was also a force for development of many parts of the world. It was very much in the process of transition to a more equal and reciprocal relationship, the Commonwealth, when Britain found itself in the position after WWII whereby other world powers had the leverage to force an abandonment of the project. A process of lack of confidence and decline followed.
In 1950 we had a two power standard navy that was almost the size of the respective Russian and U.S. navy, through neglect and political indifference the navy was slowly reduced in size. As part of our foreign policy and future needs we need to expand the navy to two thirds of the size of the U.S. surface fleet which in practical terms will require the creation of seven air craft carriers and no less than fifty frigates and ancillary battle cruisers. This program alone would require full capacity utilisation of the Steel Corporation and offer full employment in the ship yards to one million persons throughout Great Britain. If we are to project a global presence, our navy should be at the forefront.
British industry will need access to these raw materials and a secure home market for manufactured goods. In return the long-abandoned countries of Commonwealth Africa will no longer be dependent on the vaguaries of international trade that has served them so poorly since independence. Accordingly, instead of involving ourselves in costly wars in the middle east we should only intervene in local wars where the interests of a corporate Commonwealth are relevant. The plan must be to transform the Commonwealth from an ad hoc social club into a force for international good, offering security through defence, trade and a true self sufficient and insulated market. Under this new view of Africa none shall starve and war and pestilence will be a thing of the past.
In 1950 we had a two power standard navy that was almost the size of the respective Russian and U.S. navy, through neglect and political indifference the navy was slowly reduced in size. As part of our foreign policy and future needs we need to expand the navy to two thirds of the size of the U.S. surface fleet which in practical terms will require the creation of seven air craft carriers and no less than fifty frigates and ancillary battle cruisers. This program alone would require full capacity utilisation of the Steel Corporation and offer full employment in the ship yards to one million persons throughout Great Britain. If we are to project a global presence, our navy should be at the forefront.
British industry will need access to these raw materials and a secure home market for manufactured goods. In return the long-abandoned countries of Commonwealth Africa will no longer be dependent on the vaguaries of international trade that has served them so poorly since independence. Accordingly, instead of involving ourselves in costly wars in the middle east we should only intervene in local wars where the interests of a corporate Commonwealth are relevant. The plan must be to transform the Commonwealth from an ad hoc social club into a force for international good, offering security through defence, trade and a true self sufficient and insulated market. Under this new view of Africa none shall starve and war and pestilence will be a thing of the past.
Wednesday 4 March 2009
Joseph Chamberlain
Joseph Chamberlain
Joseph Chamberlain (8 July, 1836 – 2 July, 1914) was an influential British businessman, politician, and statesman.In his early years Chamberlain was a campaigner for educational reform, and President of the Board of Trade. He later became a Liberal Unionist in alliance with the Conservative Party and was appointed Colonial Secretary. At the end of his career he led the tariff reform campaign. Despite never becoming Prime Minister, he is regarded as one of the most important British politicians of the late 19th century and early 20th century, as well as a colourful character and renowned orator.
Some quotes from Chamberlain might illustrate his devotion to the Empire, later to become the
Commonwealth, alongside social reform.
"You are suffering from the unrestricted imports of cheaper goods. You are suffering also from the unrestricted immigration of the people who make these goods...The evils of this immigration have increased during recent years. And behind those people who have already reached these shores, remember there are millions of the same kind who, under easily conceivable circumstances, might follow in their track, and might invade this country in a way and to an extent of which few people have at present any conception...But the party of free importers is against any reform. How could they be otherwise? They are perfectly consistent. If sweated goods are to be allowed in this country without restriction, why not the people who make them? Where is the difference? There is no difference either in the principle or in the results. It all comes to the same thing - less labour for the British working man."
Speech in Limehouse in the East End of London (December 1904.)
[Social legislation] raised the cost of production; and what can be more illogical than to raise the cost of production in the country and then to allow the products of other countries which are not surrounded by any similar legislation, which are free from any similar cost and expenditure—freely to enter our country in competition with our own goods...If these foreign goods come in cheaper, one of two things must follow...either you will take lower wages or you will lose your work.
Speech on Free Trade (6 October, 1903).
And yet a keen social reformer:
"The great problem of our civilization is still unsolved. We have to account for and grapple with the mass of misery and destitution in our midst, co-existent as it is with the evidence of abundant wealth and teeming prosperity. It is a problem which some men would put aside by reference to the eternal laws of supply and demand, to the necessity of freedom of contract, and to the sanctity of every private right of property...Our object is the elevation of the poor, of the masses of the people—a levelling up of them by which we shall do something to remove the excessive inequality in social life."
-1885
Imperial Preference
Chamberlain advocated Imperial Preference at the turn of the 20th century. During the 1920s, it became popular once more. Prime Minister Baldwin was a tepid supporter. His Colonial and Dominions Secretary, Amery, was one of its strongest supporters and in 1926 established the Empire Marketing Board to encourage Britons to 'buy empire'. But Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Baldwin government, and always a free trader, was an opponent.
In 1935, the Canadian P.M., R. B. Bennett, a Conservative who supported Imperial Preference, was replaced by a Liberal, W. L. M. King. King responded to pressure from U.S. Secretary of State, Hull and abandoned Imperial Preference. In true American fashion, the United States was determined to maintain its tariff protections and access to markets, but was vociferously opposed to any such preferences enjoyed by other countries. In the case of the Commonwealth, the US was hostile to it from its inceptions, notwithstanding the fact that in the cases of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, there was overwhelmingly preference for a system anchored by the United Kingdom rather than the US.
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