In the anti-Labour landslide of 1931 Dundee elected its first Conservative MP since the Great Reform Act, Florence Horsbrugh. Re-elected in 1935, for the whole of the decade she was faced with responding to the desperate economic plight of Juteopolis as it suffered from the collapse of international trade, but above all the competition from the Calcutta jute industry. In the face of the shrinkage in markets for its products, Dundee suffered from the worst unemployment rate of any major city in Britain in the 1930s.

For a Conservative MP, responding to this situation meant working with the complex, intertwined Conservative politics of protectionism and empire.

The Conservative party had been converted to protectionism at the beginning of the twentieth century. It had fought the 1906 general election on this issue, and lost disastrously. This did not lead to a reversal of sentiment in the Party, but made its leaders extremely wary of the electoral consequences of advocating protectionist measures. The First World War seriously undermined free trade sentiment in Britain, and pushed the Conservatives into an even stronger pro-tariff, as well as pro-empire, position. In 1923 Baldwin again committed the Party to a protectionist programme at a general election, and again the result was defeat. In office between 1924 and 1929, the Conservatives had pursued only a very limited protectionist agenda, not least because of the role of the free trader Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer, backed by a Treasury very unenthusiastic about financing any expensive schemes of imperial promotion. As noted in Chapter 6, what protectionism was pursued in the later 1920s came largely in the form of ‘Safeguarding’, which gave tariff protection to a small range of products deemed to be suffering from ‘dumping’, a cautious approach which led to considerable unhappiness amongst the Conservative rank and file. The biggest battle was over iron and steel, a major industry whose protection would have had economy-wide ramifications. But it was defeated, after heated battles within Conservative ranks, by Churchill and the Treasury. In sum, the protectionist policies of the 1920s ‘were all rather insignificant in terms of the volume of imports they affected but they were of some importance for their inroads on free trade ideology’.