None of the main political parties offered a plausible solution to the crisis of Dundee jute in the 1930s. The National government, though highly protectionist, drew the line at any statutory restriction on imports from India. Its priority was to shape Indian politics to sustain British rule as long as possible; the Conservatives were bitterly divided on how this aim was best achieved, but both sides to this dispute regarded the importance of this objective as far outweighing concerns about a small industry like jute. The die-hards who opposed the 1935 India Act sought to link the issue of Indian constitutional reform to Indian protection against Lancashire cotton, but this purely tactical manoeuvre was defeated. Dundee's much smaller political weight meant no such linkage was even seriously attempted.

On the Labour side, equivocation about the benefits of free trade, already evident in the 1920s, was greatly increased by the crisis after 1929. But the triumph of a protectionist Conservative party in 1931 acted to revive and reinforce Labour's traditional ideological opposition to tariffs. The problem of competition from low-wage countries was to be addressed by international agreements on hours and wages in combination with international solidarity in the form of British encouragement for trade unions in poor countries, not protection. Growing support for Indian nationalism in the Party reinforced opposition to any policy which might be seen as subordinating Indian to British interests.

The Communist party's political strategies gyrated in this period, but its economic policies never had any place for protectionism. Its commitment to international worker solidarity meant that de facto it became the inheritor of the traditional liberal opposition to tariffs, regarded as instruments of employer collusion, the underpinnings of monopoly and a means of reducing real wages.

But these national postures had only limited influence in Dundee, where the profound crisis of the city underpinned quite distinct alignments of forces. We can summarise these alignments as two ‘united fronts’. One of these was a local version of a Labour party/Communist party alliance, advocated nationally by the CP, strongly resisted by the national Labour leadership, but with considerable support in Dundee. More intriguing was the formation of a second, purely local, ‘united front’ which brought together a protectionist alliance between the local jute employers and jute trade unions, along with the city council and the local MPs.