Birmingham has a square named after Joseph Chamberlain, its most famous politician, through which visitors to the Conservative Party conference will pass on their way up from rebuilt New Street station this week. Although the square is home only to a lacklustre memorial fountain, and not his statue, Chamberlain will still loom large over proceedings at the conference. He will be celebrated by Theresa May and her colleagues as a champion of the manufacturing industry and a great social reformer, the radical who campaigned for municipal education, decent housing and civic improvements for the Victorian working class.<\/p>\n
Chamberlain was also an apostle of imperial unity between Great Britain and her settler colonies \u2013 what today\u2019s Brexiteers call the \u201cAnglosphere\u201d. As Colonial Secretary, he sought closer economic and political ties between Great Britain and Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. His passion for this cause would eventually lead him out of government, the better to campaign for tariff reform that would give preference to colonial goods and shelter British industry from international competition. It was a lost cause. Free trade was too deeply embedded in the political economy of Edwardian Britain for Chamberlain to dislodge it. Birmingham\u2019s manufacturers were no match for the financial, commercial and shipping interests that had the deepest stakes in the liberal British world order, while the free traders\u2019 \u201cbig loaf\u201d beat Chamberlain\u2019s \u201clittle loaf\u201d for the loyalty of the working class. Unionist imperialism plus social reform lost out to a new progressive alliance of Liberal and Labour interests.<\/p>\n
Theresa May wants to succeed where Chamberlain failed in uniting working-class voters with the British industrial interest. She has created a new department for industrial strategy and promised to prioritise \u201cjust managing\u201d households. Housing policy is to be refocused from subsidising home ownership, to building homes and supporting private renters. Fiscal policy will be relaxed, easing planned cuts to services and benefits. The electoral coalition that delivered Brexit \u2013 of struggling working-class voters and middle-class older voters (or the \u201cexcluded and the insulated\u201d, as David Willetts recently put it) \u2013 will form the ballast of a new Conservative hegemony.<\/p>\n