Unionist Free Food League
_Chamberlain_by_Sir_Francis_Carruthers_Gould_('F.C.G.').jpg)
Michael Hicks Beach (centre) with Arthur Balfour (left) and Joseph Chamberlain (right), by Sir Francis Carruthers Gould.
The Unionist Free Food League was a British pressure group formed on 13 July 1903 by Conservative and Liberal Unionist MPs who believed in free trade in order to campaign against Joseph Chamberlain's proposals for Tariff Reform, which would involve an import tax on food.
Members included George Goschen, 1st Viscount Goschen, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Hugh Cecil, Robert Cecil and Winston Churchill.
Whereas Chamberlain's Tariff Reform League was a grass-roots organisation which had captured 300 Unionist constituency associations by 1906, the Free Food League was little more than a parliamentary group and so was much less effective.[1]
Notes
- ↑ Robert Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Major (London: Arrow, 1998), p. 181.
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