Fair Trade League

The Fair Trade League was a British pressure group formed in August 1881 to campaign for protectionism.

[1] The League was dissolved in 1895 and the Conservatives did not wish to revive it in case this would damage their alliance with the Liberal Unionist Party.

[2] The Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone in response to the forming of the League delivered a root and branch defence of free trade in a speech in Leeds in October.

So do the muscles and nerves of the body of a man who has been hanged twitch and work violently for a short time after the operation.

I am not sure; I should like an inquiry; but I suspect free imports of the murder of our industries much in the same way as if I found a man standing over a corpse and plunging his knife into it I should suspect that man of homicide, and I should recommend a coroner's inquest and a trial by jury...[4]However Churchill abandoned Fair Trade in October 1887.