Churchill’s Economics

Abstract

The chapter looks at Churchill’s economic ideas as a Liberal and then Conservative and their impact on his actions. Churchill was a free trader and accepted the self-correcting specie-flow mechanism of the Gold Standard. His political economy before 1914 rested on interventions to remove monopoly power and market imperfections that would allow ‘competitive selection’ by free enterprise and encourage individual responsibility. After the war, strains appeared in this coherent set of assumptions. Churchill’s tenure as chancellor was marked by creative accounting for pragmatic political reasons. He remained a devotee of sound finance and balanced budgets, and despite some reservations on the issue of the return of the Gold Standard, he could not go against the advice of Treasury officials and the Bank of England, or his own ‘deeply internalized convictions’ that coincided with their assumptions. After 1929 he took little systematic interest in economics. Churchill’s coherent political economy of free trade and the Gold Standard collapsed and he had nothing in its place.