By the summer of 1933 the main lines of British commercial policy had been established. The bedrock was the Import Duties Act of March 1932. Within two months of its passage the standard tariff on imports of manufactures had been raised to 20 per cent, and the Import Duties Advisory Committee subsequently recommended additional duties. An inevitable concomitant of protection had been imperial preference, granted to the self-governing dominions on a temporary basis in March 1932 but confirmed and enlarged at Ottawa later that summer. The imperial agreements had still reserved plenty of bargaining power for negotiating other agreements, and by April 1933 the most important of these had either been signed or were well on the way to being completed.

The basic framework of protection and overseas commercial policy was therefore in place by 1933. This still left other issues to be decided, notably agricultural policy, and it still left other treaties to be negotiated, but the point is that they had to be accommodated within the framework already constructed. While the World Economic and Monetary Conference held in London during the summer of 1933 might have provided an opportunity for reviewing policy, perhaps leading to greater emphasis on multilateralism, there is no evidence that it induced any change in the main thrust of British policy.