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Problems of ‘Socialist Planning’: Evan Durbin and the Labour Government of 1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Stephen Brooke
Stephen Brooke
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Canada
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Extract

‘Socialist planning’ was a notable, if unlikely casualty of Labour government after the Second World War. Between 1931 and the election victory of 1945, central economic planning was, in the words of G.D.H. Cole, the ‘professed creed of the Labour Party’. Depression and war demonstrated that the anarchy of free-market capitalism had to ‘give way to ordered planning under national control’. Labour won the election of 1945 with a commitment to ‘plan from the ground up’ through the socialization of industry, the establishment of a national investment board and the use of wide-ranging economic controls. Planning was the defining characteristic of Labour's socialism in this period and it could indeed be argued that the party did not find so effective a political rhetoric until ‘Labour and the scientific revolution’ in 1963.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , September 1991 , pp. 687 - 702
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 A version of this paper was presented to the seminar on twentieth-century British politics at the Institute for Historical Research and I express my appreciation to the participants for their comments, Professor Ben Pimlott in particular. I would like to thank Sir Henry Phelps Brown, Lord Diamond, Lord Jay and Dr John Bowlby for interviews. I am particularly grateful to Mrs Marjorie Durbin and Dr Elizabeth Durbin for their generous and invaluable help.

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