The Revision in State Strategy

Abstract

The final phase of Cripps’s Chancellorship from late 1948 to mid-1950¹ saw a fundamental reorientation of the British state’s accumulation strategy — a reorientation which is often obscured by analysts who simply equate the period with devaluation.² Whilst a discussion of devaluation is indispensable in disclosing Cripps’s short-term policy alternatives, the state’s overall accumulation objectives cannot be revealed by so narrow a focus. As in the preceding sections this chapter will therefore elucidate the state’s relation to accumulation by charting the political and economic constraints on state action via an analysis of economic developments from mid-1948 to the end of the first quarter of 1950. This reveals that, whereas Dalton’s dual accumulation strategy had successfully nurtured capital accumulation through the trials of the immediate postwar years, a revision of state policy was essential in the final phase of Cripps’s Chancellorship if capital expansion was to be ensured.