Abstract
While departments and agencies concerned with industry ranged themselves along a trail leading from concern with whole industries to investigations of how single firms behaved, the government made some efforts to keep alive priority for industry as well as for the welfare, educational and social improvement policies that had been so severely set back in July 1966. But in the late 1960s, international economic conditions grew steadily more hostile to the deferred hope of restoring balance between these and the demands of sterling, overseas debts and the deficit.
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Notes and References
Quoted in C. Ponting, Breach of Promise (1989), p. 43. Other American advisers’ comments were more vindictive.
J. Bruce-Gardyne and N. Lawson, The Power Game (1976), p. 133.
Callaghan, Time and Chance (1987), pp. 209–10. On the basis of this analysis, Callaghan rejected a US offer of a vast loan to fund the sterling balances, and merge sterling into a sterling-dollar area, because acceptance would have locked Britain into American strategy in South-East Asia and the Vietnam War (as had been intended by the September 1965 agreement), and ended hopes of EEC entry (ibid., p. 211).
M. Stewart The Jekyli and Hyde Years (1977), pp. 86–88 discusses five separate stages: (1) November 1969, Bank Rate to 8 per cent, lending cut to all but priority clients, hire-purchase deposits up on cars, £100m. cuts in defence, corporation tax raised to 42£ per cent, £100m. off government spending; (2) January 1968: cuts spread over two years, withdrawal in principle from bases east of Suez, welfare cuts and postponement of raising the school leaving age to 16, growth target reduced from 4 J to 3 per cent (the first, he suggests, was futile, the second largely cosmetic); (3) the March 1968 Budget, all taxes raised, including SET, and 3$ per cent ceiling on pay; this Stewart judged to be the first real cut in private and public consumption; (4) November 1968: more reductions in overseas expenditure, a 50 per cent imports deposit scheme and increased hire-purchase requirements; (5) the April 1969 Budget with further cuts of £250m. and nearly £ 1000m. taxation increases, ranging from car licences to prescription charges.
All figures taken from P. Browning, The Treasury and Economic Policy (1986), statistical appendices, pp. 357-M.
Jacques Leruez, Economic Planning and Politics in Britain (tr. 1975). The principal mid-sixties analysis was of course Andrew Shonfield’s Modem Capitalism (1965).
Sir R. Clarke, Public Expenditure, Management and Control (1978), p. 128.
Generally, see A. Peacock and J. Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in the UK (1967).
Sir Alec Cairncross (ed.), Britain’s Economic Prospects Reconsidered (1971). Cairncross had been head of the government’s Economic Service, 1964–69, and previously Chief Economic Adviser under Macmillan.
Cf. Derek Morris, UK Economy, (3rd ed. 1985), p. 258. For the deindus-trialisation thesis, see F. W. Blackaby, Deindustrialisation (1978).
T. Balogh, ‘The Apotheosis of the Dilettante’, in Hugh Thomas (ed.), The Establishment, p. 83. This 1959 collection also included essays by John Vaizey, Simon Raven, Victor Sandelson, Christopher Hollis and Henry Fairlie. Cf. also Brian Chapman, British Government Observed (1963).
Interview with Lord Fulton, 1983; F. Stacey, British Government 1966–1975 (1975), Chapter 7.
Sir Solly Zuckerman, ’scientific Advice since World War Two’, Proceedings of the Royal Society (1975).
Interview with Lord Fulton, 1983. Later critics argued that it would, indeed, have revitalised the Service: P. Kellner and Lord Crowther-Hunt, The Civil Servants (1980), pp. 9–4.
Brian Lapping, The Labour Government 1964–70 (1970), pp. 191–2.
Cf. Peter A. Hall, ‘The Role of the State in Britain’, in B. Elbaum and W. Lazonick, The Decline of the British Economy (1985).
D. Hague and G. Wilkinson, The IRC: An Experiment in Industrial Intervention (1983), pp. 244–6.
K. Williams, J. Williams and D. Thomas, Why are the British Bad at Manufacturing?, (1983), pp. 60–1, citing G. Meeks and G. Whittington’s 1976 submission to the Royal Commission on Wealth.
N. Goodison, ‘The Stock Exchange, government borrowing and monetary policy’, Society of Business Economists Journal (1982). In 1967, just before devaluation, the Treasury indicated that it had in recent years been selling gilts to holders outside the domestic banking system, in order to avoid increasing the credit base, to keep the market orderly and to minimise the government’s short-term dependence (NEDC (67)51, October 1967).
S. G. Prais, The Evolution of the Giant Firm in Britain (1976), Chapter 5.
Cf. Frank Longstreth, ‘The City, Industry and the State’, in C. Crouch (ed.), State and Recovery in Contemporary Capitalism (1979), pp. 178–90; Moran, Politics of Banking, Chapter 6; Stephen Fay Portrait of an Old Lady (1987) Chapter 3.
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© 1990 Keith Middlemas
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Middlemas, K. (1990). Coming to Terms: Economic Management. In: Power, Competition and the State. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378780_7
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