ABSTRACT
By imposing tariffs, which needed to be legislated, negotiated and promulgated, governments had usually been able to lower the quantity of imports-but not in the face of aggressively reduced import prices and never to an amount which was exactly predictable. Quotas, unlegislated and often unpublished, enabled post-war government ministries to maintain elaborate and detailed Import Programme’s, that is to say, to plan their trade. After shipping space had become once more available on an open market in 1946 the official objective of these programmes was to save scarce currencies, particularly dollars. But their effect was to protect British industry from post-war competition, especially against competition of more capital-intensive industries elsewhere in the west and labour-intensive industries in Asia. Much of the modern science-based industry of the United Kingdom can be said to owe its birth to such protection, while some older industries like jute manufactures owed their longevity to it. ‘Imports of those goods which would give rise to substantial readjustment in UK industry are still very strictly limited’1
the Mutual Aid Committee was told as late as September 1955. Although the pattern of British industry in the post-war decade
was substantially affected by these import programmes, they represented planned trade without a plan. A subcommittee on the contribution of science to productivity growth, set up by the Labour government, did have an Imports Substitution Panel as one of its four panels, and this survived until 1967. However, its activities were limited to a few explorations of alternative raw material sources.2 It seems more probable that where such substitutions took place they
were the outcome of the import controls themselves rather than committees. Some elements of a long-term industrial strategy did exist: the post-war Development Areas; the great oil refinery programme of 1948-51; the activities of the National Research and Development Corporation. All of these elements were in place before 1951 and were directly or indirectly fortified by quantitative restriction on imports. But the effect of import quotas on the pattern of industry, though large, was an aggregation of special cases.
