ABSTRACT
The Labour Party took with it from the interwar period a determination to effect a substantial and swift extension of public ownership, a commitment to a fundamental redistribution of wealth, a pledge to enhance social welfare provision, a preparedness to use monetary and fiscal policy as the basis of macroeconomic management and a general insistence on the need for planning, along with an ambiguous and sometimes confused notion of what economic planning entailed. It also took with it into government a number of policy-making intellectuals such as Dalton, Cripps, Gaitskell, Strachey and Durbin and was, in the 1945-51 period, a Party which ‘took ideas seriously and sought to apply them to the exercise of power’.1 It is the purpose of this chapter to consider the extent to which the commitments and ideas to be found in the Labour Party literature of the 1930s were actually translated into economic policies.
