ABSTRACT
Lloyd George put up the money to finance the “Liberal Industrial Inquiry” in July 1926. The purpose of this Inquiry was to provide the thoughtful research necessary to support a detailed new economic policy position for the Liberal Party. In February 1928, the Liberal Party’s Industrial Inquiry group published Britain’s Industrial Future (BIF), the end product of an 18-month study of the economic problems troubling the country. John Maynard Keynes was a member of the Inquiry’s Executive Committee, along with such influential party figures as Lloyd George and Ramsey Muir. The chapter considers BIF to be a crucial stage in the evolution of Keynes’s plans for the construction of Liberal Socialism in Britain for reasons. BIF argued that high unemployment was primarily the result of long-term structural problems in key export industries aggravated by deflationary government policies related to the return to gold at par.
