ABSTRACT
British wartime policymakers had little interest in anything but short-run ‘programming’ of resources to ensure that the maximum output was achieved. Labour policy had been stalled by the mutual suspicion between Chamberlain’s government and unions opposed to government attempts to regulate labour. The impression that wartime macro-economic problems were handled better than those at the micro-economic level is confirmed by an examination of monetary and fiscal policies. An important by-product of Keynes’s wartime fiscal policy was greater breadth in the social basis of direct taxation. The absence of firm agreement between Labour and Conservatives extends to other aspects of social reform associated with the Beveridge Report. The influences which shaped wartime discussions of postwar health care can be incorporated even less easily into a simple ‘war and society’ model. Most of the discussions of reconstruction planning imply that the ‘white paper chase’ was concerned exclusively with domestic questions and that British policy-makers had considerable autonomy.
