ABSTRACT
It had been the original intention to prepare a long-term survey or plan alongside the annual one. From time to time this idea came to life, first in 1946, then in 1948, and again in 1953; but on each occasion it soon died. All that emerged in public was a single document submitted to the OEEC in Paris in 1948 entitled The Long-term Programme of the United Kingdom. 1 This had to be submitted (and published) because the Americans operating the Marshall Plan wanted some reassurance that the aid they were bringing to the European economies would make them self-supporting within a reasonable time, taken to be four years. Thus Europe was urged to engage in central economic planning by a country bitterly opposed to such planning within its own borders. Meanwhile in the United Kingdom a Socialist government committed to economic planning shrank from issuing a national plan to its own people and sent a rather ersatz plan for scrutiny abroad.
