ABSTRACT
The debate inside the Cabinet in the summer of 1915 about how to mobilize the British economy for war was not conducted along ideological lines between exponents of 'freedom' and 'control'. The new ministry did not mark the end of the era of running the war economy according to the tenets of laissez-faire because such an era had never really existed. The government did not have enough civil servants to arrogate this function to itself and the existing managers, as one of them tartly explained to Lloyd George, 'are not going to sit down in an office in London and be clerks either to the War Office or the Munitions Department'. Throughout 1915 McKenna was an unrepentent supporter of the notion that Britain's best war policy was to abstain from creating a large conscript army and instead to support its allies by supplying them with money, munitions and ships.
