ABSTRACT
The condition of the British economy in the twenty years after 1955 was a source of much interest, amazement and concern. Its performance baffled economists, industrialists and politicians alike, though they did not often admit it. The 'English sickness' broadened, on examination, into the 'British disease'. The record of British industry and its relationship to government was subjected to intense scrutiny in an attempt to discover what had gone wrong. One simple approach, which 'surfaced' during the 1960s, was to suggest that over several hundred years what had, literally, fuelled British industrial development was coal. The British Gas Corporation took over from the Gas Council in 1972 and in 1974 it was supplying some 20 per cent of United Kingdom energy use. In 1974, the British Steel Corporation (BSC), at last emerging with some sense of its own raison d'etre, suggested a radical reshaping of the industry. The domestic British boom coincided with one in Japan and the United States.
