Tim Worstall

State Planning

Of course, wise men planning things is vastly better for an economy than this wasteful and duplicative market nonsense. I mean, it’s just obvious, isn’t it?

By December Butler admitted cheese and egg rationing
was breaking down, while Gwilym Lloyd-George broke the news that the
Prime Minister’s pet project – encouraging people to keep pigs and eat
pork – had backfired because it was costing £15 million in imported
supplies of pigs and foodstocks.

Sterling was in crisis, too, when Lord Woolton,
Lord President of the Council, suggested the slogan “Eat Potatoes to
save the £”. But the Cabinet was concerned while there was a glut of
potatoes, there was a shortage of labour to lift them out of the
ground.

In April 1952, Cabinet agreed to import cheap
meat from Canada. But it was cheap because of a foot and mouth outbreak
in Western Province, which meant the US had banned it. A month later
there was an outbreak in Britain.

Then, in July 1952, the Cabinet came under
pressure to end sugar rationing because of a glut of plums which could
be used for jam making. It would mean releasing an extra 25,000 tons –
which would either have to be imported at a cost, or taken from war
stockpiles.

The Chancellor suggested cutting the sweet ration for children to give mothers sugar for jam.
“The plums shall not rot,” declared Churchill. “On sweet rationing: do it later if you have to – and blame it on the plums”.

Let’s bring it back, shall we? Then as the politicians spend all their time arguing over pork, potatoes and plums, they won’t have enough time left over to continue stealing our liberties.

In

3 responses

  1. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    You might have also mentioned the impressive contribution Manny Shinwell made to the fuel crisis of 1947. As he said in Cabinet:
    “Coal. Excess consumption is the real trouble. Problem is how to reduce it. Are there luxury industies we don’t want. Find them and cut them out. That’s planning.”
    http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/transcript_cab_195_5.pdf

    Reply
  2. Roger Thornhill Avatar
    Roger Thornhill

    The government has not had the plums to sort out the economy for decades – i.e. “step away from the vehicle…”.

    Reply
  3. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    It’s amazing in retrospect, although instructive in its way, to see how little is now available online about the Fuel Crisis of 1947 without access restrictions. The scale of the crisis is hinted at by this summary comment from the detached perspective of the International Herald Tribune for 5 February 1947:
    “LONDON — Great Britain’s industrial output began to sag alarmingly today [Feb. 4] for lack of coal, and as a result an estimated 50,000 persons are out of work and up to 30,000 have been placed on part time. Thousands of other workers face unemployment in a matter of days unless the coal crisis eases. Principal shutdowns have occurred in the automobile and textile industries. For the second consecutive day, the Cabinet discussed the growing industrial stoppage throughout the nation and a new plan of fuel allocation is being drawn up.”
    http://www.iht.com/articles/1997/02/05/edold.t_8.php
    In his memoires Hugh Dalton, Chancellor of the Exchequer, seemed to have believed that Manny Shinwell, the Minister for Fuel and Power, was hugely to blame:
    ” . . The former [Shinwell] is exceptionally rattled, suspicious, irrelevant and discourteous. He demands information on our gold and dollar reserves as though I had deliberately withheld it from him. He has by now wholly antagonised all our colleagues. The most severe criticism that any person with real knowledge could make of the PM is that he has allowed this man to continue for so many months of failure to be Minister of Fuel and Power…”
    http://www.adam-matthew-publications.co.uk/digital_guides/fabian_economic_series_two_parts_1_to_3/Publishers-Note.aspx
    The essential point is that Shinwell had been warned in 1946 – notably by Douglas Jay – that coal stocks were running perilously low and that there serious risks of major disruption to power supplies in the event of a harsh winter. Shinwell was complacent about stepping up coal production and, as it turned out, the winter of January through April 1947 was the coldest winter on record since 1880. As a consequence, there were widespread and recurrent power cuts, short time working in industry and even BBC TV was taken off the air to save on electricity use.
    As for cutting back on luxuries to economise of power use as Shinwell had suggested in cabinet, there were few luxuries to cut back on in 1947 – the luxury products that were made by industry were strictly for export markets only to alleviate the deepening Balance of Payments Crisis.

    Reply

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