Postwar Labour Britain nationalized major industries and announced broad public-sector expansion.

Evidence

So what had happened in the preceding two years, 1946 and 1947, to bring about such a catastrophic state of affairs? The Bank of England was nationalized (March 1946), plans for a National Health Service were announced, the intention to nationalize the steel industry was made public (April 1946), plans for a united, independent India had begun (May 1946), bread rationing was introduced (May 1946), the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was blown up (July 1946), the Muslim League demanded a separate “Pakistan” (May 1946), nationalization of railways, ports, long-distance transport, and canals was announced (November 1946), the coal industry was nationalized (January 1947), the meat ration was reduced (January 1947), and later that same year the Town and Country Planning Act was introduced to place the regulation of land use in the hands of local authorities. Though very selective, this list serves to draw attention to one important fact: owing partly to the experience of the war economy and partly to the international challenges presented by a declining empire, the British postwar government certainly did have an agenda for the extension of the public sector, but it was also faced with managing several other major and intractable problems. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 410

Categorization

• XREF: Sets the concrete British policy landscape that the Mont Pèlerin Society’s founding document (‘Neo-Liberalism’ statement of aims) was reacting against.