Temporal Governance. Time,Exhortation and Planning in British Government,c.1959–c.1979

Abstract

Temporal Governance. Time, Exhortation and Planning in British Government, c.1959-c.1979

The early 1960s saw a number of long-term plans being issued by the British government – for roads, hospitals, new towns, social care, and even the whole economy. A «Very Long Term Planning Group» within Whitehall even looked 25 years into the future, to inform the setting of priorities. By the 1970s, however, this effort seemed to have entirely broken down, and the UK Government was involved in a day-to-day struggle even to keep electricity supplies flowing. Incomes policies and industrial subsidies focused, not on the twenty-first century, but on day-to-day negotiations in particular sectors of the economy. This article will explore this retreat from forethought and precommitment. What factors explain this remarkable retreat from ambitious and hopeful plans of a «scientific» future? It will argue that the British Government's peculiar challenges – of managing a large defence budget, a reserve currency and an international financial centre – made it much more vulnerable to recurrent crises, and a constant sense of emergency, helping to explain why more immediate and rapid «solutions» were applied, in the Thatcherite 1980s, than in France or West Germany.