In February 1931, Lloyd George wrote to the Labour cabinet minister George Lansbury that he was ‘genuinely perplexed and disappointed by the stickiness of some of your colleagues. They are always finding reasons for not doing things. They are too easily scared by obstacles and interests.’ He also prophesied that unless ministers showed, like Lansbury, some faith and courage, ‘your party and ours will be landed in an overwhelming catastrophe’. It was this ‘stickiness’ of MacDonald, Snowden and others that, from 1930 onwards, brought forth increasingly vocal calls for planning as an antidote to complacency and economic stagnation; these came most notably from the talented, flawed Sir Oswald Mosley and his fellow Labour MP John Strachey. Outside the party, the creation of the organisation Political and Economic Planning (PEP), which self-consciously sought to appeal to enlightened Conservatives as well as to moderate socialists and Liberals on a non-laissez-faire basis, signalled the emergence of the ‘middle opinion’ which Arthur Marwick has identified.2 In the period before the government's fall, however, unease about the status quo could not contend with the Labour Party's still-strong loyalty to MacDonald. Making little impact, Mosley and Strachey parted from Labour, ultimately in opposite political directions. Equally, the official movement was suspicious of non-party initiatives such as PEP, and was to remain so throughout the decade; Labour's planning ideology after 1931 developed distinct from ‘middle opinion’, and frequently disdained it.