‘What is national planning but an insistence that human beings shall make ethical choices on a national scale?’ asked Aneurin Bevan at the 1949 Labour Party conference. He continued: ‘Planning means that you ask yourself the question: which comes first? What is the most important? … The language of priorities is the religion of Socialism.’ This was a subtle, oblique and persuasive defence of the government's programme of cuts in investment and social services, of which Bevan's own housing programme had been a notable victim. Chiefly associated not with Bevan, but with the famously ascetic figure of Cripps, this policy was accompanied by a marked change in Labour's rhetoric about the planned economy. Once, to use Attlee's pre-war phrase, planning had been seen as the key to the treasure house of a better world. Now, in the aftermath of the annus horrendus of 1947, it was a means of imposing hard economic choices in the interests of national survival. Labour's ‘plan for plenty’ had been supplanted by the necessary expedient of austerity.

Of course, this change was a reaction (perhaps somewhat belated) to the extreme economic situation in which Britain found herself. The problems the nation now faced were of an entirely different order from those of the 1930s, which Labour's policy of planning had originally been designed to rectify. Accordingly, the measures which the government took – and which it nonetheless presented as consistent with Labour's previous ideas – were in important respects different from the planning solutions that Labour had proposed since 1931.