Industrial efficiency and state
intervention

In Industrial Efficiency and State Intervention Nick Tiratsoo and Jim Tomlinson describe and assess the Labour Party's development of a policy for improving industrial efficiency between 1939 and 1951. The authors concentrate on the debates and initiatives of the wartime period and on the subsequent implementation of policy aimed at raising productivity under Attlee.

The book provides two major modifications to existing historio-graphy. First, it shows that the prevailing view of Labour between 1945 and 1951, with its emphasis on the creation of the Weifare State, is wrong. Labour saw the correction of social ills as vital, but it also recognised the crucial need for industrial modernisation. Second, this reading demands the re-evaluation of wider theories about Britain's economic decline. If the key difference between Britain and, say, Japan is Britain's lack of a ‘developmental state’, then, as the book shows, any explanation of this Situation is impossible without consideration of the country's political parties and the context within which they have operated. Given this twin purpose, the book should appeal to both specialists interested in party politics and those who are interested in wider questions about Britain's overall contemporary history.

Nick Tiratsoo is Lecturer in Social History at the University of Warwick and Visitor in the Business History Unit at the LSE. Jim Tomlinson is Reader in Economic History at Brunei University and Visitor in the Business History Unit at the LSE.