‘Nature Does Not Make a Jump’: The British Government's Very Long-term Planning Committee in the 1960s

Most commentary about the influence of scientific and economic ‘experts’ in post-war Britain focuses on policy failures – on the inadequacy of medium-term decisions, and on missed targets and political reverses. This is particularly so in the field of very long term economic and social planning, given the scrapping of most controls in the early to mid-1950s and the abandonment of the ill-fated National Plan of 1965. This essay seeks to recover a more detailed and less normative story about the use of new technocratic and scientific forecasting techniques inside post-war British governance. It draws on the work of the civil service’s Very Long-Term Planning Committee to unpackage ‘official’ Britain’s view of the likely future, as that Committee tried to look forward to what the country would look like in 1980 and 2000. In so doing, the article will demonstrate that Britain’s long-term look ahead was presciently focused on defence and transport infrastructure, capital investment, the returns to spending on social services, education’s contribution to growth, more expert management inside government and the strategic role of the state in industrial modernisation – all of which would re-emerge again and again as key themes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.