By the close of 1932, the idea of the planned economy to replace capitalism was firmly established as the defining principle of the Labour Party's socialist policy. As a consequence of the events of 1931, and bolstered by the seeming success of the Soviet model, planning was, within the Labour movement, the almost universally accepted antidote to both the incrementalism of the MacDonald years and ‘the cult of impotence’ supposedly preached by the National government in the face of the slump. Moreover, as the decade drew on, the case for planning was strengthened by developments abroad. Labour politicians argued, as the threat of war burgeoned, that because of the class interests which the Conservative party represented, the government which it dominated was congenitally incapable of (a) pursuing a ‘constructive’ foreign policy based on collective security via the League of Nations, and (b) organising finance and production in the developing ‘near-war’ economy in an equitable and efficient fashion. Labour aspirations towards a socialist foreign policy based on international co-operation thus went hand in hand with calls for a domestic economy planned on socialist lines.

Moreover, the party's internal divisions notwithstanding, there was significant agreement between Labour's left and right wings on what ‘minimum steps’ were necessary for socialism. Samuel Beer has described this phenomenon as ‘pluralism within consensus’. Nevertheless, the immense energy that went into discussions of socialist planning bore remarkably diverse fruit.