When the Labour Party left office in 1951, it was still committed to economic planning, and indeed claimed to have undertaken such planning when in government. Nevertheless, the party's thought about the nature and scope of the planned economy was radically different from the planning policies and programmes which had been consequent upon its far heavier defeat twenty years earlier. The virtues of nationalisation as a planning tool were in doubt; the notion of consumer sovereignty was no longer a complete anathema; the need for a constructive policy for private industry was increasingly recognised; and global demand management via the budget was seen more and more as the key to planning, albeit augmented on a permanent basis by physical controls. There had been a clear departure from the grand aspirations of the past. Labour's commitment to the planned economy had reached a crescendo in the aftermath of 1931. This died away to diminuendo in the Cripps and Gaitskell eras. And however noisy the drums surrounding later developments, like theWilson government's national plan of 1965, the main theme of the thirties – comprehensive planning based on wholesale nationalisation and extensive physical controls – would in future be reduced to the merest echo.

The leaders of the Attlee generation had themselves prepared the party, both directly and indirectly, for this apparent reversal. In the immediate aftermath of Labour's smashing defeat at MacDonald's hands, Attlee, Cripps, Dalton, Morrison and even Bevin, had made pronouncements of a very radical socialist nature.