The Industrial Strategy

NEDC is a protean organisation whose history can be portrayed either as continual adjustment to the economic and political conditions of the day or as a series of attempts to impose an a priori view of what those conditions might become. After the 1973 oil crisis and the apocalyptic events of early 1974, space for the second aspect existed in British politics. Council members and NEDO officials sensed a weariness among politicians and civil servants, allied to a determination not to go through so much conflict again for so little result. Ronald McIntosh expressed the belief that NEDC could build on the gains made in productivity during the three-day week by looking at social as well as economic constraints to growth, and by formulating a policy for the ‘reconstruction period’ until North Sea oil became available. ‘The collapse of last year’s strategy’ he wrote, when urging a review of NEDC’s work and structure, ‘means that a new one had to be devised’.1