This paper explores the links between the ideas that have informed macroeconomic and industrial policy as well as corporate governance, and Britain’s industrial development and social outcomes, from the interwar years to the present. It begins by examining interwar developments in both theory and policy in relation to industrial organisation and development, and the important – but virtually unknown – contributions made by John Maynard Keynes in this context.
It then traces postwar developments – and the return of laissez-faire during the 1970s and 1980s – before considering the so-called “renaissance of interest” in industrial policy in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which – as yet – has produced very little results. It concludes by returning to the question of the path that Britain’s industrial development might have taken, had Keynes’s ideas about industrial organisation and policy been taken as seriously as his ideas about macroeconomics.