Economic policies: still shackled by post-war euphoria?

This country's economic and social policies remain dominated by the war-time consensus: Keynes and Beveridge and the full-employment White Paper, and belief that the state is best qualified to'run the economy.'The so-called monetarist and Thatcher revolutions failed to re-shape policy-making. Dependence on the rate of interest to suppress inflation, the staple of successive governments'macroeconomic policy, represents a neo-Keynesian survival and is a major source of our distempers. It needs reconsideration ab initio .