The Retreat from ‘High Technology’ in Post-War Britain

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that the 1970s saw an important change in the attitude of the British state to civil technological projects. It focuses on supersonic aviation and nuclear power policy as its case-studies, which were the key areas of techno-nationalist investment in the post-war period. It shows that Whitehall became radically more sceptical about state-led Research and Development, scrapped many core long-term projects, and cut back others. The politics and timing of this shift matter for our wider understanding of post-war British history, the history of technology, and histories of ‘neo-liberalism’. Thatcherism is supposed to have brought with it the decisive move away from industrial intervention by the state. Such a characterisation, while containing important truths, makes it difficult to see that the retreat from the most spectacular industrial investments of the British state in fact occurred during the 1970s in what was an economic liberalism from within, rather than a ‘neo-liberalism’ from without. This paper also challenges the narrative that the ‘technological disillusion’ of the 1970s came via the New Left and environmentalists, demonstrating the importance of an expert critique focused on economic and industrial arguments that emerged from inside the state itself.