Edwin Plowden

Edwin Plowden    (businessman, civil servant)
Born	6 January 1907 Argyll, Scotland
Died	15 February 2001 (Age 94)
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Le Rosey, University of Hamburg, Pembroke College (Cambridge)
Religion	Roman Catholic
Spouse	Bridget Plowden
Party	Conservative
UK senior civil servant involved in implementing the Marshall Plan. Friend of Jean Monnet, who worked to bring Britain into an European community. Attended Bilderberg/1961.  Chairman In office 1953 - 1959 Employer Atomic Energy Authority Attended Bilderberg/1961  Chief Planning Officer In office 1947 - 1953 Employer Cabinet Office Attended Bilderberg/1961

Edwin Noel Auguste Plowden, Baron Plowden was a British senior civil servant who was involved in implementing the Marshall Plan. He was a friend of Jean Monnet, who worked to bring Britain into an European community. Plowden attended the 1961 Bilderberg meeting.

Background

Plowden was born in Strachur, Argyll, the second child of Roger Plowden, a banker and landed proprietor, and his American second wife Helen. The Plowdens were a long-established Roman Catholic family. The young Edwin was educated abroad, at the Le Rosey school in Switzerland and at Hamburg University, before returning to Britain in 1926 to read economics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he received an "indifferent degree".

Early career

Having the great misfortune to graduate from university at the beginning of the Great Depression, Plowden spent many years unsuccessfully trying to find gainful employment, taking up odd jobs. At last, before the Second World War, Plowden secured a better job in the City when he joined C. Tennant Sons & Co, commodity dealers. As he spoke French and German and knew the European mainland well, he was put in charge of selling Palestine potash, in competition with the European potash cartel; he did so to such effect that his firm, as it had hoped, was invited to join the cartel.

During World War 2, he worked in the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and later joined the Ministry of Aircraft Production, in which he remained until 1946. During 1945–46 he was chief executive in succession to Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman.

Chief Planning Officer to the Cabinet Office

He returned after the war to the private sector, but then was appointed Chief Planning Officer to the Cabinet Office in March 1947. The group was called the Central Economic Planning Staff and Plowden headed it for over six years.

The Marshall Aid obliged him to construct a model of the economy's future. Each country in the American program was required to provide an economic program for the next five years. Plowden was involved in the production of this document, which he described as "the first and only long-term economic plan to be issued by a British government before Labour's plan of 1965". Despite notable improvements in the economy in 1948, severe problems with the balance of payments remained. Plowden was one of the first to be convinced of the inevitability of devaluation, which Cripps long resisted as morally repugnant. The argument raged for weeks until Cripps devalued by 30 per cent in September 1949. Plowden insisted that devaluation should be accompanied by cuts in government expenditure and by a tight incomes policy.

Meanwhile Plowden had been closely involved in negotiations with Jean Monnet, then head of the French Planning Commissariat. Monnet became a close friend of Plowden's, and at a meeting at his country house in April 1949 proposed a system of mutual exchange of food and coal. Plowden believed that his French counterpart was seeking to establish an Anglo-French nucleus around which to build a European community. Plowden pointed out that he did not have power either to assent or dissent; and in the event the idea was rejected by Bevin as an infringement of British sovereignty.

Monnet turned to the Germans in order to set up the European Coal and Steel Community. When Robert Schuman publicly proposed the ECSC in May 1950, Bevin angrily dismissed it as an Franco-German plot. Plowden envisaged a cartel, and felt that Britain ought to join, though he was worried by the "extremely nebulous" character of the proposal. Cripps, too, believed that Britain should negotiate. But Monnet, fearful that the British would ruin his dream by qualifying their membership, hurried to tie up an agreement with Konrad Adenauer, the West German Chancellor. On June 1 1950 France issued an ultimatum which gave Britain until the next evening to accept the ECSC's supra-national status. Bevin was ill; Attlee and Cripps were on holiday in France; and Plowden was obliged to improvise a meeting with Herbert Morrison in a passage at the back of the Ivy restaurant in London. "We can't do it," Morrison told Plowden. "The Durham miners wouldn't like it." Dean Acheson, the American Secretary of State, described this decision as "the greatest mistake of the post-war period." But Plowden was unrepentant - not because he considered that Britain was right to stay out of the ECSC, but because he held that such a decision was unavoidable in the prevailing climate.

Other Committees

In 1953, he was appointed the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, which mostly related to development of the United Kingdom's nuclear weapons program.

In 1959 he led a committee of inquiry into the Treasury's control of public expenditure. Its report laid emphasis on the importance of long-term planning rather than short-term expedience, and resulted in a wholesale reorganisation of the Treasury.

Another of his committee reports, published in 1964, recommended the merger of the Foreign and Commonwealth offices. It also advocated that diplomats should be more closely concerned with commerce. In 1965 another Plowden committee investigated the future of the British aircraft industry. The committee advised that the government should acquire a majority shareholding in the British Aircraft Corporation and in the airframe elements of Hawker Siddeley.

In 1975 Plowden headed an inquiry which proposed that the 13 electricity boards should be placed under direct control of the Electricity Council. In 1982 a salaries review under his chairmanship embarrassed the Thatcher administration, which was trying to hold down costs in the public sector, by proposing large pay rises for civil servants, senior officers in the armed forces, and judge.

 

Event Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Bilderberg/1961	21 April 1961	23 April 1961	Canada Quebec St-Castin	The 10th Bilderberg, the first in Canada and the 2nd outside Europe.

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