The marked increase in government intervention into markets, in effect a partial reversion to mercantilism, was perhaps an inevitable response to the distress of the Great Depression. At the same time, the notions of Marx gained influence in the West, perhaps because the repressions of the Soviet Union, the major avowed practitioner of Marx, were not well known before World War II.
But cracks in the facade of economic management by government emerged early in the post-World War II years, and those cracks were to widen as time passed. Britain's heavily controlled economy, a carryover from the war, was under persistent stress as it encountered one crisis after another in the early postwar decades.