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. With the TUC co-operating, retail prices rose by only two per cent in the year after devaluation.
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.
As Lord Home later commented, the British in the immediate post-war period were "still too near to the glory of Empire to accept the role of just another country in Europe". Or, as Bevin remarked at the time, Britain "was not simply a Luxembourg".
