This book was originally published without a Preface. The reason for this is that it was never meant to be a book. The Fabian society asked me in July 1948 for a pamphlet on the economic perplexities of contemporary Britain, and this was what I set out to write.

Thus the book is not, as its title might suggest, an academic study of theoretical principles, but is rather a political statement. Neither does it cover the whole field of planning, but concentrates rather on some topics which happened to be of special interest in Great Britain in the summer of 1948 Perhaps it was wrongly named. It should have been called ‘A Brief Statement on Some Current Topics in British Planning’; but it is too late to change its name.