Besides sharing the peculiarly Anglo‐Saxon obsession with aggregate demand management, the British have been conspicuously narrow in their choice of policy instruments. The favourite was frequent tax changes, with others used only in subsidiary roles and none of these (certainly up to 1967) operating with any direct force on the foreign balance—the dominant source of anxiety. Long‐run structural aspects were either neglected or tackled in ways which often conflicted with each other and contributed to fundamental difficulties apparent even before the oil and commodity crises. Britain today needs a long‐term policy framework: perhaps an indicative plan (on the Japanese pattern) broken down by regions, and policies to encourage competitive industries to relocate and expand in regions of declining employment, adjustment assistance to industry and labour and with the pattern of public expenditure seen as integral to an active long‐term industrial policy. In the context of North Sea oil, the time now would seem most opportune to devise this.