Eighty years ago the United Nations acquires a physical reality

 

The General Assembly of the newly established United Nations Organization held its first meeting in the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster after intense efforts to create from scratch a key body that was to avoid the failures of the League of Nations. The hall had just enough space to accomodate the delegations of the 51 original member countries and had been redecorated by the Ministry of Works in lieu of rental; the light blue colour emblematic of UNO still today predominated. The massive organ was masked by the UNO's globe emblem. In the rehearsals for the opening session a British diplomat had adopted the identity of the delegate from Antarctica and delivered a moving speech on the aspirations and disappointments of the penguins.

The four occupying powers met to discuss the shape of the German economy in peacetime. Their paramount consideration was to prevent a resurgence of German military might. Their first firm conclusion was that steel output - then the prime measure of military industrial capacity - was to be less than one third of the 18.5m tons produced in 1929.

The British government announced that it would lay a Bill before Parliament giving it control over industrial investment. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton claimed to wish to avoid "a disorderly scramble for capital" by providing the government with permanent powers to set priorities for the provision of fresh capital. These priorities would  be set to "promote full employment and national development." The mechanism by which this would be achieved was vague but a national investment board was under consideration. Companies would be free to invest their own funds and investors would not be compelled to invest in particular ventures, but in practice the bill meant that there was to be no free market for capital.