Further evidence of a trend towards technocratic control is to be found in the writings of a significant group of young intellectuals within the British Labour Party (including G.D.H. Cole, Hugh Gaitskell, Evan Durbin, Douglas Jay and Colin Clark) who became enthusiasts for "planning" on this model. Cole's ideas, as expressed in his book Principles of Economic Planning (1935), have been described as follows:

A planned economy would be a state-planned economy, in which the state would be the sole producer — or at least the sole major producer. Cole thought of planning in a statist or physical manner. The state would control directly the essential economic variables — production, investment, income, and prices — to achieve maximum production.

As Durbin put it, the aim was to substitute "conscious foresight for the instinctive adjustments of the competitive system". The historian Ben Pimlott, describing the attitudes of this group, stated that their ideal was "an open and meritocratic society governed by an enlightened elite".

Elitism was in fact one of the predominant characteristics of planism, which shared with fascism a mistrust of the intellectual or practical capabilities of the people. To set the people on the right path one had to rely on an elite. While for the fascists this elite consisted of dynamic and charismatic "leaders", for the planists it was made up of intellectual "authorities", experts who "knew", and who, it was believed, could solve the world's problems better than anyone, and certainly better than democratically-elected politicians who had got where they were because of the votes of the ignorant masses. Economists and technocrats were to be the ruling class of the future; politics (now seen as a dirty word) had had its day.

Which brings us to the European Community. It is probably not fortuitous that, among the admirers of de Man's planism, one finds some of the people later to be most responsible for that planners' delight, the series of European institutions that emerged after the war. Paul-Henri Spaak of the Belgian Labour Party was one of the founding members of Benelux, the prime negotiator in the founding of the Council of Europe, President of the European Movement, and a founding member of the European Union; Paul Finet became President of the European Iron and Steel Community; and there were several others. It is perhaps significant that so many of the non-fascist planists from the Thirties should thus have found, after the war, a suitable vehicle for their policies in the fundamentally anti-democratic institutions of the Community, where so many of the decisions are taken by non-elected bureaucrats.