How interwar policy reduced Britain's escort-building capacity

Britain entered the Second World War with fewer yards able to support a mass escort program than it had possessed in the First. The earlier industrial base had expanded through the naval arms race and advances in merchant-shipping machinery. Government spending priorities are central to this interpretation of its interwar contraction: rapid debt repayment competed with the beginnings of welfare-state spending, while laissez-faire thinking discouraged orders to sustain firms during recession. Once yards failed, their skills and capacity were unavailable when war returned. Recovering escort production volume therefore required a smaller, simpler, more mercantile Flower design.