The XYZ Club was a club established in 1932 by Nicholas Davenport and H. V. Berry to provide financial intelligence to the British Labour Party. The secretary was

Hugh Gaitskell Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell (9 April 1906 – 18 January 1963) was a British politician who served as Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1955 until his death in 1963. An economics lecturer and wartime civil servant, h ...

.Gaitskell Papers.
UCL Library Archives. Retrieved 11 August 2019. It was credited by

Ben Pimlott Benjamin John Pimlott FBA (4 July 1945 – 10 April 2004), known as Ben Pimlott, was a British historian of the post-war period in Britain. He made a substantial contribution to the literary genre of political biography. Early life Pimlott was ...

with being partly responsible for the acceptance by the party of

Keynesian economics Keynesian economics ( ; sometimes Keynesianism, named after British economist John Maynard Keynes) are the various macroeconomic theories and models of how aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) strongly influences economic output an ...

. To spare embarrassment to its members who worked in the

City of London The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London fr ...

, it met in secret at first, in a room above a pub. It also drew up plans for the nationalisation of the

Bank of England The Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom and the model on which most modern central banks have been based. Established in 1694 to act as the English Government's banker, and still one of the bankers for the Government of ...

. When a Labour government came to power after the end of the Second World War in 1945, it instituted the

Bank of England Act 1946 The Bank of England Act 1946c 27 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom which came into force on 14 February 1946. The Act brought all of the stock of the Bank of England into public ownership on the "appointed date" (1 March 1946). This ...

, one of a series of nationalisations undertaken by the post-war government of

Clement Attlee Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, (3 January 18838 October 1967) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. He was Deputy Prime Mini ...

References

1932 establishments in the United Kingdom Clubs and societies in London Economics organizations {{econ-org-stub