Biographers From The United Kingdom

"In 1890 there were still twice as many academic chemists in Germany as in Britain, though the British population was three-quarters of the German figure. In 1892 Britain had 287 academic staff in mathematics, science, and engineering compared with 452 in Germany. In engineering in particular the major German technical high schools had 7,130 students in 1901 against a total of 1,443 in British universities. In terms of overall university provision, Britain spent £26,000 in government grants in 1897, while Germany spent £476,000; in 1902 Germany had 22 universities for a population of 50 million, England and Wales 7 for 31 million. And...British industry still lagged badly in advanced industries like chemicals, electricals, and machine tools, and even in basics like steel—partly because of a continuing lack of trained personnel at all levels (the "practical man" still failing to recruit enough of them). Britain's annual rate of growth in the years 1880–1900 averaged 1.7 per cent against Germany's 5.3 per cent and America's 4.5 per cent. Britain's own rate of growth in industrial production was also declining—from 33 per cent in the decade of the 1860s to 24 per cent in the 1890s and 9 per cent in the 1900s."

"The 1902 Act led to a major expansion in secondary education, so that by 1914 there were 1,123 such schools, of which 500 were directly run by the local authorities while the remainder was denominational. Unfortunately, the prestige of a "grammar school" education, itself derived from the Arnoldian public school, with its emphasis on the academic approach to both the arts and science, impressed itself on parents, local authorities, and the Board of Education alike, so excluding a system of alternative secondary education of equal standing, like the German Realschule, more related to Britain's existence as a commercial and technical power."

"Except in rare cases such as Robert Owen's paternalistic management at New Lanark, the brutality of indoctrination into the life of a coolie in a vast camp for coolies, performing coolie work in service to machines, was unsoftened by positive care and control by the state. Not until the great uprooting and resettlement had been largely completed did Parliament belatedly begin to mitigate the squalor, chaos and exploitation by reforms in local government and public health, and by regulating working conditions by successive Factory Acts... This was the environment, then, which moulded the character of the new British working class: a home life in a mean brick hovel without piped water in an unpaved street with open drains, much like the townships in which the Bantu coolies of South Africa still live today; a working life at the mercy of a "practical-man" master who believed that the profitability of his business depended on low wages and long hours. It was, after all, from the study of the British working class that Marx and Engels principally derived their conception of the alienated proletariat."

"[W]hereas American workers during the industrialisation of the United States after 1850 never accepted they were permanent members of a coolie class, but believed instead that, true to the American myth, they were merely passing through on their way to prosperous middle-class status, British "coolies" came to accept that working-class they were, and working-class they and their children would always remain; and proud of it. In Hoggart's judgement in 1957, "Most working-class people are not climbing; they do not quarrel with their general level; they only want the little more that allows a few frills." In fact it was an aspect of their conformism that social ambition was positively discouraged as "giving y'self airs", quite apart from an individual's fear anyway of becoming isolated from social roots and family. It is apparent that none of these lasting characteristics, beliefs and attitudes of the British urban working class make for maximum industrial productivity or for maximum speed in adapting to new technologies; indeed the very opposite. Was it not the boss's factory, the boss's product, the boss's market and the boss's profit; and in the boss's interest to bring in new machines? Did not the boss exact – or try to exact – the most work for the least wage? It followed that the worker's only connection with the productive process was to fight the boss as best he could through trade unions or through simple skiving, in order to do as little for as much money as possible; or to protect his job or craft by restrictive practices. So deeply ingrained in the worker was this sense that the productive process, let alone success in the market, was no responsibility of his that it determined his actions even in the midst of the Second World War."

"On the basis of legal advice sketchy enough to be put on one side of a sheet of A4, and from a single lawyer who was also a cabinet minister, Blair finally took Britain to war against a country which posed no threat at all to British interests, let alone to the United Kingdom itself. There can be no sterner test of a national leader's soundness of judgement than when he has to decide between peace and war. And there can be no sterner test of his probity than his choice of the means of persuading his countrymen to back him. Both these tests Tony Blair has unquestionably failed. As a result, he stands convicted of being wholly unworthy of our trust. This is the central fact of this election, and we should vote accordingly."

"It is Northern Ireland that provides the classic contemporary demonstration of Clausewitzian principles in action. In 1974 the Ulster Protestants rejected powersharing under the 1973 Sunningdale agreement to the point of launching a general strike which the British army warned the British government it could not handle. The government thereupon abandoned the project. But in 1998 the majority of Unionist political parties and at least half the Unionist electorate have come to accept power-sharing under the deal brokered by Mo Mowlam. Wherein lies the essential difference between 1973–74 and 1998? It lies in the profound yearning on the island of Ireland and on the British mainland (including Whitehall and Westminster) for "peace" after the intervening 25 years of unrelenting "war" on the part of the IRA, years of violence of the most extreme kind intended (to quote Clausewitz) "to compel our opponent to fulfil our will". Thus all the talk of compromise and reconciliation in Northern Ireland is just so much small-l liberal blather disguising the Clausewitzian reality that by their "continuation of politics by other means" the IRA have indeed compelled their opponents to fulfil their will."

"Ever since the war we had lived in a form of state socialism with tremendous controls and regulations over economic and social life. I can remember when you couldn't even buy a house abroad without special permission from the Bank of England. People who think the pre-Thatcher years were a golden age really didn't live through them: just ask anyone who rode on the clapped-out railways or tried to make a telephone call when the Post Office ran the phones. When she came to power she transformed the country. The moribund industries relying on taxpayer funding – all gone. The trade unions – all gone. She abolished exchange controls, completely liquidated the state sector of industry and threw the economy wide open. It's certainly true that she was so powerful a person that cabinet government in the collegiate sense began to diminish. More and more they were like a collection of staff officers around the general. Blair has taken that further and deliberately adopted a presidential style in every possible way. The main difference was that she had genuine feeling, conviction and leadership. In my view, during the last eight years, Blair has proved a very plausible conman who promises much but hasn't achieved it."

"I am dismayed by the RSA's change of institutional Schwerpunkt from hardnosed concern with education and training for personal and national capability to generalised small ‘l’ liberal do-goodery, or, in the words of your chief executive, the driving of "social progress". While we waste time and effort on this right-on idealism, poor old Britain is confronting ever tougher competition from old rivals like Europe and North America, and new ones like India and China. You would hardly guess from the contents of your Journal that it is a ruthlessly hard world out there, and getting harder every decade."

"Between 1948 and the first half of 1953 manufacturing output per head in Britain only rose by some 14 per cent, as against rises of 20 per cent in America and Sweden, 27 per cent in France and the Netherlands, and a staggering 101 per cent rise in Germany (reflecting, naturally, her acceleration from stand-still). Even as early as 1950 Germany had virtually caught Britain up in manufacturing productivity. In fact, such productivity actually fell in Britain by some 3–4 per cent in 1951–2, just at the time when it was rising fastest in Germany. It only regained the 1951 level in 1953."

"Now...came a further threat to the power of employers (no longer "masters"): the arrival of national trade unions or federations of unions. So the employers too began to organise themselves on an industry-wide scale. Their purpose was well expressed by Colonel Dyer, the American leader of the Federation of Engineering Employers (founded in 1896), in respect of his own industry. It was "to obtain the freedom to manage their own affairs which has proved so beneficial to the American manufacturers as to enable them to compete...in what was formally an English monopoly..." Just how far that freedom had been cumulatively shackled by the past step-by-step gains of the trade unions was revealed by books and newspaper campaigns urging Britain to "wake up" to German and American competition. In 1894 appeared the bestselling British Industries and Foreign Competition. In 1896 followed a "Made in Germany" press panic, on publication of a book under that title. In 1901 the Daily Mail followed a Daily Express series entitled "Wake up England!" with its own on "American Invaders". In 1900–1901 The Times, governing-class opinion incarnate, ran major articles on "The Crisis in British Industry" and "American Competition and Progress". Technical journals critically examined the efficiency of particular industries. All exposed British owners and managers as now widely old-fashioned in outlook, lethargic in action, and smug. But also fully explored was the opposition of the unions to new machines and new methods; the shackling effect of union restrictive practices on efficiency and productivity."

"Between 1950 and 1952 the volume of British exports fell by 5 per cent (rearmament again), while German exports rose by over 50 per cent and American exports by about 20 per cent. In just those two years Britain's share of world trade in manufactures dropped from 26 per cent to 22 per cent. By the end of 1954 it was down to just over 20 per cent. In 1955 American exports of manufactured goods rose by about 9 per cent by value, Germany's by 18 per cent, Japan's by 27 per cent – and Britain's by 7 per cent."

"[I]t was the young pilots of Fighter Command who passed into British myth as "The Few" who outfought vast German airfleets. Today, 70 years on, we can acknowledge that the young men in the Messerschmitts were just as gallant, high-spirited and skilful. But whereas the German pilots were fighting for a hideous tyrant in the delusion that they were patriotically defending the Fatherland, the pilots of Fighter Command were modern-day Spartans, holding the pass for the free world against the barbarian. They included volunteers from the British Dominions overseas, from countries under Nazi occupation such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, and even a handful from neutral America."

"In late January 1941...formal staff conversations were held in Washington at which the British delegation pressed again the key importance (as they saw it) of Singapore, and urged that America should base there as strong a detachment of her Pacific Fleet (including battleships) as possible. An American battlefleet to Singapore! It was a solution to the imperial dilemma that would have astonished and dismayed Beatty and Amery. It marked a tacit acknowledgment that after two decades Britain's imperial bluff had at last been called by events; and that she had reached the point of bankruptcy in terms of world maritime power."

"A navy is no more than the armour and the weapons-system of seapower. The hull, providing essential buoyancy, is the national wealth. The propulsion is commercial and industrial success, which creates the national wealth. By the end of the Second German War in May 1945 British national wealth, once the greatest in the world, had given way to bankruptcy, with overseas debts exceeding reserves of gold and foreign currency by nearly fifteen times. Whereas in 1870 Britain's foreign trade had nearly equalled that of France, Germany and the United States put together, in 1945 her export trade had collapsed to less than one-third of the 1939 level, and her visible exports could finance no more than one-tenth of her overseas requirements. Worse still, the British industrial machine, once the envied model for the rest of the world, had been revealed by the war to the government, though not to the British people at large, as out-of-date in equipment, methods and attitudes; crippled by poor management and obstructive workforces; and weak in advanced technologies. All this was especially true of shipbuilding."

"[A]s Britain's wartime record demonstrates and the contemporaneous surveys of postwar export prospects grimly concluded, here was no industrial equivalent of a panzer striking force, superbly equipped with the best of modern technology, its troops brought to a high pitch of morale and tactical training, and blessed with dynamic leadership from the high command down to junior officers and NCOs. Rather, Britain as an industrial society in 1945 more resembled the French Army of 1940 – its equipment (including infrastructure such as ports, roads and railways) largely old and outmoded; its tactical doctrines out of date; the standard of training of its regimental officers (in other words, line and shop-floor managers) often lamentable; its NCO corps (trade union conveners and shop-stewards) more devoted to thwarting the officers than obeying them; the morale and motivation of its ill-educated rank and file low, even to the point of recurrent local mutiny; and its generals (boards and top management) largely too timid, too torpid, too set in the ways of the past to measure up to the exacting role of planning and conducting a war of conquest for world markets."

"Britain therefore entered the twentieth century an ill-educated, one might say ignorant, nation compared with its rivals; and particularly weak in those key areas of education on which industrial success depends. We see in these failures the combined baneful effects of liberal laissez-faires reluctance to embark on large-scale state education at all levels, the "practical man"s' scorn for technical education, and a public-school-educated governing élite's lack of comprehension that Britain stood or fell by her industrial capability."

"It must be left to Cunningham himself to sum up the success of "Operation Judgment": "Taranto, and the night of November 11th–12th, 1940, should be remembered for ever as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon. In a total flying time of about six and a half hours – carrier to carrier – twenty aircraft had inflicted more damage upon the Italian fleet than was inflicted upon the German High Seas Fleet in the daylight action at the Battle of Jutland". Taranto indeed marked the dethronement of the battleship as the arbiter of seapower after four centuries, and the opening of a new era of naval warfare."

"Britain in particular was again paying the penalty for a hundred years of Free Trade policy. This had rendered her dependent on enormous quantities of imported foodstuffs (to the ruin of British agriculture, only now being once more resuscitated in wartime by emergency measures). Free Trade had also reduced her general economic and industrial self-sufficiency by exposing her home market to massive imports of foreign technology, all of it paid for in peacetime by British exports (now reduced to only a third of the peacetime figure) or by income from foreign investments (now all liquidated). In the Victorian era this national dependence on a high volume of seaborne imports and exports had seemed the formula for unexampled prosperity. Now, in the crisis of a world war, it constituted, as in 1914–18, a strategic vulnerability that menaced the country's very survival."

"Noble though the wartime aspirations of the liberal Establishment might be, New Jerusalem nevertheless constituted – just like the postwar illusion of Britain as a present and future world and Commonwealth power, or the pre-war faith in the League of Nations as a preserver of world law and order – a piece of romantic fantasising, rather like some gigantic palace in an engraving by Piranesi. And just as Piranse's imagination defied the laws of physics and geometry, so did the dreamers of New Jerusalem disregard the real-life problem of funding its construction out of what was now a bankrupt and backward industrial economy instead of the richest in the world that it had been in their youth."

"In 1937, the best trading year for Britain between the world wars, the volume of her visible exports amounted to only two-thirds of the 1913 figure. The British share of world trade in manufactures fell from nearly 24 per cent in 1921–5 to 18.6 per cent in 1936–8, whereas Germany's share actually rose from 17.4 per cent to 19.8 per cent, and Japan's from 3.4 per cent to 7 per cent. As a consequence of this slow defeat and retreat in world markets for manufactures Britain was compelled to look more and more to her invisible exports (banking, insurance and shipping services, plus the income from the vast overseas investments built up during the Victorian age) in order to pay for the imports essential to the nation's life and work. Even at the height of her nineteenth-century dominance as a manufacturing country Britain had relied on such invisible exports to keep her balance of payments in equilibrium – indeed to enable her to earn the surpluses to invest overseas. But the percentage of imports that had to be covered by invisible earnings rose from 19.2 per cent in 1870–4 to 44.4 per cent in 1935–9. Even so, Britain by these latter years was incurring an overall balance of payments deficit. Like some ageing industrialist who finds that the shrunken profits from the family firm are no longer enough to pay for his accustomed way of life, Britain had to resort to spending capital. In other words, in the run-up to the Second World War Britain was gradually selling off her foreign investments and using up her gold reserves."

"In his 1982 book On Britain, that Anglophile German, Ralf Dahrendorf, was to opine that Britons lacked that urge for material achievement which drove his fellow countrymen... The consumer boom of the mid-1980s, when the British were to rush to the household super-stores to stuff their houses with new furnishings and electrical kit of every kind (most of it imported), might seem to prove Dahrendorf wrong. Yet in fact this spending was to be mostly done with borrowed money, thanks to the ballooning, soon punctured, of property values. It did not represent the fruits of extra effort and careful saving, as had the German "middle-class" lifestyle to which Dahrendorf referred and which constituted the outward manifestation of a genuine economic miracle. Even after undergoing Margaret Thatcher's strident sermons on the "enterprise culture" in the 1980s, most Britons (according to opinion polls) still aspired to be comfortable rather than rich – an aspiration which, even if morally admirable, hardly compares with greed as a psychological motor of economic growth."

"Two things caused the decadence of British maritime power: the long peaceful supremacy after Trafalgar and the capture of the navy by that hierarchy of birth and class that controlled so many of Britain's national institutions. Drawing most of its officers from 1 per cent of the nation, the Royal Navy never tapped that great reservoir of urban middle-class talent that made Scheer's fleet so well-educated and so intelligent... The navy reflected social rather than functional values, preoccupation with tradition rather than technology... It was a tragedy for Britain that the aristocracy and gentry had never been cut off from the national life, as had largely happened in France... [T]he social and intellectual values of industrial society never ousted those of the aristocracy. The richer Victorian England became, the more ashamed in a deep sense did she become of the technological origin of those riches. The engineer and the businessman have never been as "respectable" in Britain as in Germany or America... [I]n the world after 1870, when Britain faced the technical challenges of the more complex phase of the industrial revolution and the commercial challenge of foreign competition, the leadership of the country was in the hands of the social group least likely (because of its wealth and privilege) to be aware of the challenges and to respond to them. From 1870 to 1914 Britain was decadent because a decadent ruling social group and decadent (non-functional) values had captured or corrupted the forces of technological and social change."

"That idealism was of course shared by the whole Cabinet, including its chapel-bred working-class members. All their adult lives the vision of New Jerusalem had inspired them to struggle through the sloughs of committee work and along the stony paths of electioneering. However, in the expectation of coming to power in a rich imperial Britain, they had always assumed that they would build New Jerusalem by the simple method of redistributing wealth from the rentier class to the working masses. Now, in Government, they found themselves in a plight to which a lifetime's assumptions were quite inappropriate, for instead of redistributing wealth they were faced with the urgent and immensely more difficult task of creating it. Their problem in adjusting their minds to this sordid need was shared by the small-'l' liberal Establishment as a whole, especially in the opinion-forming intelligentsia, as Lord Annan acknowledges in his book Our Age: "Unfortunately we were more concerned with how wealth should be shared than produced.""

"In the 1960s and 1970s British folk-wisdom cherished (perhaps still cherishes) a comfortable explanation for Britain's relative economic decline since the Second World War, and especially her then all too evident industrial backwardness compared with West Germany. West Germany, so the story goes, had all her industries and transport system bombed flat during the war, and then, thanks to Marshall Aid, was able to completely rebuild them with the most up-to-date equipment. Meanwhile poor old Britain had to struggle on with worn-out or obsolete kit. This favourite British "wooden leg" excuse is pure myth. In the first place, West German industrial capacity in 1948 stood at 90 per cent of 1936 despite wartime bombing and postwar reparations. Secondly, Britain in fact received a third more Marshall Aid than West Germany – $2.7 billion net as against Germany's $1.7 billion. She indeed pocketed the largest share of any European nation."

"For the British...Jutland has a much deeper significance, for it was in fact a defeat for British technology. More than that, as with the French at Crécy and Sedan, a social system had been exposed by battle as decadent and uncreative. Jutland proves that already in 1914, when Britain and her empire had never seemed richer, more powerful, more technologically able, dry rot was crumbling the inner structure of the vast mansion. Jutland proves that the spectacular collapse of British power and British industrial vigour after 1945 was not a sudden disaster due, as comforting legend has it, to the sale of overseas investments in 1914–18 and 1939–45, but the final acute phase of seventy years of decline. For the principal armed service of a country—in its professional attitudes, its equipment, its officer corps—is an extension, a reflection, of that country's whole society, and especially of its dominating groups."

"Since the Great War was an artillery war, shells for field and medium guns stood at the top of the list. But that list also included motor transport, aircraft and aero-engines, small arms and ammunition, telecommunications kit, drugs, and later, tanks and poison gas. It was here that "the audit of war" (to coin a phrase) in 1914–1916 showed up the British industrial system as widely inadequate or obsolescent... To take the basic industrial sinew, British steel production in 1910 was little more than half the German total... According to the History of the Ministry of Munitions: "British manufacturers were behind other countries in research, plant and method. Many of the iron and steel firms were working on a small scale, old systems and uneconomic plant, their cost of production being so high that competition with the steel works of the United States and Germany was becoming impossible". In fact, this history draws the conclusion that in 1914–1916, "it was only the ability of the Allies to import shell and shell steel from neutral America...that averted the decisive victory of the enemy". More than 50 per cent of shells fired off in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 were American and Canadian."

"The mistake was enshrined in the preamble to the first German Navy Bill of 1900, by which the new High Seas Fleet was to be big enough to constitute a provocation and a worry to the British, but not big enough to defeat the Royal Navy. The Germans thus drove the British into alliance with their enemies without as a compensation being able to defend German overseas colonies and trade... The basic truth about the High Seas Fleet was that it should never have been built."

"Cobden in his boundless mid-Victorian optimism about free trade could no more have imagined such a plight than Adam Smith could have imagined refrigerated cargo ships bringing meat from the New World to undercut British livestock farmers. Perhaps their intellectual descendants today are at times too preoccupied with peacetime world trade and the advantages of economic specialisation between nations, to the neglect of the total-strategic implications in wartime of such specialisation. But at least Adam Smith himself recognised that, in his words, "defence, however, is of much greater importance than opulence"."

"[I]t was the inner elite (the general staff) of one of the most caste-bound and privileged officer corps in Europe—the Prussian—that was the first to succumb to the new world of industrial change, and transform itself into a group of "industrial" managers and technicians... Railway transport, swift mobilization, and new equipment called for a high degree of technical skill and competence. Education and intelligence in conscripts required the same attributes in officers. Above all, the Prussian army, in the era of Moltke, Roon, and Bismarck, was the key to Prussian unification of Germany; neither the officer corps nor the nation could afford it to be less than efficient and modern. By 1870 the revolution was almost complete; the first European army of the modern era had been seen in action in three swift wars."

"Of course I entirely agree...that the British plight consists in a low-wage, low-investment, low-productivity economy. I suggest...that the peculiar structure, history and attitudes of British trades union is—and has been for a century—largely, although not wholly, responsible for this dismal cycle. You cannot pay high wages unless you have already achieved high productivity. You cannot achieve high productivity unless the workforce is prepared to operate modern machines to the utmost of the machines' capacity. Yet for all the glib talk by trades union leaders about improving productivity, everyone knows that British industry is fettered by demarcations and other restrictive practices aimed at preserving somebody's "property right" in a particular task. This in turn must affect British industry's attitude to investment; for what, it may well think, is the point of investing vast sums in advanced processes if it is not to be permitted to work them to their full potential. Surely, therefore, the necessary switch to a high-wage economy cannot be achieved in isolation, by the process of "free collective bargaining" (ie, extortion of money by menaces or force), but only in step with a parallel switch to high productivity and investment. Are Mr Scanlon's members—and other British workers—prepared to match the efficiency, flexibility, cooperativeness and zeal of German workers—or do they really simply want more money for going on as they are?"

"The new German conception of organizing and planning opened the modern epoch of war. Nothing like the minutely dovetailed plans, routes, and timetables of the mobilization and Aufmarsch of 1870 had been seen before. Thus an army had become the professional and organizational peer of modern history."

"[T]he essential and constant factor common to all three national academies [in Britain, France and America] is the indoctrination with tradition: potent emotional conditioning in military myth, habits, and attitudes. There are the physical symbols and reminders: engraved tablets of the glorious dead; the museums; the assembled iconography of illustrious graduates; statues; guns... At all three academies there are songs, slang, customs and ceremonies that link each annual class together for the rest of their army life... This indoctrination has grown out of history rather than been artificially created, but it may be doubted whether psychologists or sociologists could improve on it. Upon this mental sub-structure, purely neo-feudalist with its emphasis on glory, gallantry, honour, duty, and patriotism, is built functional and technical training, both concurrently at the academies, and later in schools of application. But it is this indoctrination, together with drill and discipline, that turns civilians into soldiers. Without it there would be no difference between a general in a defence ministry and a high executive in a business cartel. In terms therefore of creating the common character of the military elite, this constant factor of conditioning inside cadet colleges has been of greater importance than the changing detail and emphasis of academic curriculum and military training."

"It is noteworthy that neither the Labour Party's plans for "reconstructing and regenerating" Britain nor the so-called or alleged "social contract" makes provision for reconstructing and regenerating the one British institution which most of all shackles our productive progress and denies us prosperity. I refer of course to the trades unions, whose insistence on over-manning and on rigid demarcations is responsible for the low productivity and want of flexibility of operation in British industry, as was finally and conclusively proved by the experience of the three-day week... It might be thought that it was time that the trade unions, who claim so much in terms of power and privilege and yet contribute so little towards the achievement of a British economic miracle, were compulsorily reconstructed too. Such a course is of course politically out of the question. But then it is already clear from the manifestos and the speeches that, over the entire field of policy, what is nationally necessary is still politically impossible. Adjustment to reality being therefore...too painful a cure for us voluntarily to adopt, we shall fool on until there is no more foreign money to be borrowed, but only to be repaid, and catastrophe at last forces adjustment to reality upon us."

"[T]he Victorian public school is one of the keys to our decline, turning out by means of curriculum and the moulding influence of school life alike a governing class ignorant of, and antipathetic towards, science, technology and industry, and which despised the qualities needed for success in a competitive industrialised world as those of the cad and the bounder. I would suggest that it is a matter for concern rather than self-congratulation that the broad strategy of contemporary British state education, from primary school to higher education, perpetuates under new guises the Arnoldian, Thringian and Newmanian ideals of a "liberal education"; and that it can be argued that even now we are not sufficiently directing our education towards preparing young people to make their way—and their country's way—in the world."

"In the eighteenth century the English ruling classes – squirearchy, merchants, aristocracy – were men hard of mind and hard of will. Aggressive and acquisitive, they saw foreign policy in terms of concrete interest: markets, natural resources, colonial real estate, navel bases, profits. At the same time they were concerned to preserve the independence and parliamentary institutions of England in the face of the hostility of European absolute monarchies. Liberty and interest alike seemed to the Georgians therefore to demand a strategic approach to international relations. They saw national power as the essential foundation of national independence; commercial wealth as a means to power; and war as among the means to all three. They accepted it as natural and inevitable that nations should be engaged in a ceaseless struggle for survival, prosperity and predominance. Such public opinion as existed in the eighteenth century did not dissent from this world-view. The House of Commons itself reflected the unsentimental realism of an essentially rural society. Patriotism coupled with dislike and suspicion of foreigners were perhaps the only emotions that leavened the vigorous English pursuit of their interests; a pursuit softened but hardly impeded by the mutual conveniences and decencies of international custom and good manners."

"[I]n the course of the first half of the nineteenth century a moral revolution was completed in England; a revolution which was in the long term to exercise decisive influence on the shaping and conduct of English foreign policy. It is indeed in the transformation of the British character and outlook by this moral revolution that lies the first cause, from which all else was to spring, of the British plight in 1940. The revolution had begun to gather momentum in the late Georgian age; a peculiarly English manifestation of the romantic movement common to all Western Europe. The essence of romanticism was to value feeling above calculation or judgement. Romanticism exalted sentiment – soon crudened into sentimentality – over sense... For the first time since the doctrinaire seventeenth century a concern for principle had begun to manifest itself in politics by the early part of George III's reign, when, for example, the war against the rebellious American colonies was denounced by politicians like Burke as unjust as well as unwise... After 1793 Charles James Fox attacked the war with revolutionary France as being an attempt to crush a noble experiment in human liberty rather than the parrying of a national danger. Radicals of the day, like Samuel Whitbread, the brewer MP, were even more passionately moralistic in denouncing English policy and excusing French actions, thereby setting a pattern of emotional response to be followed by the romantic left of politics down to the present day."

"British policy was therefore the child of their insemination of the politicians – politicians like Baldwin and MacDonald, the Chamberlains, Simon and Henderson, Halifax, Eden. It was as if the encumbents of quiet early-nineteenth-century rectories and nonconformist minister's houses had been miraculously transported into the great offices of State of a hundred years later. Instead of the suspicious minds of pre-Victorian statesmen, there was trustfulness; instead of a worldly scepticism, a childlike innocence and optimism. And instead of a toughness, even a ruthlessness, in the pursuit of English interests, there was a yielding readiness to appease the wrath of other nations. For the very bedrock of the national character had been crumbled since the eighteenth century. Whereas the pre-Victorian Englishman had been renowned for his quarrelsome temper and his willingness to back his argument with his fists – or his feet – now the modern British, like the elderly, shrank from conflict or unpleasantness of any kind. In Lord Vansittart's words: "Right or Left, everybody was for a quiet life.""

"Growing foreign perils were perceived and promptly and fully reported, first to London and then to ministers. Some permanent officials, such as Crowe in his time and later Vansittart, struggled hard to convince governments of the need for a strong foreign policy, and to puncture the prevailing euphoria with a bodkin of realism. They failed. They failed because there was another, competing influence on politicians, a more congenial and therefore in the end a more effective influence: a constellation of moralising internationalist cliques, each with its ideas-peddlers, its contact-men in high places, and its tame press. These busy romantics – from Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) and Lord Robert Cecil on the Right, through liberals like Smuts and Gilbert Murray in the middle to Kingsley Martin and Clifford Allen on the Left – not only believed, admirably enough, that morality rather than power ought to govern relations between states but acted as though it did... The internationalists successfully imposed on governments their pretension to speak for the inarticulate and unsounded body of the British nation; that is, to represent public opinion at large."

"In terms of British society at home, this transformation of national character was wholly beneficent. It was a great achievement of Victorian moralism to have softened British life and manners; to have created British civic virtue and self-discipline, and brought about standards of personal and public honesty unequalled in the world; to have rendered the law virtually self-enforcing; to have given the British their special sense of the dignity and liberty of the individual, and, as a corollary, their sense of the individual's personal responsibility. Yet it was exactly because British life itself was now so orderly, gentle, docile, safe and law-abiding, so decent, so founded on mutual trust that the British were less fitted to survive as a nation than their ancestors, whose characters had been formed in a coarse, tough and brutal society. For the British made the fundamental mistake, catastrophic in all its consequences, of exporting their romantic idealism and their evangelical morality into international relations... And so, in applying the qualities of gentleness, trustfulness, altruism and a strict regard for moral conduct to a sphere of human activity where cunning, cynicism, opportunism, trickery and force, all in the service of national self-interest, still held sway, the twentieth-century British stood disarmed and blinded by their own virtues."

"The change in the British since the eighteenth century went far deeper than conscious belief. Evangelical religion had modified the national character itself. The violence and quarrelsomeness that had once been noted as English characteristics had vanished, except in working-class districts; replaced by gentleness and readiness to see good in others. Kindness and gentleness indeed were now seen as prime virtues. The hardness, insolence and even arrogance with which Englishmen used to deal with foreigners had given way to an unlimited willingness to see and understand the other man's point of view, even that of an opponent; indeed a willingness to assume, out of a profound though absurd sense of guilt, that his case was morally better founded than their own. Thanks also to Victorian religion – and perhaps to Dickens – the English now evinced a compassion for the underdog and a sympathy for failure, and a corresponding suspicion of ability and success, that were unparalleled in other countries. Thus it followed that the English now preferred the soft handshake of goodwill and reconciliation (in which they placed unbounded trust) to the firm grip of decision and action. Appeasement indeed had become a conditioned reflex of the British middle and upper classes. Few would now say with Palmerston that the practical and sagacious thing to do in life was to carry a point by boldness: knock an opponent down at once, and apologise afterwards if necessary to pacify him."

"Between the prejudices and the facts therefore the Cabinet could only follow a tortuous course of evasion. England's German policy became one of inherently futile expedients. Underlying these expedients was the illusion, extraordinary in view of Rumbold's and Phipps's reports, that the Nazi leaders would be accessible to reasoned argument and responsive to proofs of goodwill; a failure, per contra, to realise that English policy would carry no weight at all with the Nazis unless backed by English – and French – power and by an evident willingness to use that power."

"There was yet another powerful element in British public opinion in 1933 which made a return to the balance of power and the line-up of 1918 wholly out of the question. Despite the failure of the League of Nations over the Japanese aggression in Manchuria, the faith of internationalists in the future of the new world order remained undiminished. That the general situation in the world had so much worsened since the happy days of 1929, with the rise of Nazism in Germany and militarism in Japan, only stimulated the internationalists into even greater activity; the more disquieting the facts, the more faith must conquer them. The rather smug optimism evinced by internationalists in the 1920s, when they thought war and aggression had been banished for ever, gave way to a somewhat hysterical eagerness to explain away the inherent impotence and fallaciousness of the League and its Covenant so brutally exposed by the Manchurian affair, and prove how the League nevertheless could and would prevail."

"Meeting Simon could only impress Hitler the more vividly with English feebleness. Here, in Simon, Hitler met for the first time a Foreign Secretary of England, the greatest of all imperial powers, the nation which had thwarted the ambitions of Kaiser Wilhelm II – this sanctimonious and deferential old gentleman of mild and episcopal appearance. In a situation which called for a breezy, brutal arrogance of a Palmerston, the chilling dignity of a Castlereagh, or the blunt, plain-speaking and dominant will of a Wellington, Simon could only make a sorry attempt at ingratiation."

"In provoking even the peace-loving and feeble Addington Cabinet into a unanimous decision for war Bonaparte had committed the most catastrophic blunder of his entire career. It sprang in the first place from a failure to understand the English character and English institutions, or comprehend England's strength. Since his youthful studies he had regarded her as the modern Carthage, a mere nation of traders doomed to destruction at the hands of a martial state like France. And certainly there was little about English society that accorded with Bonaparte's own ideas as to what constituted a powerful and well-governed state. Vacillating cabinets precariously depended on the hazardous outcome of parliamentary votes. Instead of the central government directing the national life, the national life arranged itself by some mysterious organic process. The nobility and gentry governed the English shires virtually without reference to London, even controlling the militia, that important part of the English military system. The new volunteer movement had sprung up spontaneously as private and independent associations of citizens. The legal profession and the universities jealously guarded their independence. The City of London, the world's greatest financial centre, formed yet another self-governing republic. The Industrial Revolution, already well under way in England but not yet to begin in Europe, owed everything to personal initiative and nothing to State direction or encouragement. All in all, English society consisted of innumerable co-existing private clubs. The apparent anarchy of the English scene found supreme expression in a free press which hounded politicians, the nobility and even the royal family with cruel lampoons. How could such a cloud of human atoms, such a nation of usurers lacking even a great army, contended against Bonaparte's own logical, efficient military state directed by a single mind of genius?"

"Industrialisation in Britain had been a "bottom-upwards" grass-roots transformation brought about by the initiative of the individual "practical man", and without benefit of state guidance or intervention. This was in accordance with British political and commercial attitudes already deeply ingrained by the time that the Industrial Revolution got under way. For the British had come to prize individualism and localism, as against a strong and effective state, which they saw as the essential feature of the European despotisms they feared and hated... This traditional British dislike of the state was sharpened and given fresh doctrinal justification during the Industrial Revolution by the laissez-faire political economists, laissez-faire becoming, by 1850, a universal article of political faith. Even with regard to education, all must be left to private enterprise or private charity. In any case, it was thought, state intervention in education could lead towards tyranny. A national education system devised and directed by the state was therefore unthinkable."

"Does not Mr E. P. Thompson see any connexion between the internal nature of the Soviet empire as an oligarchic tyranny and its external policies? As a former communist he must know that the Soviet regime is of its very nature and from earliest origins a minority conspiracy that has gained and maintained power by force and trickery; that because of this inherent nature it always has been and remains terrified of independent centres of thought or power, whether within the Russian empire or beyond its present reach. It is the conjunction of such a regime, and its manifested wish to dominate others, with armed forces powerful beyond the needs of mere defence that is the engine of the present "armaments race". Who believes that Nato and its armaments would exist if Russia had been a Western-style open society for these last 60 years? The first requirement for large-scale nuclear or any other kind of disarmament is the withering away of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

"[G]iven that we are today a country that would be as bankrupt as British Steel if it were not for the lucky strike of North Sea oil, and that our gross national product is only half West Germany's, the attempt to maintain "balanced" forces plus a nuclear deterrent constitutes an exercise in nostalgic unrealism. We are like an impoverished aristocratic family who, by petty economies, struggles to go on living in the gradually decaying ancestral mansion rather than live comfortable within their means in a bungalow. Thirty-five years after the Second World War it really is time that we faced the reality of our true status as a nation and adopted a defence policy appropriate to it."

"It is entirely wrong to divide and separate education, in the sense of enabling somebody to realize his or her own potential, from education that enables them to make their way in the world and earn a living. By concentrating solely on what seems to me to be a vastly too ideal form of education you will be projecting people into the world who may have acquired a splendid taste for Mozart, or whatever, but who are totally incapable of earning a living. We might have a nation which was enormously cultured, but actually could not keep a roof over its head, or warm itself or provide itself with food. The first law is survival."

"Britain's proportionate losses in killed of men aged 15–49 was just under half that of France. Britain suffered a 6.7 per cent loss as against Germany's 10 per cent. Therefore the "Lost Generation" as applied to the whole nation is confirmed as a myth. No one has disputed that losses fell disproportionately on the products of the public schools and Oxbridge. But this raises two questions. In the first place Bomber Command's losses in aircrew in the Second World War (an equivalent élite of educated and intelligent young men) were considerably higher, at 55,888 dead, than that of subalterns on all fronts on the Great War of 37,452, but no one has sought to romanticise Bomber Command's losses or seek to use such loss to explain our national decline, in the fashion of the "Lost Generation" myth. In the second place, Dr. Strachan and others of his standpoint may over-estimate the value to Britain of these highly publicised public-school and Oxbridge heroes. Does one really see Pre-Raphaelite knights like Julian Grenfell or Rupert Brooke saving Britain from industrial decline and leading us to the conquest of markets in high technology? Consider how useless the most famous survivors proved, such as Sassoon and Graves, or, for that matter, Eden."

"How then was the Admiralty to find a fleet for Singapore, as had been repeatedly promised (though with waning conviction) to Australia and New Zealand before and since the outbreak of war with Germany and Italy? It went far deeper than a mere question of naval strategy and deployment. As Sir Samuel Hoare, the then First Lord of the Admiralty, had remarked to the 1937 Imperial Conference, "the very existence of the British Commonwealth as now constituted" rested on the ability of Britain to send a battlefleet to Singapore. But this in turn posed an even more profound question about Britain's very own existence as the centre of this oceanic empire, the immediate practical implications of which were so starkly confronting her leaders in the summer and autumn of 1941. For in retrospect it can be seen that it was an illusion for the British to believe that the Commonwealth and the Empire made Britain a great world power. Rather the strategic and economic balance sheet in 1941 demonstrates that the Commonwealth and Empire (with the notable exception of Canada and perhaps South Africa) were not an asset, but a net drain on Britain's strength; a predicament. For the imperial pink splashed across the map of the world in British atlases did not represent strength, as the British romantically believed, but one of the most outstanding examples of strategic overstretch in history."