"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.""
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Historians from EnglandBiographers from the United KingdomPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford alumniFellows of the Royal Society of Literature
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Correlli_Barnett
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Correlli Barnett
Correlli Douglas Barnett (28 June 1927 – 10 July 2022) was an English military historian, who also wrote works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post-war "industrial decline".
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