Correlli Barnett

"It is impossible to exaggerate the long-term consequences, social and psychological, of the experiences of the new industrial workforce in the raw factory settlements of the late Georgian and early Victorian England under conditions of ferocious competition and unbridled exploitation. It was in that era, when men, women and children were flooding into these settlements from the countryside and exchanging the slow, natural rhythms of the land or self-employed crafts (however hard that life might have been) for the harsh mechanical discipline and the pace and clamour of the mill, exchanging the village for the back-to-back terrace, that the British industrial working class, with its peculiar and enduring character as a culture apart, an alienated group often embittered and hostile, was created. It happened that water power and coal and iron largely existed in the bleak, wild landscapes of northern England, South Wales and lowland Scotland – regions hitherto lacking the numerous population and rich civilisation of the south; indeed regions traditionally turbulent and remote from the government of the Crown since the middle ages. Rare it was for the new factory settlements to cluster round an established city, as later would German industries develop round Leipzig and Dresden, Düsseldorf and Cologne: instead villages like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Huddersfield, Bradford, Halifax, Middlesbrough proliferated into vast brick-built industrial camps; nothing but mean dwellings, drink-shops and "works"."

"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."

"In Britain the pattern was early established, and forever continued, whereby at best management and workforce confronted each other in a state of suspended hostilities, like armies of observation: hardly a pattern that encouraged spontaneous zeal at the bench. In 1879 William Morris, himself a romantic and a socialist, could write: "It is true, and very sad to say, that if anyone nowadays wants a piece of ordinary work done by a gardener, carpenter, mason, dyer, weaver, smith, what you will, he will be a lucky rarity if he gets it well done. He will, on the contrary, meet on every side with evasion of plain duties, and disregard of other men's rights..." It was Hoggart's judgement in the early 1950s that fundamentally nothing had changed since Morris's day. And certainly the cumulative evidence about lacklustre output, absenteeism, stoppages and go-slows during the Second World War in industries ranging from coal and shipbuilding to aircraft manufacture bears this out, as does the appalling record for low productivity, strikes and shoddy workmanship which in the 1970s helped to destroy the British motor-vehicle industry. So the degree of motivation explains the performance; the performance demonstrates the degree of motivation; and the nature of the historical experience of the working class accounts for both."

"[T]here is in Britain a very strong idealistic lobby which reproduces itself down the generations. Their ideals, their hopes and their morals are of course absolutely impeccable. But the question is the practicality and the consequences. Certain aspects of morality may be sound in themselves but hopelessly inappropriate when made the basis for decision-making in international relations. One has to see the world as it really is, to see the realities of power, the realities of leverage and of course the realities of your own interests."

"[A]s Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao perceived, the basic concept of war as a continuation of politics by other means can be applied to any form of rivalry between human groups, be they class, racial or ideological. In these contexts "war", or the use of force to compel an opponent to fulfil one's will, has far broader meanings than a traditional punch-up between nation states or alliances, or the kind of "absolute" or "total" war which Clausewitz saw as conceptually the purest form and which we have witnessed twice this century. Thus we saw anti-nuclear protesters employ force at military installations in pursuit of the political aim of persuading Western governments into unilateral nuclear disarmament. We saw Greenpeace employ force against Shell plc over the disposal of the Brent Spar platform. We saw Arthur Scargill's troops attempt by coercion to bring down an elected government, only to be defeated in, quite literally, pitched battles. We may note in these encounters and, for that matter, in the street brawls during the World Cup, another fundamental factor that is unlikely to change in the future – the dark well of aggressiveness that lies within human nature and finds release in the pleasurable adrenalin surge that comes from violence, risk and danger."

"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."

"That Clausewitz lives, and will live, is equally shown in such cases as the former Yugoslavia, where Nato has simply frozen a war which will certainly break out again if and when the intervention forces leave; or Israel–Palestine, where the political relations between Jew and Arab reflect the military outcome of past wars, where the conflict of interest is essentially irreconcilable, and where therefore policy and violence will continue to go hand in hand. What may therefore be safely predicted is that over the next 170 years the world will continue to be an arena of complex rivalries and direct collisions of interest rather than a "world order" or a "world community", and that human groups engaged in such rivalries will from time to time resort to force as an instrument of their politics. What weapons will be then available, and what tactics will consequently be employed, only a fool would pretend to guess. It will be remarked that so far I have not mentioned the United Nations Organisation, that expensive figment of liberal wishful thinking. I have done so now."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It remained only for Britain during the war to pour out the rest of the investments and the gold on the purchase of war supplies from the United States, while at the same time cutting visible exports to a third of the 1938 level for the sake of war production, and the basis of Britain's economic existence for the last hundred years had been comprehensively destroyed. In 1945 Britain was therefore left by this nemesis of free trade with none of the advantages of being highly dependent on foreign trade, and all the vulnerability. In the immediate postwar era, and for the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution, she would have to depend almost entirely on visible exports in order to secure the life and work of the nation and to rebuild her old prosperity."

"[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."

"Nor, except in the garden or allotment or on the sports field, did Britons generally evince an eagerness for strenuous effort. A journalist with the British Army advancing into the heart of Germany in April 1945 noted: "It occurs to me that the Germans are a menacing race by reason of their docility and their ability to toil. No man ought to love work as they do – it's indecent, certainly uncivilised. We English don't love work in this slavelike way, and thank God for it." And a week later the same journalist, J. L. Hodson, confided to his notebook that the reason why the British were unable to maintain hatred for long was their temperament was "too lazy, too indifferent, too good-natured"."

"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."

"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."

"The truth is that the Labour Government, advised by its resident economic pundits, freely chose not to make the re-equipping of Britain as an industrial society the Schwerpunkt of her use of Marshall Aid. Instead, the Government saw Marshall Aid (like the American loan of 1945) primarily as a wad of greenbacks stuffed by a kindly Uncle Sam into the breeches pocket of a nearly bankrupt John Bull who, though diligently seeking future solvency, nevertheless still wished in the meantime to go on playing the squire, beneficent to his family and the poor, and grand among the neighbours."

"In the twentieth century the capability of a nation's armed forces cannot be separated from that nation's technological capability and industrial resources, or even social fabric. This realisation led me...to the concept of "total strategy", defined...as strategy conceived as encompassing all the factors relevant to preserving, or extending, the power and prosperity of a human group in the face of rivalry from other groups... It will be seen that "total strategy" provides a different approach from that of the economic historian, and especially an economic historian in the Anglo-Saxon Adam-Smithian free-market tradition."

"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."

"Machine-tools, ball-bearings, magnetos, internal combustion engines, drugs – it is hard to name a basic necessity of advanced technology in which Britain was self-sufficient in 1915... Thus the audit rendered by the first two years of the war on Britain's own capabilities in newer technologies proved harsh enough. Nonetheless, economic historians might object that Britain's Victorian and Edwardian "total strategy" actually served her well enough in wartime. Thanks to her accumulated wealth and her credit as the centre of a global free trade economy and thanks also to British seapower, she could buy in all the technological imports that she needed – largely from North America. But there are two snags here. First, wealth and credit are wasting assets when spent, while the spending only serves to profit other countries' manufacturers and build up their industries. In contrast, up-to-date export industries of your own are long-term earners. Secondly, the high degree to which free trade had rendered Britain dependent on imports of food and raw materials actually brought her near to complete national defeat in 1917 at the hands of the U-boat... Moreover, even though the U-boat was narrowly beaten, Britain had to devote immense naval resources to the merely defensive purpose of keeping open her sea lifelines. This pattern was to be repeated in the Second World War."

"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"."

"The audit of the Great War showed up widespread human weaknesses in British industry. Too many British capitalists in their boardrooms were simply self-trained "practical men" smugly content with old products, old equipment and old markets, guided by a concern for short-term profits rather than for the long-term development of their businesses. The trade unions...were resolutely resistant to new technology, while also holding back productivity by a maze of demarcations and restrictive practices."

"The urgent challenge of winning a total war against so formidable an enemy as Germany, indeed the peril of national defeat, jolted Britain as an industrial society far more effectively than mere peacetime world-market competition, to which she had failed to respond as she should have done according to classical economic ideas. A remarkable technological revolution began in Britain in 1915 and was consummated in 1918 – remarkable not only because of all the deficiencies that had got to be made good, but also because the revolution was accomplished under wartime conditions and at utmost speed. It is also noteworthy that it was masterminded by the government, and that many of the new American-style factories were actually owned and operated by the state."

"It hardly needs emphasising that this wartime technological revolution marked a complete departure from Victorian and Edwardian laissez-faire orthodoxy. Given time for consolidation and further development – probably under some form of protection such as fostered the growth of American, German and Japanese industry – Britain's wartime achievements might have served as the starting-point for a root-and-branch modernisation of Britain as an industrial society. Indeed, the 1918 report of the Committee on Commercial and Industrial Policy virtually recommended this. More fundamentally still, the wartime revolution could have served as the prototype for a new British "total strategy", based on Britain's own technological strength: in other words, the German and Japanese version of capitalism, a partnership between state and industry, rather than the Anglo-Saxon version. But instead Britain tried after the war to revert to her Victorian and Edwardian total strategy based on laissez-faire, the City of London, the gold-standard pound sterling and the Empire – with consequences which would only be fully revealed when the Second World War submitted Britain to yet another audit of industrial capability."

"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."

"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."

"In 1955 British exports of manufactures rose by only 7 per cent by value over 1954; those of the United States by 9 per cent; of Germany, by about 18 per cent; and of Japan by about 27 per cent."

"Between 1946 and 1950, the most desperate period of the post-war export campaign and of national dependence on American loans and handouts, there were sixteen major strikes in British docks, cumulatively involving nearly 137,000 workers and losing a total of over 1,000,000 worker-days. Between 1950 and 1955...the dockers were out eighteen times playing the big matches and 168 times in instant and short-lived kick-abouts. The big matches drew onto the pitch a cumulative total of nearly 155,000 players, costing nearly 2,000,000 worker-days. But mere statistics cannot properly record the ramifying harm inflicted on British industry and commerce by these repeated blockades. For they meant export delivery dates missed and foreign customers infuriated; factories held up for want of raw materials and equipment from abroad; wholesalers and retailers running out of imported foodstuffs; transport to and from afflicted ports backing up in standstill and confusion; telegrams and telephone calls crowding an out-of-date and already overloaded telecommunications net as victims of the blockades tried to sort out their troubles; and an immense waste of time and effort by ministers and civil servants in attempting to deal with the strikes and their immediate impact. More insidious still was the moral harm done to Britain at home and abroad by such spectacular mutinies, further helping to convey the impression of a nation without disciplined purpose, and instead blindly intent on self-mutilation."

"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 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."

"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."

"Perhaps the most damaging single proof of this American superiority in all-round productivity lies in a comparison in September 1954 between steel output at the Inland Steel Company, Chicago, and the more modern Port Talbot plant of the Steel Company of Wales. For Inland produced about 260 ingot tons per man-year as against about 160 ingot tons per man-year at Port Talbot. It was a foretaste of the even more horrifying comparisons in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s between productivity at identical car plants in Britain and on the Continent."

"In May 1956...a working party of officials submitted a report on "German Competition with particular reference to the Engineering Industries". It made grim reading. Between 1953 and 1954 German exports rose by 40 per cent in volume and her share of world trade in manufactures rose from 13.3 per cent to 15.6 per cent, whereas Britain's share fell from 25.5 per cent to 19.8 per cent. In those same years output per man in manufacturing "improved almost twice as much in Germany as in the United Kingdom"."

"For full employment also execrated a by-product highly poisonous to the health of the nation's economy as a whole: the so-called "wage-price" spiral of inflation. This weakened the cost-competitiveness of British exports, so in turn menacing the balance of payments, the international standing of the pound, the survival of the Sterling Area, and ultimately the grandiose but wobbly facade of Britain as a world power. Moreover, even full employment's comforting warm milk of abundant pay-packets and easy profits only served to render the British economy at home fat and flabby, so that even dud companies (especially in older technologies) found it easy to keep bumbling along."

"The deal between the French and the Israelis was struck in Paris on 1 October 1956. An eighteenth-century British cabinet would not have hesitated to join in... In contrast, Eden's cabinet was riven by moral squeamishness; so too were the house prefects of the Foreign Office. The irony lay in that the political and psychological shackles which the morally squeamish now found so uncomfortable had been forged by themselves. It was they and their predecessors who since 1918 had brought about the prevailing climate of opinion in which a state's naked pursuit of self-interest, if necessary by armed diplomacy, if necessary by war, was deemed a sin, even a crime. In furtherance of their romantic vision that a "world community" ruled by law could, and would, replace the existing world arena of group struggle, they and their predecessors had first created the League of Nations and its futile Covenant, and then, after the Second World War, the United Nations Organisation and its Charter. Since this document outlawed war except in clear cases of self-defence, it now supplied an peculiarly uncomfortable shackle for Britain, for here she was, a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council and yet secretly plotting to revert to realpolitik."

"The evidence also justifies a verdict that the British character in peacetime...lacked not only hardness of mind, but also (except perhaps among the trade union barons and the shop-floor mutineers) hardness of will. In a corruption of the virtue of tolerance into a vice, the British too readily put up with slackness; they shrank from weeding out and discarding the incompetent, whether these wore the executive homburg or the workman's overalls or the teacher's gown. They lacked, moreover, the dynamism powered in America by individual and corporate ambition and in post-war Germany by obsession with Leistung (achievement). For long since out of fashion in Britain was the restless energy displayed by British entrepreneurship in the full momentum of the industrial revolution. Instead, in the shrewd diagnosis of a distinguished economic commentator in 1963 (and fully justified by the historical evidence), "The very niceness of the British, the national desire to do the decent thing...has become an enormous force for immobilisme...""

""Niceness", the desire "to do the decent thing" – these qualities constituted then, and still constitute today, the emotional essence of small 'l' liberalism. They are qualities desirable in a friend, a neighbour or a colleague, and admirable in the citizen of a democracy. But they serve ill as a guide to a nation's total strategy in a ruthless world of struggle. The dominance of these qualities over the British public mind and feelings therefore accounts more than any other factor for the contrast between British power in 1918 and British power in 1956. For the desire to be "nice" and "do the decent thing" lay at the heart of "appeasement", whether of dictators in the 1930s or trade unions in the 1940s and 1950s; it explains why the British saw their colonial empire as a trust, a civilising mission, rather than as a resource to be exploited if profitable, and dumped if not; it explains why the British saw the Commonwealth and the Sterling Area – indeed, world affairs in general – in terms of altruistic responsibility rather than of self-interested calculation. And it was this same desire to be "nice" and "do the decent thing", rather than a resolve to improve the competitive quality of Britain's human resources, which provided the inspiration behind "New Jerusalem"."

"As I can remember, as a schoolboy in south London, there was no dismay among my family and their friends at the sight of contorted vapour trails high over us as Fighter Command and the Luftwaffe fought it out in the blue summer sky – only a sense of excitement. Looking back now as a historian, it is clear to me that in 1940 the British nation was blessed by an inner certainty that, just as the Navy had seen off Philip II of Spain in 1588 and Napoleon in 1805, so now the Royal Air Force and the Navy together would see off that funny little man with the toothbrush moustache and his fat chum in the gawdy uniform covered in medals. In that certainty, there was truly an element of the heroic."

"[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."

"Barnett is no Thatcherite: he does not suppose that a return to laissez-faire in 1945 would have wrought an economic miracle. On the contrary, he believes the Churchill coalition ought to have developed a coherent industrial strategy... Barnett is a joyful debunker of patriotic myth, but not, of course, from a left-wing standpoint. He is probably the only modern British historian whose creed is Bismarckian nationalism. His admiration for the German nation-state, through every stage of its development from 1870 to the present day, is the most prominent theme in the book. There are glowing passages, which make one pause, on the productivity of German industry under the Nazis. No trade-union agitators there, no socialists or liberal softies putting a spanner in the works! The occasional admiring references to the United States do little to modify the teutonic feel of the book. Barnett is, in fact, the heir of Sir John Seeley, the Late Victorian prophet of a federal British Empire, whose admiration for Prussia led him to the conviction that Britain must develop along the same lines or perish as a great power."

"Depressed, shaken by Correlli Barnett's The Collapse of British Power."

"On the return flight...the PM [Margaret Thatcher] invited me to sit at her table... I was interested and gratified to hear her pass a comment showing that she had read The Audit of War."

"Correlli Barnett was another reputable author whose work was pilfered. "I'm a Correlli Barnett supporter", Keith Joseph affirmed in his 1987 interview with Anthony Seldon. In his follow-up question Seldon qualified this: "You are partly a Correlli Barnett man". This showed that the interviewer, at least, had read Barnett's work carefully. In a series of scholarly books and articles Barnett argued that Britain's economic decline could be traced back to an anti-business culture whose foundations were laid by an education system which had been shaped by the model of the public school. Joseph was living evidence that Barnett's theory did not invariably hold good, and indeed some of his detailed points have been criticised. There was a further problem in that Barnett was in no sense an economic liberal; the state, he felt, had not intervened enough in industry. But these minor details did not deter Joseph. Barnett had written that British power collapsed because of a pervasive anti-business culture, and for Joseph that was quite enough to make the historian "one of us". Barnett recognised the differences of principle which Joseph overlooked, but the connection proved useful to him in the 1980s, when Sir Keith and Lord Young encouraged him to put his ideas on vocational training into practice."

"[T]here has been widespread reaction, partly ideological, partly based simply on scrutiny of primary sources, against what Cannadine has called the "welfare state triumphalism" of much post-Second World War British historiography. The ideological wing of this reaction—incapsulated par excellence in Correlli Barnett's The Audit of War (1986)—has questioned not the substance of the established view that the war precipitated the welfare state but its wider implications. Barnett takes direct issue with the Titmuss approach by suggesting that the atmosphere of sentimental and uncritical moral solidarity induced by the war gave rise to wholly unrealistic, Utopian expectations of a post-war world (governed by deficit-finance, job security, comprehensive welfare and indifference to economic consequences) that led inexorably to Britain's post-war economic decline."