Historians From England

"I think it’s terribly important for the historian to take the alternative point of view to the fashionable one, and present the options. For instance, the assumption in much of the 19th and 20th centuries was that the centralised nation state was the culmination of a millennium of European history. What we now see as a result of the development of the European Community, of globalisation, of corporate institutions, and transnational corporate institutions, is that the nation state has been put under increasing pressure from above. And at the same time, and partly as a consequence of that, there’s increasing pressure from what you might call the under-represented or suppressed ethnic groups, regions and so on. So we’re getting these pressures on the 19th/20th century nation state both from above and from below."

"If you knew for instance, that British had been in Iraq in the 1920’s, and had run into problems there, this might at least make you pause before taking major policy decisions."

"...In this globalized world, independence no longer exists. It is gladdening to see that we are part of a world in which we are all linked. There is also a thing called generosity: any people that thinks only of itself and is not generous with others is doing itself harm in the long run."

"As you write, it doesn’t matter what age you are. I think I’m a better historian now, at 75, than I was at 25."

"I have always said that it is precisely at moments of economic difficulty when politicians emerge who want to take advantage of widespread discontent to impose their own agenda."

"...In Oxford there was and is an enormous commitment to individual teaching, or teaching in very small numbers, and a real interest in the intellectual development of undergraduates."

"...As there was a growing pressure to publish, and publish to a deadline – which I think is a disaster, and has been an intellectual disaster..."

"...I believe that one of the great contributions of British historians of the 20th century to history and the historical profession has been their willingness to look beyond the British Isles."

"...The whole trend towards rather nit-picking revisionism. The old big picture often presented by Marxist or marxisant historians began to be eroded by a new generation, and I think the result all too often has been a narrowing of focus, a fragmenting of the discipline. And my whole life I’ve been trying to save the big picture and promote its virtues and its importance. I think at this moment we may be seeing a shift back to something rather larger, as against microhistory, and revisionist mini-history. There has been a growing realisation of the importance of a wider framework, and that framework may be pan-European, it may be Atlantic history, or increasingly, global history."

"I’ve always tried to keep in mind the big picture, which I believe is one of the biggest contributions of Marxist or marxisant historians to the historiography of the twentieth century. For all the flaws in the Marxist approach – and I could never accept the determinism that one finds even in Braudel (perhaps because of the influence of Butterfield I was always impressed by the role of personality and contingency in the development of historical events) – I was very aware of the interactions, imitations and parallel developments resulting from what in many respects were similar social and economic backgrounds."

"The younger generation think in terms of the present and the future, and they’ve lost a sense of what happened before their lifetimes. They’ve lost any notion of the complexities of the past, and the fact that statesmen were struggling with similar problems in the 17th century as in the late 20th – threats to the unity of a nation state that was moving towards the form of development that it would reach in the 19th century."

"Barnett is not giving a recipe for a free market and there is no mention of Hayek's (1944) warning about the state in The Road to Serfdom. What he appears to think ought to have happened can only be imagined on the basis of a much more powerful central direction, much less deferential to public opinion... The alternative implied here is that of Bismarck's State, which so many British educational reformers admired, with a specific industrial policy and close involvement in the scientific, education, transport and energy infrastructure—the remit given to the state by Oswald Mosley in 1931 and which Mussolini and Salazar attempted to implement. Whether, even under such a regime, Britain could have remained competitive vis-à-vis the United States, Germany and Japan is unlikely; that the electorate would have stood for it, inconceivable. But the Bismarckian state kept the unions and the public in their places: and, Barnett implies, Britain's soft democratic system ought to share the blame with the utopian intellectuals."

"In a series of brilliant books Correlli Barnett has made the case against the English élite and its education, telling us that the ethos, curriculum and lifestyle of the public schools and the collegiate universities did little or nothing to prepare the English for the great conflicts of our time. The ideal of the gentleman, with its emphasis on fair play and honesty, left the English at a disadvantage in the struggle against calculating and cynical forces. The classical curriculum put the modern world at too remote a distance from the scholar who had absorbed it; the downgrading of science and technology meant the English were beset by a crippling nostalgia, which caused them to gothicise their industry and surround it with feudal prohibitions. The education instilled by the public schools and the old colleges was, in Barnett's words, not a preparation for the world but an inoculation against it. All such criticisms are based on a mistaken view of education. Relevance in education is a chimerical objective and the English knew this. Who is to guess what will be relevant to a student's interests in ten years' time? Even in the applied sciences, it is not relevance that forms and transforms the curriculum, but knowledge. A relevant technology is one that is relevant to us, here, now. To concentrate on teaching such a technology is to ensure that we remain locked in techniques that will soon be useless."

"If we examine the complaints made by Barnett, we cannot fail to be struck by the fact that they contain no comparative judgement. Set beside which élite did the English élite fail so badly? In which country of the modern world do we find the educational system which compares so favourably with the English college? Which European nations, unhampered by the code of the gentleman, have shown us the way to successful empire building and retreated with credit from their colonies? All such comparisons point to the amazing success of the English. By devoting their formative years to useless things, they made themselves supremely useful. And by internalising the code of honour they did not, as Barnett supposes, make themselves defenceless in a world of chicanery and crime, but endowed themselves with the only real defence that human life can offer – the instinctive trust between strangers, which enables them in whatever dangerous circumstances to act together as a team. It was not only the battle of Waterloo that was won on the playing fields of Eton: the entire imperial adventure was settled there."

"My main concern...was education standards... By early 1986 I had become even more convinced of the importance of this issue after reading Correlli Barnett's newly published book, The Audit of War, which impressively documented the British educational failure stretching back into the last century, and linked it persuasively with the reasons for our disappointing economic performance over that period, with particularly ominous implications for the future."

"[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."

"Dr Correlli Barnett was the first scholar to point out the extent to which, by 1945, Britain had become totally dependent on the United States for its economic survival, let alone its military victory—a dependence that reduced it virtually to satellite status; but this dependence he attributed, rightly or wrongly, not to any mistaken policy pursued by the British government of the day, but to an entire culture that for half a century past had emphasized domestic welfare at the expense of military power."

"It's easy with hindsight to see all those years before and after the war as wasted. I'm a Correlli Barnett supporter. I believe that managements, helped by trade unions and helped by governments, were not nearly effective enough."

"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."

"[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."

"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...""

"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."

""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."

"[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."

"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."

"The war embraced infinitely complex elements and motives. The most important single one of those elements was the struggle for power in Europe, and the world. Between 1870 and 1914 Britain and France had been stagnant and declining in comparative industrial vigour. They nevertheless owned great territories and enjoyed vast traditional overseas markets. Germany...had been comfortably and steadily taking over the markets before 1914; she would have liked the possessions as well. No wonder France and Britain had been so much in favour of defending the political status quo. Yet, as the endless surges and recessions of power throughout history indicate, a fixed status quo is an absurdity because static. The problem of the world of nation states before 1914 was the eternal problem of continually adjusting political structure so that it always fits and expresses the reality of power."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The importance of war and military institutions has been generally neglected in British historical writing, whose tone has been set by the Whig and liberal emphasis on peaceful constitutional progress. In this liberal view war appears as an aberration, an interruption of a "natural" condition of peace: almost as a form of delinquency unworthy of intellectual attention. The liberal, pacifistic view of history can only be maintained by resolute aversion of the gaze from the facts. For conflict between tribal or social groups and nations constitutes the essential human condition in the absence of a world-state with a monopoly of force. The relations between nation states have always been those of a struggle for advantage and domination, where friendships may indeed burgeon while interests temporarily coincide, but then again languish when those interests diverge. Peace and war in history flow continually in and out of each other, alternative aspects of the single phenomenon of the struggle for power. It is false and unrealistic therefore to divide policy between hard-and-fast categories of "peace" and "war". Policy may shade all the way from trade and diplomatic rivalry through indirect conflict and limited war to total war; the distinctions are of degree, not of kind"

"With regard to Blunt, we should remember that the 1920s and 1930s marked a high tide of romantic idealism, or high-minded priggishness, among the public school-educated British élite. Common-room Communism was not the only form of mandarin prize-assery to flourish; there were the League of Nations Union, the Peace Pledge Union, the Anglo-German Group and Anglo-German "Link", and numerous other groups or ad-hoc committees devoted to various "good causes". There was "Bloomsbury"; E. M. Forster as the grand guru of intellectual wetness. A web of personal relationships and inter-connecting memberships linked the different sects into what may fairly be described as "the Establishment". Blunt and co, having pushed romantic idealism to the point of treachery, simply take the cigar as the prizest, or most misguided, asses of them all."

"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"."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."