"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."