"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."