Correlli Barnett Quotes

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.

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the rest of the world, had been revealed by the war to the government, though not to the British people at large, as out-of-date in equipment, methods and attitudes; crippled by poor management and obstructive workforces; and weak in advanced technologies.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.

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.

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.

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.

Does not Mr E. P. Thompson see any connexion between the internal nature of the Soviet empire as an oligarchic tyranny and its external policies? As a former communist he must know that the Soviet regime is of its very nature and from earliest origins a minority conspiracy that has gained and maintained power by force and trickery; that because of this inherent nature it always has been and remains terrified of independent centres of thought or power, whether within the Russian empire or beyond its present reach. It is the conjunction of such a regime, and its manifested wish to dominate others, with armed forces powerful beyond the needs of mere defence that is the engine of the present "armaments race". Who believes that Nato and its armaments would exist if Russia had been a Western-style open society for these last 60 years? The first requirement for large-scale nuclear or any other kind of disarmament is the withering away of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The British complained at the time, and were long to complain afterwards, that the French had let them down; that the French army had not fought well enough; that France, by capitulating, had left them to carry on the war alone against overwhelming odds. These were complaints which the British, who had been hardly more than spectators of the battle, were singularly ill-qualified to make. For it was, after all, only the logical, if not the inevitable, consequences of the entire course of British policy towards France in the previous twenty years, and of the whole pattern of British grand strategy and re-armament in the 1930s, that France should virtually alone have to fight the decisive land battle against Germany, a nation twice her size; and that she should therefore lose that battle.
Now the British were face to face with the doom which, step by step, illusion by illusion, they had brought down on themselves – a war without an ally against two great powers, possibly three; their own island in danger; an ill-defended and immensely vulnerable empire; and an inadequate industrial machine; and insufficient and fast-dwindling national wealth.

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.

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".

The 1902 Act led to a major expansion in secondary education, so that by 1914 there were 1,123 such schools, of which 500 were directly run by the local authorities while the remainder was denominational. Unfortunately, the prestige of a "grammar school" education, itself derived from the Arnoldian public school, with its emphasis on the academic approach to both the arts and science, impressed itself on parents, local authorities, and the Board of Education alike, so excluding a system of alternative secondary education of equal standing, like the German Realschule, more related to Britain's existence as a commercial and technical power.

Meeting Simon could only impress Hitler the more vividly with English feebleness. Here, in Simon, Hitler met for the first time a Foreign Secretary of England, the greatest of all imperial powers, the nation which had thwarted the ambitions of Kaiser Wilhelm II – this sanctimonious and deferential old gentleman of mild and episcopal appearance. In a situation which called for a breezy, brutal arrogance of a Palmerston, the chilling dignity of a Castlereagh, or the blunt, plain-speaking and dominant will of a Wellington, Simon could only make a sorry attempt at ingratiation.

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.

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.

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.

In provoking even the peace-loving and feeble Addington Cabinet into a unanimous decision for war Bonaparte had committed the most catastrophic blunder of his entire career. It sprang in the first place from a failure to understand the English character and English institutions, or comprehend England's strength. Since his youthful studies he had regarded her as the modern Carthage, a mere nation of traders doomed to destruction at the hands of a martial state like France. And certainly there was little about English society that accorded with Bonaparte's own ideas as to what constituted a powerful and well-governed state. Vacillating cabinets precariously depended on the hazardous outcome of parliamentary votes. Instead of the central government directing the national life, the national life arranged itself by some mysterious organic process. The nobility and gentry governed the English shires virtually without reference to London, even controlling the militia, that important part of the English military system. The new volunteer movement had sprung up spontaneously as private and independent associations of citizens. The legal profession and the universities jealously guarded their independence. The City of London, the world's greatest financial centre, formed yet another self-governing republic. The Industrial Revolution, already well under way in England but not yet to begin in Europe, owed everything to personal initiative and nothing to State direction or encouragement. All in all, English society consisted of innumerable co-existing private clubs. The apparent anarchy of the English scene found supreme expression in a free press which hounded politicians, the nobility and even the royal family with cruel lampoons. How could such a cloud of human atoms, such a nation of usurers lacking even a great army, contended against Bonaparte's own logical, efficient military state directed by a single mind of genius?