Correlli Barnett Quotes

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.

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.

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.

In 1890 there were still twice as many academic chemists in Germany as in Britain, though the British population was three-quarters of the German figure. In 1892 Britain had 287 academic staff in mathematics, science, and engineering compared with 452 in Germany. In engineering in particular the major German technical high schools had 7,130 students in 1901 against a total of 1,443 in British universities. In terms of overall university provision, Britain spent £26,000 in government grants in 1897, while Germany spent £476,000; in 1902 Germany had 22 universities for a population of 50 million, England and Wales 7 for 31 million.
And...British industry still lagged badly in advanced industries like chemicals, electricals, and machine tools, and even in basics like steel—partly because of a continuing lack of trained personnel at all levels (the "practical man" still failing to recruit enough of them). Britain's annual rate of growth in the years 1880–1900 averaged 1.7 per cent against Germany's 5.3 per cent and America's 4.5 per cent. Britain's own rate of growth in industrial production was also declining—from 33 per cent in the decade of the 1860s to 24 per cent in the 1890s and 9 per cent in the 1900s.

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.

[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.

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.

Britain's proportionate losses in killed of men aged 15–49 was just under half that of France. Britain suffered a 6.7 per cent loss as against Germany's 10 per cent. Therefore the "Lost Generation" as applied to the whole nation is confirmed as a myth. No one has disputed that losses fell disproportionately on the products of the public schools and Oxbridge. But this raises two questions. In the first place Bomber Command's losses in aircrew in the Second World War (an equivalent élite of educated and intelligent young men) were considerably higher, at 55,888 dead, than that of subalterns on all fronts on the Great War of 37,452, but no one has sought to romanticise Bomber Command's losses or seek to use such loss to explain our national decline, in the fashion of the "Lost Generation" myth. In the second place, Dr. Strachan and others of his standpoint may over-estimate the value to Britain of these highly publicised public-school and Oxbridge heroes. Does one really see Pre-Raphaelite knights like Julian Grenfell or Rupert Brooke saving Britain from industrial decline and leading us to the conquest of markets in high technology? Consider how useless the most famous survivors proved, such as Sassoon and Graves, or, for that matter, Eden.

There are of course the neo-Puginites or neo-Morrisites who like to think of Britain as leading the world into a post-industrial phase where this form of capability will be obsolete, and who despise so material a matter as GNP as unethical or—the trendy version—unecological. Yet these high-minded escapists are among the first to howl about the need for more resources to be invested in hospitals, schools, good works, prison improvement, subsidies for the arts and what not. A country of static or declining GNP will not be an 'Erewhon' but a pinched and increasingly bitter place. Poverty may be noble as a concept; it is rarely so in in the flesh.

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

The European states, and above all Germany (newly united in 1871), therefore entered the second Industrial Revolution, that of science-based industries like chemicals and electrical goods, very well equipped by education, training, and research systems to take the lead. Britain, on the other hand, could only deploy a sorry militia of the ignorant led by the "practical man". Not merely did Britain lack a modern educational and research structure, it lacked the necessary national understanding and will to create one. Here then is the leitmotiv in British education for the next sixty years: the painful effort against the very grain of national prejudices to remedy what was already by 1870 a half-century of backlog.

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.

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.

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.

[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.