Britain came out of the Second World War as an obsolescent industrial economy with grievous weaknesses. Instead of first devoting all possible resources and effort to remedying this, she chose to load this economy with the vast and potentially limitless cost of the welfare state; current expenditure before capital investment; the patterns of the next thirty years.
British military historian (1927–2022)
Showing quotes in randomized order to avoid selection bias. Click Popular for most popular quotes.
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.
In 1937, the best trading year for Britain between the world wars, the volume of her visible exports amounted to only two-thirds of the 1913 figure. The British share of world trade in manufactures fell from nearly 24 per cent in 1921–5 to 18.6 per cent in 1936–8, whereas Germany's share actually rose from 17.4 per cent to 19.8 per cent, and Japan's from 3.4 per cent to 7 per cent. As a consequence of this slow defeat and retreat in world markets for manufactures Britain was compelled to look more and more to her invisible exports (banking, insurance and shipping services, plus the income from the vast overseas investments built up during the Victorian age) in order to pay for the imports essential to the nation's life and work. Even at the height of her nineteenth-century dominance as a manufacturing country Britain had relied on such invisible exports to keep her balance of payments in equilibrium – indeed to enable her to earn the surpluses to invest overseas. But the percentage of imports that had to be covered by invisible earnings rose from 19.2 per cent in 1870–4 to 44.4 per cent in 1935–9. Even so, Britain by these latter years was incurring an overall balance of payments deficit. Like some ageing industrialist who finds that the shrunken profits from the family firm are no longer enough to pay for his accustomed way of life, Britain had to resort to spending capital. In other words, in the run-up to the Second World War Britain was gradually selling off her foreign investments and using up her gold reserves.
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.
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.